Listen free for 30 days

Listen with offer

  • Endless Forms

  • Why We Should Love Wasps
  • By: Seirian Sumner
  • Narrated by: Seirian Sumner
  • Length: 12 hrs and 28 mins
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars (25 ratings)
Offer ends May 1st, 2024 11:59PM GMT. Terms and conditions apply.
£7.99/month after 3 months. Renews automatically.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Endless Forms cover art

Endless Forms

By: Seirian Sumner
Narrated by: Seirian Sumner
Get this deal Try for £0.00

Pay £99p/month. After 3 months pay £7.99/month. Renews automatically. See terms for eligibility.

£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £13.00

Buy Now for £13.00

Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.

Listeners also enjoyed...

The Hidden World cover art
The Mind of a Bee cover art
Monarchs and Milkweed cover art
The Lost Rainforests of Britain cover art
Much Ado About Mothing cover art
Forget Me Not cover art
Alien Worlds cover art
Super Fly cover art
Buried cover art
British Woodland cover art
Dance of the Dung Beetles cover art
Evolution cover art
Nature Underfoot cover art
The Book of Wilding cover art
Cornerstones cover art
The Selfish Gene cover art

Summary

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 Publishers

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 ratings
Overall
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    17
  • 4 Stars
    5
  • 3 Stars
    2
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    1
Performance
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    15
  • 4 Stars
    2
  • 3 Stars
    3
  • 2 Stars
    1
  • 1 Stars
    1
Story
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    16
  • 4 Stars
    4
  • 3 Stars
    1
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Sort by:
Filter by:
  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 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.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

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

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

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.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

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.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

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

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

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.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!