“Lie down and scream.”. If you mess around with a wasp or yellow jacket colony, they come out to greet you, usually tail-end first. In his new book The Sting of the Wild, which came out this week and was published by Johns Hopkins University Press, Schmidt explains the roles of stings in insect society in great detail. In order to determine this, Schmidt had to create a pain scale for stings. An exponential scale grows by a factor greater than 1. What natural selection has evolved them to do is make it difficult for you to come and rob their territory. He devotes chapters to how different insects inflict their respective flavors of pain, covering creatures from fire ants to tarantula hawk wasps to honeybees. There isn’t a lot of interest in funding the study of alternative or natural treatment options, according to Schmidt. His research gave us an amazing inventory of stinging insects from all over the world and vivid descriptions of just how bad each of those stings hurt. On the other hand, insects that live in social groups, such as honeybees, tend to have moderately painful stings that are highly toxic. For Justin Schmidt, it was a sting of a different kind that catapulted him into extensive research on a very specific topic—the pain of the getting stung by different insects. There’s no real reason to make the pain last any longer. In fact, he has been quoted as describing their sting as “light and ephemeral, almost fruity.”, “This little, gray bee lands in the crook of your elbow, called a sweat bee,” he says. I was really interested in how come certain insects are much more defensive than others. I may be off by 500, but whatever it is, it’s a big number. “They’re kind of like digging under your skin and ripping out the tendons, muscles, and nerves. The least painful sting is the sweat bee. Interestingly, the pain of the sting isn’t indicative of the damage that sting does to the victim. One of them really sticks in my mind, which is kind of unimpressive other than it will demonstrate my foolishness. You can feel it a little bit but it’s not nearly as bad as being stuck by a cactus spine or something like that. An Interview with 'the King of Sting' … The material on this site can not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with prior written permission of Multiply. So he started to take a look at the chemistry of the venom of this ant and other stinging insects. The adventure of learning more about them [became] a greater joy for me than the fear of getting stung. It’s very intimidating and frightening visually. I was studying the tarantula hawk—it’s the highest, most intense immediate pain of any of the insects. “It paralyzes the tarantula to be food for its young. Stung By 83 Different Insects, Biologist Rates His Pain On A Scale Of 1 To — OW! How does understanding this pain scale help to understand stinging insects? How much less painful is a yellow jacket sting compared with a velvet ant sting? “It turns out that pain is a very valuable mechanism for discouraging a predator from attacking you,” says Schmidt. After covering each of the 25 areas of the body, he repeated the entire experiment two more times. Somewhere on a different scale entirely lies the belief that bee venom may have health benefits. Biologist Justin Schmidt has traveled all over the world looking for bugs ... and getting stung by them. For example, a sting ranked 2 is 10 times as painful as a sting ranked 1. The exponential expression 10^x/10^y can be used to compare the pain of two stings ranked x and y. He describes the pain as “shockingly electric,” like a “running hair dryer has been dropped into your bubble bath.” Biologist and author Justin O. Schmidt tells the story of getting stung by a tarantula hawk, whose sting is extremely excruciating. Schmidt rates the sting of a sweat bee as a 1, obviously, on his pain scale. For example, the stings of solitary insects like the tarantula hawk often feel awful, but don’t do any real harm. [An edited transcript of the conversation follows.].

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