Toxic Insects

Would you rather be stung by a yellow jacket or a bullet ant?  Just based on a gut instinct, most people would go with the ant, but unless you have a bee allergy, you are in for a surprise!  Justin Schmidt and some colleagues conducted a study in the 80’s in which the researchers were voluntarily stung by 72 hymenopteran species (mostly bees, wasps, and ants) to create a relative “pain index” for the various species.  The pain levels were ranked on a scale from 0 to 4, where 0 indicates no pain, and 4 indicates severe pain.  Let’s just think about this experiment for a second.  Can you imagine that there were people voluntarily being stung by insects for science?  That is some STRONG dedication right there. 

Photo credit: http://waynesword.palomar.edu/images2/BulletAnt2c.jpg

So based on this scale, the bullet ant (Paraponera clavata) you see above was one of the most painful stings on the list!  Another interesting thing is that pain is not necessarily a strong indicator of the level of toxicity of a bite or a sting.  Even though the bullet ant has a whopping 4.0+ on the Schmidt sting pain index, it does not actually have the most toxic sting. The title of most toxic sting actually goes to a different ant species: the harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex Maricopa).  Just 0.12 mg per kilogram of body weight can bring down an average mouse!  So allergies aside, ants are really the ones you should be avoiding, rather than honey bees or the like, which, if you were wondering, would need 2.8 mg per kilogram body weight to kill an average mouse.  

Photo credit: http://insects.about.com/od/insects101/f/most-toxic-insect-venom.htm

Anyone noticing the trend where the people in the experiments are kind of getting the short end of the stick?  Researchers getting stung and mice getting poisoned, how dreary is that?  Well let’s end on something more colorful then.  Caterpillars!  Some insects do not generate their own toxins, but instead use the toxins supplied from their food.  These nifty little critters have developed enzymes over time to not only become immune to the toxins that certain plants have incorporated into their tissues, but can also store them in their bodies to keep them safe from predators.  The warning coloration of this cinnabar moth caterpillar clearly denotes to any predators it might encounter that it is not to be trifled with!

Photo credit: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120221090240.htm