On the Schmidt Sting Pain index, the red velvet ant’s sting ranks a 3 on a scale of 1 to 4 with 4 being most painful. For perspective, wasp and bee stings rank at a level of 2 on the Schmidt ...

Few creatures can tangle with a velvet ant and walk away unscathed. These ground-dwelling insects are not ants, but parasitic wasps known for their excruciating stings. Now researchers have ...

This makes the velvet ant’s color what scientists call “ultrablack” or “superblack”. Traditional black colorations reflect around five to ten percent of the light that hits it, says ...