this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2026
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Yup! Was about to type out a similar reply. To further clarify:
Hymenoptera - order of Insecta - ants, bees, wasps, hornets
Aculeata - infraorder of Hymenoptera - bees, wasps, hornets
Apidae - family of Aculeata - bees (also bumblebees)
Vespidae - family of Aculeata - wasps, hornets Formicidae - family of Hymenoptera - ants
edit20260227: forgot ants belong to aculeata
Except many non-Vespidae, both living and extinct, would readily be considered wasps. Look at this thing and tell me it’s not a wasp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eusapvertic.jpg If that’s a wasp and a yellow-jacket is a wasp, then so are ants and bees, in the same way that we are apes and birds are dinosaurs. You wouldn’t call a zoo to deal with a loose human and you wouldn’t call dr. Grant to deal with a pigeon, but biologically it makes a lot more sense to deal with ancestry then with how a species interacts with humans.
You can't argue "this looks like a wasp so it is a wasp" and then extend from that to "and because of evolutionary history, all these other things that don't look like wasps are also wasps"
Defining groups of species with a common word is always going to be ambiguous, but you need to stay consistent in what you use to define it. By the same logic you can argue that humans are fish, because whales clearly are fish if you just look at them, and whales and humans are both mammals.
Sure, but I was responding to someone who was defining wasp (the common word) based on clade (using scientific words).
I’m fine with common parlance words for things. What I had issue with was arbitrarily restricting the definition of wasp to a specific clade, which would exclude ants and bees, and also a whole host of at the very least wasp-adjacent animals which would now be stuck with no real way to describe them.
(Also, yes, fish is a rubbish scientific word. We’re far closer cousins of salmon than sharks are. By any reasonable definition of fish, at least biologically, we are fish. You could redefine “fish” in the same way we define “tree”, i.e. based on structure and not on ancestry, but by that definition whales should still be fish. The word “fish” shouldn’t be allowed within 50 metres of cladistics.)