A dirt track in the Arizona desert, a wasp the length of a thumb joint working the ground with orange wings.<\/p>\n
A man kneels and lets it sting him, then starts a stopwatch and writes down what happens.<\/p>\n
The sting is unbearable and it is over in about three minutes.<\/p>\n
He did this for thirty years, published his ranking in 1990, and died in February 2023 at the age of 75.<\/p>\n
The wasp scored the maximum<\/strong>.<\/p>\n So did something slower<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Pain is a nerve firing. The question with any venom is how long it can keep that nerve firing after the needle comes out.<\/p>\n Most stings work by damage and inflammation. The tissue is hurt, the body responds, and the signal fades as the chemistry is cleared and diluted.<\/p>\n The bullet ant does something else. Its venom carries a peptide that jams the voltage gated sodium channels in a nerve cell open.<\/p>\n A sodium channel is supposed to snap shut a fraction of a millisecond after it opens. Blocked from closing, the cell fires again and again on its own.<\/p>\n The peptide also sits inert inside the acidic venom sac and only changes shape once it reaches the less acidic tissue it is injected into, which is why it acts where it lands.<\/p>\n Damage heals away<\/strong>. A stuck channel keeps talking<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The pain scale runs from 1 to 4 and is anchored, deliberately, on something almost everyone has felt. The western honey bee is a 2.<\/p>\n Level 1 covers small bees and twig ants, described in one case as almost pleasant. Level 3 holds the red headed paper wasp and several harvester ants.<\/p>\n Level 4 holds three species, not one. The bullet ant, the tarantula hawk and the warrior wasp all sit at the ceiling.<\/p>\n Two of those three are wasps. The ranking by intensity alone does not put an ant on top, and the published table never claimed it did.<\/p>\n Four points were chosen on purpose. Finer gradations are not reliably distinguishable, so a ten point version would have invented precision that nobody can feel.<\/p>\n Three at the ceiling<\/strong>. Two of them wasps<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The published classification covers 78 species across 41 genera of Hymenoptera, assembled from collecting trips over three decades.<\/p>\n He put his own total at more than a thousand stings. Most arrived by accident during fieldwork rather than by design, and he said plainly that he wanted the data and not the sting.<\/p>\n The descriptions are the part that travels. The tarantula hawk is blinding, fierce and shockingly electric. The bullet ant is pure, intense, brilliant pain, like walking over flaming charcoal with a three inch nail in the heel.<\/p>\n Those readings are one nervous system reporting on itself, with no control, no blinding and no second rater. He never claimed otherwise.<\/p>\n The work took the 2015 Ig Nobel in physiology, shared with a researcher who had mapped sting pain across 25 locations on his own body.<\/p>\n One subject, one lifetime<\/strong>, no blind<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The tarantula hawk fades in two to three minutes. The warrior wasp runs up to two hours. The bullet ant goes 12 to 24.<\/p>\n That is a gap of two orders of magnitude sitting inside a single rating, because the scale measures peak intensity and nothing else.<\/p>\n The half point extension sometimes quoted for the bullet ant, the 4 plus that record keepers use, is a later shorthand for exactly this. It is a duration argument wearing an intensity number.<\/p>\n Which is defensible but worth saying out loud, because a reader who sees one number assumes it covers the whole experience.<\/p>\n Most members of this order never sting anyone at all, as the count at two restored prairies under solar panels<\/a> showed.<\/p>\n Counting what actually happens rather than what is assumed is the same discipline that logged 1,044 encounters<\/a> around a tidal machine.<\/p>\n Peak is one number<\/strong>. Duration is another<\/strong>.<\/p>\n It is not a danger ranking. A honey bee at level 2 kills far more people every year than everything at level 4 combined, through allergic reaction rather than through venom.<\/p>\n It is not a toxicity measure either. The original question was whether the most painful stings also do the most tissue damage, and the answer turned out to be no.<\/p>\n And it is not a medical instrument. It is a field naturalist’s notebook, kept consistently enough over long enough to be useful, which is rarer than it sounds.<\/p>\n The durations behind the top three, and the gap between them, were reported by a broadcaster<\/a>.<\/p>\n The 4 plus entry that puts the ant alone at the top is held by the record keepers<\/a>.<\/p>\n Three species share the top of the pain scale, and the ant wins only once the clock<\/strong> joins the ranking<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A dirt track in the Arizona desert, a wasp the length of a thumb joint working the ground with orange wings. A man kneels and lets it sting him, then starts a stopwatch and writes down what happens. The sting is unbearable and it is over in about three minutes. He did this for thirty … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":43653,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rank_math_focus_keyword":"insect","rank_math_title":"A 4 point pain scale came from one man letting insects sting his own skin, where two of the three at the top are wasps and the ant wins only on time","rank_math_description":"An Arizona entomologist was stung by nearly 100 insect species on purpose to build a pain scale. Here's what his nerves actually recorded.","footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-human-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43317"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43317\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43654,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43317\/revisions\/43654"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Why one sting ends in minutes and another runs all day<\/h2>\n
What the top of the ranking actually looks like<\/h2>\n
How the list was put together<\/h2>\n
Why duration is the number that got dropped<\/h2>\n
What the scale was never built to do<\/h2>\n