Velvet ants in general are quite colorful ... resembling the pages of a book, underlying dense, hair-like setae. Combined with dense, fuzzy setae, these features in the insect’s exoskeleton ...

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 first thing to understand about velvet ants is that they are not ... stacked platelets that resembled the pages of a book. According to Guillermo-Ferreira, this particular structure hasn ...

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 ...

A velvet ant bite like “hot oil from the deep fryer” delivers an array of peptides that inflicts pain on insects and mammals alike.

But scurrying across this land of extreme whiteness is, paradoxically, one of the darkest animals on Earth: a species of velvet ant known as Traumatomutilla bifurca. With its furry exterior and ...