Endless Forms
Why We Should Love Wasps
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Endless Forms
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Narrated by:
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Seirian Sumner
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By:
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Seirian Sumner
About this listen
‘A funny and beautifully written welcome to the enigmatic, weird and wonderful world of wasps’ DAVE GOULSON, author of SILENT EARTH
There may be no insect with a worse reputation than the wasp, and none guarding so many undiscovered wonders.
Where bees and ants have long been the darlings of the insect world, wasps are much older, cleverer and more diverse. They are the bee’s evolutionary ancestors – flying 100 million years earlier – and today they are just as essential for the survival of our environment. A bee, ecologist Professor Seirian Sumner argues, is just a wasp that has forgotten how to hunt.
For readers of Entangled Life, Other Minds and The Gospel of Eels, this is a book to upturn your expectations about one overlooked animal and the wider architecture of our natural world.
With endless surprises, this book might teach you about the wasps that spend their entire lives sealed inside a fig, about stinging wasps, about parasitic wasps, about wasps that turn cockroaches into living zombies, about how wasps taught us to make paper.
It offers up a maligned insect in all its diverse, unexpected splendour; as both predator and pollinator, the wasp is an essential pest controller worldwide. Inside their sophisticated social worlds is the best model we have for the earth’s major evolutionary transitions. In their understudied biology are clues to progressing medicine, including a possible cure for cancer.
The closer you look at these spurned, winged insects – both custodians and bouncers of our planet – the more you see. Their secrets have so far gone mostly untapped, but the potential of the wasp is endless.
©2022 Seirian Sumner (P)2022 HarperCollins PublishersListeners also enjoyed...
Critic reviews
"If you’ve ever wondered 'why do wasps exist?, you must read this book. There is so much more to them than you ever imagined. A funny and beautifully written welcome to the enigmatic, weird and wonderful world of wasps. Wasps are seriously cool." (Dave Goulson, author of A Sting in the Tale and The Garden Jungle)
"You also shouldn’t miss Endless Forms…which explains why you shouldn’t, on any account, go squashing these remarkable creatures to a pulp…. [A] marvellous, revelatory natural history." (Caroline Sanderson, The Bookseller, Editor’s Choice)
"A funny and beautifully written welcome to the enigmatic, weird and wonderful world of wasps." (Dave Goulson, author of Silent Earth)
What listeners say about Endless Forms
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- irune
- 01-09-22
fascinating insight on this amazing insect
who would have thought this about a wasp
very well narrated and full of interesting and wonderful facts that I totally ignored about wasps
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Ken P
- 23-11-22
Well, who knew about Wasps?
I didn't think I would enjoy this audio book, mainly because of the "school girly" voice of the author, but I persevered and found the content very informative and VERY interesting.
I am in two minds about the Aristotle dream section, but it did add something different.
All in all it is a very learned piece of work and the researcher/author has presented the readet/listener with a lot of valuable information and learning about wasps and other insects so important to our life on earth.
My wife had a panic attack this past summer when a wasp came into the house, she is very wary of wasps and bees, and was about to get a fly spray out to kill it, as she does with anything that flies. I stop here every time with bees / wasps / spiders as I don't like killing these insects, so I get an empty net and place it over the insect and slide a tissue under the lol of the jar and put it outside. She thinks I'm crazy, I know I'm not.
Good audio and well worth listening to.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Amazon Customer
- 19-03-24
excellent insight into the amazing world of wasps!
amazing great insight into the amazing world of wasps shouts out to the Beauties & beasties podcast for having seirian summer as guest on the podcast!
which made me buy this incredible book, Thankyou
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Linda S
- 17-08-22
I loved Endless Forms by Serbian Sumner
I have just finished listening to Seirian Sumner, entomologist, behavioural ecologist and author reading her new book: Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps. I really enjoyed it and highly recommend it. She makes even the most complicated ideas easy to understand and is not patronising in any way, even with the most difficult concepts. Seirian Sumner has a lovely voice but more importantly, doesn't talk down to you in any way--she speaks so clearly and easily that you just absorb and understand what she is saying. Having said that, there were parts I listened to several times just to get the concepts down in my mind. But that wasn't her writing, it was my own feeble brain! If you are interested in wasps, this is the book for you.
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance2 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- w
- 29-01-23
Fascinating topic let down by the performance
Fascinating insight into the world of wasps. Unfortunately it is let down by the author reading the book themselves - like being read a book by Hermione Granger.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Wendell Poons
- 24-01-23
A tale of two halves
The first part of this book was fascinating. The second half was framed within a ridiculous fantasy dinner party withe Aristotle or "Aris" ; an annoying ongoing and unecessary contrivance which buried an otherwise interesting account.
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1 person found this helpful