• CryptidBestiary@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      Yup, while they don’t collect pollen, they do visit flowers to find nectar for themselves. They inadvertently transfer pollen from plant to plant.

    • Nightwatch Admin@feddit.nl
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      1 year ago

      No, the idea is that bees are useful because pollinators, and honey.
      However, wasps may not be the friendliest creatures around, but they are certainly useful too - like cleaning up corpses, leftovers, and last but not least they eat insects that we think of as plagues

        • wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          but have you tried to find out if we really can’t live without them? because I would definitely support the anti-wasp movement

          • MintyAnt@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            As they are insect hunters, yes their absence would fuck up our already damaged ecosystem. I would guess it would lead to a different insect getting out of control and causing tons of problems - like a non native leaf miner who then proceeds to multiply like crazy and obliterate all leaves off trees kind of deal.

          • Sotuanduso@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            Anti-mosquitoes first please. I have yet to hear a single good point in defense of mosquitoes (unless they just went down the memory hole.)

    • benignintervention@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Check out the book (or audiobook) Endless Forms by Seirian Sumner! It’s a fascinating exploration of the different kinds of wasps and their role in their environments. For example, some figs can only be polite (typo: pollinated) but a certain species of wasp and some wasps use antibacterial compounds to coat their nests.

      • remotelove
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        1 year ago

        Navy construction personnel are called Seabees. They do other things and might actually operate firearms.

    • shalafi@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I figured 'em out. Seems that, despite their microscopic excuse for a brain, they have excellent pattern matching abilities. That’s important, because they’ll remember your face if you fuck with them.

      tl;dr Ignore them. And by ignore, I mean completely ignore. No swatting, staring, etc.

      My pet pig has no idea he’s “supposed” to be afraid of wasps, they’re not on his radar. And they don’t hassle him. I watched a nest grow on my porch, right over the door, didn’t bother me a bit.

      (And no, that doesn’t go for every species on planet Earth. Some are wildly aggressive, but I find the evil fuckers to mainly be hornets.)

  • uphillbothways@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Meanwhile, mosquitoes… pollinating, cleaning waterways as nymphs, females just needing the slightest amount of blood to lay a couple hundred eggs. Forgotten, maligned, made the focus of actual efforts to purposefully cause species extinction. ._.

    • seitanic@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      Not all mosquitoes bite humans. So, you could eradicate the biting variety, and a non-biting variety would step in to fill that ecological niche. I don’t see a downside.