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 ...

How painful a velvet ant's sting is appears to vary depending on the species. For example, an unnamed nocturnal species scores 1.5, making it less painful than a western honeybee, whereas the glorious ...

A velvet ant bite like “hot oil from the deep fryer” delivers an array of peptides that inflicts pain on insects and mammals alike.

The species in question is Traumatomutilla bifurca, a type of velvet ant – which is, somewhat confusingly, actually a species of wasp. Some of these wasps don't have any wings, but they do have ...

In the animal kingdom, scarlet velvet ants are known to deliver some of the most excruciatingly painful stings. These insects live on the ground, but they are not actually ants at all. Instead ...