Justin Schmidt is an entomologist, and has accordingly been stung by a lot of bugs. So he invented something called the Schmidt sting pain index (named after some guy called Schmidt, apparently), which ranks the pain of insect stings from one to four. Down at one is something like the fire ant, which is so named for a reason, while up at four is the bullet ant, which is so called for a very, very good reason.
Joining the bullet ant at four is a critter that lives right here in the southwestern US: the tarantula hawk. It’s actually a kind of solitary wasp with a sting whose resulting pain only lasts three minutes, but it’s so fiercely electric that it could only be described as totally unacceptable. “There are some vivid descriptions of people getting stung by these things,” says invertebrate biologist Ben Hutchins of Texas Parks and Wildlife, “and their recommendation—and this was actually in a peer-reviewed journal—was to just lie down and start screaming, because few if any people could maintain verbal and physical coordination after getting stung by one of these things. You’re likely to just run off and hurt yourself. So just lie down and start yelling.”
Hilarious description! Unless of course you are a victim, at which point it is (as the article says) "totally unacceptable." However I wonder what it takes to make one sting you? There was a huge mass of these insects on this bush and I stood very close for perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes photographing them. They were only interested in the pollen on the bush and not the least bit interested in me.
