An international team of scientists recently published detailed studies of a Brazilian species of velvet ant that they discovered to have superblack, or ultrablack, patches. An ultrablack ...

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

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 ...

Velvet ants, equipped with powerful stings and tough ... Microstructures that mimic those found in T. bifurca might increase the panels’ efficiency, capturing more sunlight and converting ...

Müllerian mimicry, a concept first proposed in the 1870s, is a phenomenon where well-defended species have evolved to mimic each other's warning signals to their mutual benefit. For velvet ants, ...

But scurrying across this land of extreme whiteness is, paradoxically, one of the darkest animals on Earth: a species of velvet ant known as Traumatomutilla bifurca. With its furry exterior and ...

BRASILIA, Brazil – A new study has revealed the complex makeup of an ant found in South America that can absorb nearly all visible light. Researchers analyzed the velvet ant’s exoskeleton and ...

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 ...