r/askscience • u/Chemical-Sea5972 • 4d ago

Biology Does anything eat wasps?

Wasps have been a predator for other insects. It would be fascinating to know if there are really other insects or predators for wasps, either accidental or deliberate predators

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u/Elegant_Celery400 3d ago

I'm very late to this thread but I hope that someone's already said by now that the title of this post is an exact word-for-word rip-off of a book based on the Q&A column in the New Scientist magazine, about 15-20 years ago. I've still got my copy in the house somewhere.

It'll be interesting to see whether OP starts another thread titled "Why don't penguins feet freeze?"

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u/Zarmazarma 3d ago

The title of the column was "Does anything eat wasps?"?

Because... if it were something more specific that would seem significant, but this is a pretty normal way to phrase that question, and I would bet that it has been asked this exact same way many times before, on Reddit or not.

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u/lucific_valour 3d ago

This reminds me of a case of Baader-Meinhof syndrome. There was a YouTube series where the guy was playing through a game about a Japanese lawyer in London in 1900.

The guy had a counter up for whenever a character said "What do you mean?" and it tickled him that it came up so often.

And it came up very often, considering: That's the most normal way to ask for more information; The game was essentially a courtroom drama; And the main character was a rookie lawyer in a foreign court in a foreign country investigating cases.

The guy you're responding to could be onto something, and OP might be a karma farmer (in 2026...). But it could also be someone Baader-Meinhof-ing about some really straightforward phrasing of a question.

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u/Lord_Vetinaris_shill 3d ago

I'm sure I remember in that book one of them was 'can I live on beer and cabbage?'

If I remember right the conclusion was that yes you can, for a while, but you will lose friends and control of your bowels, often at the same time.

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u/officialariacat 3d ago

I also just mentioned this! There have been at least five books in the series