The Caatinga is a stark, dry shrubland in northeastern Brazil. In Tupi, an Indigenous language, its name means “white forest,” describing the arid grasses, thorny trees and pale, stony soil that ...

Scientists found that the dark markings on a species of fluffy wasp reflected less than 1 percent of light. By Katrina Miller The first thing to understand about velvet ants is that they are not, in ...

OAKLEY, Md. (WHTM) — It certainly looks like an ant, doesn’t it? In fact, the red velvet ant (Dasymutilla occidentalis) isn’t an ant at all, but a wasp. At around 3/4 of an inch long, it’s the largest ...

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 a ...

The animal world goes in hard for impressive colors, from those that blend in perfectly with their surroundings to those born to stand out and seem dressed to impress. However, new research has ...

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 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 “The ...

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, they ...

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 discovered ...

The sting of a female velvet ant is one of the most painful in the animal kingdom. Now, researchers have discovered that these insects have multiple proteins in their venom that make it exquisitely ...

The wasp species known as the "velvet ant" has a pattern of white and ultra-black coloration. © shrike2 via iNaturalist under CC BY-NC 4.0 The Caatinga is a stark ...

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 “The ...