Seirian Sumner

Seirian Sumner FRES is an Entomologist and Behavioural Ecologist in the UK. She is a reader (associate professor) at University College London and is an expert in social wasps.

Seirian Sumner

FRES
Alma materUniversity College London (BSc, PhD)
Scientific career
InstitutionsUniversity of Bristol, University College London

Education and career

Sumner was educated at University College London where she was awarded a Bachelor of Science in Zoology and in 1999 was awarded a PhD on Conflicts over reproduction in facultatively eusocial hover wasps'.[1] Her postdoctoral work was with Jacobus Boomsma at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and she then held fellowships at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and at the Institute of Zoology, London.[2] Sumner moved to the University of Bristol as a Senior Lecturer in 2012 and then moved to University College London as a Reader in Behavioural Ecology in 2016, her current position.[3]

Research

Her research looks at the evolution of insect social behaviour and she has studied insect species along a continuum of sociality. She showed that insects can have simple sociality based on behaviour rather than physical characteristic of a caste,[4] 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.[5] 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[6]

On more complex insect societies 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.[7]

Sumner has also looked at the effect of social insect populations on their environments such as the impact of Argentine ants on seed dispersal.[8]

She has also 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.[9]

Sumner is an advocate of the ecosystem services of social wasps[10] saying that "wasps are useful and they are essential"[11] and that social wasps can be predators that can help control populations of pest insects.[12] 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.[13] In 2019 she published a Proceedings of the Royal Society B article on showing how social paper wasps can be successful predators of two economically important pests the sugarcane borer and the fall armyworm.[14] Her research on public attitudes to bees and wasps showed that the benefits of bees are widely understood but those of wasps are not, which is also reflected in the amount of scientific research into the two groups, with wasps being underresearched compared to bees.[15] 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[16] and to compare the accuracy of citizen science data with long-term biological recording data.[17]

Public activities

With Dr Nathalie Pettorelli of the Zoological Society of London, Sumner cofounded Soapbox Science in 2011, a platform that promotes women working in science.[18]

Sumner has taken part in Pint of Science events in 2015,[19] 2018,[20] and 2019[21] and has talked at the Cheltenham Science Festival in 2016.[22]

In 2019 it was announced that Sumner would write a popular science book titled Endless Forms on wasps to be published by William Collins.[23]

With the FoAM Kernow lab in Falmouth, Sumner helped create an online game #wasplove[24] for people to create their own wasp societies.[25]

Sumner will be an invited speaker at the EntoSci event in 2020 talking about her career to 14 to 18 year olds.[26]

References
  1. "PhD Thesis". ethos.bl.uk. British Library. Retrieved 1 August 2019.
  2. "The Scientist Article". www.the-scientist.com. 2011-08-01. Retrieved 1 August 2019.
  3. Sumner, Serian. "Academic Homepage". Division of Biosciences. University College London. Retrieved 1 August 2019.
  4. Sumner, Seirian (2015). "Long live the wasp: adult longevity in captive colonies of the eusocial paper wasp Polistes canadensis (L.)". PeerJ. 3:e848: e848. doi:10.7717/peerj.848. PMC 4375972. PMID 25825677.
  5. Sumner, Seirian (2015). "Molecular signatures of plastic phenotypes in two eusocial insect species with simple societies". PNAS. Early Edition (45): 13970–13975. Bibcode:2015PNAS..11213970P. doi:10.1073/pnas.1515937112. PMC 4653166. PMID 26483466.
  6. Sumner, Seirian (2007). "Radio-Tagging Technology Reveals Extreme Nest-Drifting Behavior in a Eusocial Insect". Current Biology. 17 (2): 140–145. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2006.11.064. PMID 17240339. S2CID 15738463.
  7. Sumner, Seirian (2014). "Fine‐scale spatial genetic structure of common and declining bumble bees across an agricultural landscape". Molecular Ecology. 23 (14): 3384–3395. doi:10.1111/mec.12823. PMC 4142012. PMID 24980963.
  8. Sumner, Seirian (2014). "Invasive ants take and squander native seeds: implications for native plant communities". Biological Invasions. 21 (2): 451–466. doi:10.1111/mec.12823. PMC 4142012. PMID 24980963.
  9. Sumner, Seirian (2004). "Ant parasite queens revert to mating singlys". Nature. 428 (6978): 35–366. Bibcode:2004Natur.428...35S. doi:10.1038/428035a. PMID 14999273. S2CID 30986614.
  10. "BBC News article". www.bbc.co.uk. 2019-05-20. Retrieved 1 August 2019.
  11. "ITV News article". www.itv.com. 10 June 2016. Retrieved 13 August 2019.
  12. "The Conversation article". theconversation.com. 12 July 2016. Retrieved 13 August 2019.
  13. "This idea must die". Portico. Retrieved 2019-12-10.
  14. Southon, Robin J.; Fernandes, Odair A.; Nascimento, Fabio S.; Sumner, Seirian (2019-11-06). "Social wasps are effective biocontrol agents of key lepidopteran crop pests". Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 286 (1914): 20191676. doi:10.1098/rspb.2019.1676. PMC 6842862. PMID 31690237.
  15. Sumner, Seirian (2018). "Why we love bees and hate wasps". Ecological Entomology. 43 (6): 836–845. doi:10.1111/een.12676.
  16. "Big Wasp Survey". www.bigwaspsurvey.org. Retrieved 1 August 2019.
  17. Sumner, Seirian (2019). "Mapping species distributions in 2 weeks using citizen science" (PDF). Insect Conservation and Diversity. online early view (5): 382–388. doi:10.1111/icad.12345. S2CID 109920397.
  18. "Soapbox Science". soapboxscience.org. Retrieved 1 August 2019.
  19. "The really wild show". Pint of Science. Retrieved 2019-12-10.
  20. "Unwanted Visitors". Pint of Science. Retrieved 2019-12-10.
  21. "Welcome to Insect night!". Pint of Science. Retrieved 2019-12-10.
  22. "Experts create a buzz as they reveal why we should love wasps". ITV News. Retrieved 2019-12-10.
  23. "FBF's buzziest book wings its way to William Collins | The Bookseller". www.thebookseller.com. Retrieved 2019-10-28.
  24. "The #wasplove game". wasplove.com. Retrieved 2020-01-21.
  25. "The #wasplove game". FoAM. Retrieved 2020-01-21.
  26. "Events - EntoSci20". Harper Adams University. Retrieved 2020-01-21.
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