Billy Easeman: The Ecological Role of Parasitoid Wasps

January 2026–May 2026. UCL MRes student Billy Easeman on his MRes research project with the Sumner Lab.

Wasps are an undervalued group of insects with high ecological importance as arthropod regulators, using two major strategies — as parasitoids (solitary, with a larval parasitic stage) and aculeates (predators) — both of which lack good diet information. Billy’s project used DNA metabarcoding of wasp guts to better understand their diets, focusing on parasitoids (can we identify their larval-stage host from remnants of DNA in the guts of adults?) and African social wasps (what do the Belonogaster wasps of Cameroon hunt?). As part of his project, Billy visited our collaborator Dr Jordan Cuff at Newcastle University, a world expert in using nanopore sequencing to analyse arthropod gut contents.