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 ...

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 ...

A team of biologists, neurologists and chemists at Indiana University has discovered why the velvet ant's sting is so painful to so many different types of creatures. In their paper published in ...