Top candidates for the nastiest sting range from bullet ants to army wasps. Tiny jellyfish also enter the competition. But which is the most painful bite? Some adventurers allow themselves to be stung to find out the answer. Animals that bite use a cocktail of chemical defenses. It includes neurotoxins and inflammatory agents to defend itself or subdue its prey. Justin Schmidt, an Arizona entomologist who developed a sting pain index named after him. He was subjected to the punctures of at least 96 species of insects, including bees, wasps, hornets and ants.
He classified the stings into four levels of pain. The first level houses the trivial. The sting of an anthophorini bee for example. Level 2 brings together some heavyweights, such as the honey wasp. Also the ferocious black wasp Polybia. The seven species of level 3 take Schmidt to real torture. Among these, Klug's velvet ant.
Walking the path
Only three species ever received a Level 4 designation from Schmidt. Schmidt's first level 4 was the bullet ant. It is an arthropod of about 2.5 cm from the rainforests of Central and South America. It is often called the "24-hour ant" because of how long the torment of its bite lasts. Next comes the tarantula-hunting wasp, a spider-hunting wasp measuring about 77 millimeters. Finally, the warrior wasp (Synoeca septentrionalis), a wasp that lives in colonies and is native to Central and South America.
Schmidt died in 2023 due to complications from Parkinson's. The one who seems destined to succeed him is Coyote Peterson. He's a YouTube personality who's been bitten by species Schmidt never classified. He sacrifices his left forearm for the education and entertainment of the millions of people who watch him squirm, sweat and scream on his channel.
Peterson used the Schmidt Pain Index as a road map. He's looking to "create the movie version" of Schmidt's 2016 book, Sting of the Wild, he says. "Let's honor the 1 to 4 scale, but let's find out what other number fours are out there," he says. It proposes two more for Tier 4 status: the Japanese giant hornet, popularized in 2020 as the "murder hornet," and the executioner wasp (executioner wasp).
pain marks
The most painful sting for him, without a doubt, is the executioner wasp. "The pain lasted maybe 12 hours," he says. But it was the aftereffects of the poison that stayed with Peterson...literally. "There were some necrotic properties that left a hole like a pockmark. A hole in my forearm. "That's the only bite that literally ate tissue, and I still have a scar... like a cigarette burn."
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