Anonymous #1 15w

They’re also extremely important in pollination and cleaning up carcasses, along with parasitoid wasps frequently hunting down agricultural pests! They’re also really pretty 🥺

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Anonymous OP 15w

Also, fun fact, bees and ants evolved from wasps! They all fall under the order Hymenoptera!

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Anonymous OP 15w

Yes! I actually got in a huge argument in this very yikyak about whether bees and ants are a type of wasp.

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Anonymous #1 15w

Wasps are some of the most incredible insects because they have such complex interactions with such a huge variety of plants and animals which they use as hosts. People don’t realize how wasps are everywhere they look. Like I think most people don’t realize those galls on all the trees around them were made by wasps

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Anonymous #1 15w

Something similar to the “ants and bees are types of wasps” is that termites are actually a weird group of cockroaches

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Anonymous #1 15w

Oh shit yeah, I learned that recently! I was looking into whether or not cockroaches were beetles (quickly found they weren’t) and at some point along the way discovered that!

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Anonymous OP 15w

Another fun thing to look at is how insects nestle inside crustacean taxonomy. It’s pretty debated but it seems like either remipedes (weird groundwater crustaceans) or branchipods (sea monkeys, triops, water fleas, and relatives) are the closest group to insects

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Anonymous #1 15w

Oh shit, cool! I figured insects were closely related with crustaceans, but I didn’t realize it was those crustaceans specifically!

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Anonymous #3 15w

The insect

1