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

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.