Friendly Sharpshooter

THE HUNTING WASP (240 pp.)--John Crompton--Houghfon Miffin ($3).

Though the safaris it describes mostly take place in bean patches and along garden walls, this is one of the year's best hunting books.

The hunters--or rather, huntresses--are wasps out for big game to feed their young. They shoot only pointblank, not to kill but to paralyze, since the victim is to be sealed into the huntress' lair with her egg, and the larva thrives only on fresh meat. Though only such consecrated bug watchers as France's late great Entomologist Jean Henri Fabre get in on these magnificent shoots, British Science Writer John Crompton, author of the excellent Life of the Spider (TIME, July 3, 1950), has put all the bug watchers' best stories in this urbane and well-written book.

To put its prey in a proper state of torpor, the caterpillar-hunting wasp sometimes shoots the caterpillar 13 times, once for each segment. That deadeyed Annie Oakley, the beetle hunter, can bowl over her hard-shelled victims with a saddle shot that pierces a tiny chink in the beetle's armor and penetrates precisely to its central nerve-control station. One rakish little black and red hunting wasp specializes in the praying mantis, ghoulish grizzly of the insect world. Ducking away from the praying mantis' gaping arms, she zooms back and forth like a pendulum behind the giant's head until its narrowly watching eyes tire of keeping track of this baffling tennis game. Then, quicker than human eye can follow, she darts onto the mantis' back and fires her lightning shot.

Author Crompton has practically nothing but praise for the hunting, or solitary, wasps. They are smart, pertinacious, utterly fearless. Shooting down flies, beetles, hoppers, caterpillars, they work for mankind. It is their thieving relations, the so-called "social" wasps, says Crompton, that have given the family such a bad name. In a righteously separate chapter on these bad actors, he reads an indictment against the yellow jackets that terrorize the summer terrace, filch from jam jars and deliver powerful stings that hurt humans for a week. The hunting wasps, says Crompton, are not to be smeared with guilt of association; they practically never sting people, he claims--and even if they do, they do not hurt half as much as social wasps.

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