An eastern variety, called a cow killer, looks like an enormous, bright red ant. It walks around ... of students how impressively long a velvet ant stinger is. Trip and the others watched me ...

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 ...

For example, an unnamed nocturnal species scores 1.5, making it less painful than a western honeybee, whereas the glorious or thistledown velvet ant (Dasymutilla gloriosa) matches the bee with a score ...

The email from Trip Lamb, biology professor at Eastern Carolina University, said, “As a velvet ant sting survivor, you may appreciate the attached.” The attachment was a scientific paper titled ...