yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Would You Risk Venomous Insect Stings for Your Job? | National Geographic


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

Harvest rants are intriguing because not only are they among the most painful of all stinging insects, their venom is 30-40 times more toxic than, say, rattlesnake venom. If you pick them up by hand, well, you might just get stung. The biggest risk around here is not being stung by the Harvester.

I use an aspirator, as we call it. What I do is I can very carefully pick up the ant. If you do it right, you can pick up just the ant and not a whole mouthful of dirt. It takes a little bit of practice, but you get good at it after a while. It's a little awkward in here.

I've been to 22 or 23 different countries over this time. I estimate I've been stung about 1,500 different times. I don't like it, but, you know, it's an occupational hazard. My research consists of testing various venoms from various insects. I'm doing biochemical and pharmacological tests on them.

On the medical level, we can use insect venoms for helping our own welfare, say chronic pain from surgery, or arthritis, or cancer, or something of this nature. That's the tip of the abdomen, including the stinger, and you put a little bit of venom into there. The idea is we'd like to be able to make a specific drug that targets just the pain, doesn't have all these side effects, which are so devastating.

So, I'm coming up to a collection of Pacific cicada killers. These are probably the fastest wasps that I know of; they're incredibly hard to catch. Most of what they're doing right now is these are males sparring with each other, trying to set up territories to attract the females for mating. I finally got one! He's in the net.

Come on, fella! Come up the far end where we can... That's a good guy! Oh, I succeeded! Well, hello there, little fella! Oh, I know you're not happy. How can you not admire the beauty of something like this cicada killer? But, you see, he's got this clever trick—he's acting like a female.

Females, of course, are the ones that can sting. I'm sneaky enough to know that he's just a sweet, lovable male, and he can't really hurt me. I'm fascinated with venoms because they allow us to understand the evolution of sociality. But also, it helps us understand ourselves. We're social animals, and we can compare our sociality with insects and see what we have in common.

We can learn from their stories. We can learn to love the insects, or even if we're afraid of them, if we understand them, we can be a little less afraid and a little more tolerant. That'll improve our joy of life. This is a containment facility for our live exhibits. You hear some hissing?

There we go! They have really meaty claws full of muscle; they can use that to grab anything smaller than them. So, we feed them crickets.

More Articles

View All
Sine and Cosine come from circles
Now I’m going to clear off the screen here, and we’re going to talk about the shape of the sign function. Let’s do that. This is a plot of the sign function, where the angle Theta—this is the Theta axis in this plot—where Theta has been plotted out on a s…
Triggerfish - Smarter Every Day 4
[Music] [Rushing waves] Hey, it’s me, Destin. We’re in the Gulf of Mexico and we’re about to go fishing. And I’m gonna beat all these guys at fishing. It’s not gonna happen. It’s not gonna be me. (Destin) Alright ladies, how’re we doing over here? L…
A Conversation with Aileen Lee - Moderated by Geoff Ralston
Today I am honored to have my good friend Aileen Lee here, and we’re going to have a conversation about stuff. Yeah, well, I hope we talk about like aliens. Aileen is a very public personality in the venture world, so there’s lots of great talks she has g…
Warren Buffett is Selling His Largest Stock.
Have you or your investment manager’s views of the economics of Apple’s business or its attractiveness as an investment changed since Berkshire first invested in 2016? Here we go, everyone! Buffett is back, making headlines, and this was a big one: Warre…
15 Signs of a High Value Man
Some say women are born with inherited value, but men have to create value for themselves. Reality hits men harder than women. While many average women expect high-value men, average men understand where they fall in the hierarchy. High-value men sit at t…
It’s much easier to build when you’re optimistic.
We all, you all, get to create this future. Yes, and there’s this thing where it’s cooler and edgier and more punk rock. Yes, to be like everything is, and that’s a good high horse to be on if you want to be cool. But if you’re actually building things an…