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Book launch: Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps by Seirian Sumner

30 June 2022, 6:00 pm–7:30 pm

Endless forms

Join us to celebrate the recent launch of Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps, a book by Seirian Sumner. This launch is taking place at the Grant Museum of Zoology.

This event is free.

Event Information

Open to

All

Availability

Yes

Cost

Free

Organiser

UCL Faculty of Life Sciences

Join us to celebrate the recent launch of Endless Forms, a book by Seirian Sumner.

About this event

Whilst bees and ants are often considered the darlings of the insect world, Sumner wants to rehabilitate the much-maligned thug of the insect world, the wasp, and show the world that wasps are older, cleverer and more diverse. This book showcases the maligned insect in all its diverse, unexpected splendour; as both predator and pollinator, the wasp is an essential pest controller worldwide.

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.

Join us on Thursday 30 June to hear from Seirian Sumner herself.

Timings for the event are as follows:

  • 6pm – Introduction
  • 6.05pm – Talk by Seirian Sumner
  • 6.25pm – Q&A
  • 6.55pm – Networking

Endless Forms was released on the 26th May 2022

About the Speaker

Dr Seirian Sumner

Professor of Behavioural Ecology at Genetics, Evolution & Environment, Division of Biosciences

seirian sumner
 Seirian's focuses on the mechanisms and evolution of behavioural (phenotypic) plasticity and how these relate to life in changing environments. Social insects (bees, wasps, ants and termites) are excellent models for this, as their societies and social phenotypes (queens and worker castes) provide us with extraordinary diversity in social complexity, phenotypic plasticity and biodiversity, replicated across several independent evolutionary lineages. Her research exploits this remarkable radiation in order to understand how phenotypic and behavioural diversity is produced, determine what facets of this biodiversity account for an individual’s behaviour, and explore how this influences their ecology and resilience to environmental change. She addresses these at proximate and ultimate levels by integrating recent advances in molecular techniques and state-of-the-art field monitoring technology, with classical behavioural ecology on wild populations of non-model organisms. More about Dr Seirian Sumner