The sting of a female velvet ant is one of the most painful in the ... venom that make it exquisitely effective against a wide range of victims, including invertebrates, mammals, birds, reptiles ...

Crawling along the underbrush of the tropical savannas of Brazil, there’s a powerful and mysterious insect known as the velvet ant. Actually a kind of wasp, wingless females of this species ...

It is called a "cow killer", but it doesn't kill cows. It is called a "velvet ant", but it is not an ant. And to make things more difficult, this insect is a fast runner that likes to hide in leaf ...

Few creatures can tangle with a velvet ant and walk away unscathed. These ground-dwelling insects are not ants, but parasitic wasps known for their excruciating stings. Now researchers have ...

The first thing to understand about velvet ants is that they are not, in fact, ants. They're wasps, some of which are wingless, and are named in part for their fluffy exteriors. About the size of ...

When you see a red velvet ant, the first thing you will probably ask yourself is “what the heck is that thing?” It kind of looks like a giant ant, but it also looks like a wingless wasp.

While studying color production in insects, a team of researchers discovered that this particular velvet ant species' cuticle, a layer of its exoskeleton, had a surprising structure; under all ...

The wasp species known as the "velvet ant" has a pattern of white and ultra-black coloration. © shrike2 via iNaturalist under CC BY-NC 4.0 The Caatinga is a stark ...