A simple trick to get rid of Wasps. Get a brown paper bag (like the ones you get at McDonalds), fill it with air, seal it, and stick in our you wall. The wasp thinks it is another wasp nest and go somewhere else. Works like a charm
I get many wasp nests around my home every year... I think that I will give that a try but my current solution [1] works very well also (it instantly neutralize the whole nest).
I wonder if there's a way to get something like this working for citrus gall wasp. They're a big problem for suburban citrus, and there's not much in the way of protection you can do since you're neighbour's trees are probably infected. If there were some way to signal to a wasp that this tree is taken...
The vine juking out the wasp's juke reminded me of the word I stumbled across whilst reading a dictionary. fossicking: Mining. to undermine another's digging;
OT/FWIW, the Wikipedia entry for fossicking is more expansive and does not mention the adversarial/negative meaning above:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossicking
How does this sort of thing evolve? Especially the variant where the gall secretes a sweet nectar to enlist ants to defend the wasp embryo from another wasp species.
Not an answer to your question, but there are other examples of this sort of thing. Lycaenid butterflies secrete nectar as caterpillars in exchange for protection by ants [1]. Indeed, ants have symbiotic relationships with a bunch of organisms, including fungus [2], aphids [3], and over 100 species of plants [4].
I’m OK with this. Wasps as far as I can tell serve no useful place in the ecosystem. They are not bees after all. They just sting people and that’s it. Good riddance!
In SoCal, at least, they'll hunt down a bunch of black/brown widows and stick them in a mud nest for their wasp offspring to eat. They almost never sting people and clear up poisonous spiders from your yard!
There are hundreds, maybe thousands of species of wasps, and as far as I know only a few (<10) social species tend to sting humans, and those don't form galls.
Personally I'd accept an anthropocentric view that takes humanity's importance as an unexamined premise and rates other species as "useful" to the extent that they positively affect humans (whether directly or indirectly). I imagine the OP has a similar idea, although for the reasons others have pointed out I don't think it necessarily comes together here.
