bogleech:

It’s amazing how often I hear that question honestly…wasps are predators, and predators are essential in maintaining the populations of other organisms so that no one species overcrowds, expends its resources and destroys both itself and the rest of its biome. That kind of goes without saying really.

Of course, with wasps, it goes a little deeper than that, too; while carnivorous, social wasps such as yellow jackets do an amazing job indiscriminately regulating all sorts of insects, the majority of wasps are parasitoids who evolved to kill one and only one host species.

In most cases, a single wasp is in fact the ONLY thing keeping a given species of caterpillar, aphid or other plant-eater from a devastatingly destructive population explosion.

This is a service so deeply integrated in the ecosystem that a staggering amount of plant life, including most of the trees, shrubs and grasses you see every day, have evolved to directly communicate with wasps – and wasps alone – when they’re in danger.

Corn, for example, is attacked by two different corn-specialist caterpillars. Each of those caterpillars has its own enemy wasp. The corn plant will tolerate some small amount of munching, but if it starts to get overwhelmed by caterpillar activity, it will identify which of the two species is feeding on it and release a chemical signal into the air, attracting exactly the right species of wasp.

To top it off, wasps also play just as big a role in flower pollination as bees, with many flowers, especially orchids, even evolving to be pollinated by wasps alone.

Wasps as a whole are basically among the most important land animals on our planet.

As for their “assholeishness,” though, most of that is pure hyperbole. It’s pretty much just a “meme” that wasps are evil, nasty monsters who love to sting people. I’ve never been stung by a wasp in my entire life. Generally, they only sting if they have reason to believe you are a predator after their nest and their young. They pay a lot of attention to how you behave around them, and if you get scared or panicky, all they know is that your level of “excitement” has risen, which, to them, can only mean you’re eager to devour their family.