The pain from a bullet ant sting lasts up to 24 hours, whereas that of the tarantula hawk wasp usually only aggravates the unlucky victim for five minutes. Schmidt has also in the past suggested that ...

Joining the bullet ant at four is a critter that lives right here in the southwestern US: the tarantula hawk. It’s actually a kind of solitary wasp with a sting whose resulting pain only lasts ...

Jam Press/@insectsevolving While the wasp is best known for its excruciating sting — which scores a mind-numbing 4 on the Schmidt Pain Index (right under the agony-inducing bullet ant ...

Justin Schmidt is a world-traveling entomologist. He's been stung more than 1,000 times, from at least 83 different species that have been evaluated on the index. The "Warrior Wasp" is one of the ...

The good doctor took some time out of his busy day wrangling animals to talk about his first encounter with the bullet ant and the tarantula hawk wasp — the only two animals to reach SSPI's ...

The wasp is infected by the Cordyceps fungi ... prevalent in tropical forests where it often infects colonies of bullet ants. Despite the gruesome way it kills its victims, the fungus controls ...