14 Facts About Seirian Sumner

Seirian Sumner was born on 1974 and FRES is a British entomologist and behavioural ecologist.

Seirian Sumner is a professor at University College London and is an expert in social wasps.

Seirian Sumner's research looks at the evolution of insect social behaviour and she has studied insect species along a continuum of sociality.

Seirian Sumner showed that insects can have simple sociality based on behaviour rather than physical characteristic of a caste, and that in these simple societies individuals can change caste from worker to queen, which is not possible in complex insect societies such as honeybees.

Seirian Sumner made the first use of RFID tags in field research, finding that the movement of paper wasp queens away from their home nests was much higher than expected On more complex insect societies, Seirian Sumner did some of the first research on the genetic relatedness of bumblebee colonies, showing that sister queens emerging from the same colony travel far apart from each other to establish their new colonies.

Seirian Sumner has looked at the effect of social insect populations on their environments such as the impact of Argentine ants on seed dispersal.

Seirian Sumner has worked on ants, looking at a parasitic ant species which evolved from and parasitises on a leaf-cutter species in Panama, she found that queens of the parasite species only mate with a single male, compared to the host leaf-cutter queens which mate with multiple males.

Seirian Sumner is an advocate of the ecosystem services of social wasps saying that wasps are useful, indeed essential, that social wasps can be predators that can help control populations of pest insects, and that wasps matter.

Seirian Sumner's lab are researching how social wasps might communicate within their colony about where resources are, perhaps like honey bees do the waggle dance.

Seirian Sumner cofounded the citizen science initiative The Big Wasp Survey in 2017 with Professor Adam Hart to raise awareness of the role and diversity of social wasp species in the UK and to compare the accuracy of citizen science data with long-term biological recording data.

Seirian Sumner has taken part in several Pint of Science events, and has spoken at the Cheltenham Science Festival in 2016.

Seirian Sumner was an invited speaker at the EntoSci event in 2020 talking about her career to 14 to 18 year olds.

In 2022, Seirian Sumner gave an invited talk at New Scientist Live in London.

Seirian Sumner has written a popular science book titled Endless Forms on wasps, published by William Collins in 2022.