Things that Sting with professor Justin O. Schmidt

Transcribed by Justin Kazlauskas

Brett Barry  0:03  
Welcome to Kaatscast, a biweekly podcast delivering history, travel guides, arts and culture, outdoor adventures, sustainability news, and local interviews from New York's Catskill Mountains and the Hudson Valley. This week, "Bees! Hornets! Yellowjackets! & Other Stinging Things" with special guest Justin O. Schmidt, research biologist at Southwestern Biological Institute, adjunct faculty at University of Arizona's department of entomology, author of "The Sting of the Wild," and creator of the famous Schmidt sting pain index.

Justin O. Schmidt  0:41  
I often tell people. I say, "You can view the honeybee is one five-hundredth of a rattlesnake with wings. So if you get 500 honey bee stings, that's about equivalent to a rattlesnake bite."

Brett Barry  0:55  
"Scientific American" called Schmidt, "The King of Sting." "The New York Times" dubbed him ... "A Connoisseur of Pain." Stay tuned for a class on stings with a man who knows them best. This episode is sponsored by the 52-mile Catskill Mountains Scenic Byway; following New York State Route 28 through the heart of the Central Catskills. For maps, itineraries, and links to area restaurants, shops, and accommodations, visit sceniccatskills.com. Interested to know about a recent paper wasp sting through my sock, which had me screaming and later itching and swelling for days, I checked Professor Schmidt's pain scale and found that this was only a two out of four, but he politely reassured me.

Justin O. Schmidt  1:45  
Your paper wasp there actually pretty painful there as you found out. There were two in some of the really big ones. If you were down in Georgia or Deep South, they have a Polistes annularis, which is a big chocolate covered one ... that one's a three, so it hurts even more and, you know, it could be that some of the paper wasp hurt more than just the standard. You know, two ... it might be a two plus or something like that, but it's too fine of a detail to try to, you know, put that into the pain scale. So it's just closer to a two than a three in general. But, that said, like you found out it really does hurt.

Brett Barry  2:23  
What does a four feel like?

Justin O. Schmidt  2:25  
You don't want to go there. Well, the worst one is the bullet ant, which is unfortunately a tropical ant, which doesn't get into the U.S., so we don't get to see it and appreciate it, but it's a big ant about 20 millimeters long or four-fifths of an inch and it stings and it's instantaneous ... just shut you down sort of pain that just throbs and goes on for 12 to 36 hours and some people report even longer than that and me usually it's about 12 hours, but I attribute that being shorter than the average because I'm an entomologist and I'm paying attention and I get the doggone thing off of me before it really delivers a good potent dose of venom. You know, all of these things are dose response and if you ... if you get the stinging insect off really quickly before it gets much venom in you while then it's going to hurt last, which is kind of the principle behind when you get stung by a honey bee. Scrape that stinger off fast, the faster the better. Because, you know, the sooner you get it off, the less it's going to hurt.

Brett Barry  3:29  
So your life's work is entomology and it's ... it's focused on things that sting. This leads me to the term: "Aculeate Hymenoptera." I hope I'm saying that right. Can you tell me?

Justin O. Schmidt  3:41  
Yes.

Brett Barry  3:41  
Can you tell me what that means?

Justin O. Schmidt  3:43  
Yeah, Aculeate Hymenoptera is basically from Latin and it's ... aculeate means a spear or a stinger. You know, something sharp like a syringe and so these are actually the Syringe Hymenoptera. In other words, a stinger is a biological syringe, which they use for injecting, in this case, venom into adversaries. Or, in some cases, prey. You know, many of the stinging insects will actually sting their prey, which either paralyzes it or kills it, and then they can handle much better for taking back to their nest and feeding to the young. So it basically just means it is a stinging Hymenoptera as opposed to a parasitic Hymenoptera, which also have a tuber and it's at the end of their body. It's an ovipositor, which is similar to a stinger, except it doesn't deliver venom. It delivers an egg to the tube and there's some accessory glands to lubricate the way down. You know, you figure of the eggs going through a skinny tube and eggs aren't exactly long as they're ... they're more round. They have to stretch and slip down this long tube, so there's lubricating fluids and sometimes they have symbiotic viruses and, you know, this kind of thing, which help change the immune system of the house. It gets pretty complicated, but ... but they don't use them for venom.

Brett Barry  5:06  
So the stinging Hymenoptera that have adapted to use the tube to sting. How do they deliver their eggs?

Justin O. Schmidt  5:14  
They come out, actually, the base of the sting is a separate opening that normally it would be in a channel coming from the ovaries right down to the ovipositor of the parasitic wasp, but instead of getting into the ovipositor, which is now become the sting, it has an opening at the base of the sting, so it just comes out there and that ... where they ... they can circumvent having to squeeze this egg to a kind of a nasty tube with all kinds of toxic lytic venom in there, which I can't imagine would be any good for the egg to be subjected to that.

Brett Barry  5:50  
And these insects that have adapted to use that sting, it comes or has evolved from an egg laying mechanism, which means that everything that's ever stung anybody in the insect world is female. Is that right?

Justin O. Schmidt  6:04  
Exactly, females are the baddies. Males are nice, friendly guys. You know, they're just fuzzy chasing around, frolicking in the autumn mist, and things of that sort. They ... they have no ability to sting, so they're quite harmless.

Brett Barry  6:19  
Unfortunately, probably for a non-entomologist, no easy way to determine by sight what a female versus a male bee or a wasp looks like?

Justin O. Schmidt  6:29  
Well, if you grab it, you'll find out. 

Brett Barry  6:31  
[LAUGHTER]

Justin O. Schmidt  6:31  
It's a female, but that's not the recommended way of finding out. Yeah, it's pretty hard to tell there. There's subtle differences like many of them will have 12 antennal segments on their antennae or feelers on their head for the females and 13 for the males and you say, "WOW! Who's gonna count that or not I?" Most of us don't and there's sometimes other differences. Paper wasp—actually one of the ones that you can often tell the difference that the males—we usually have a bright white face or a yellow face, whereas the workers, the females will have usually a darker face. It's presumably there to signal to the other wasp not to signal to us because, you know, we're sort of irrelevant to the males, but to signal them that I'm a male, so don't beat me up. Because there's a lot of antagonism and posturing and dominance hierarchy rituals going on among the workers and the females in the colony and since males are kind of left out, you know, they're irrelevant. If they have a white face, then there's no real need to waste your time, you know, beating up on them.

Brett Barry  7:44  
Well, I never saw her face the one that ... that stung me. I just saw her back and as she left with those dangling legs, but obviously it was a female and you say that wasps can choose the sex of their babies pretty much on the spot. How does that work?

Justin O. Schmidt  7:57  
Yeah, that's one of the fascinating things about ... about Hymenoptera. There's several other groups of animals disparately spread throughout the world and the taxonomy of animals, but they have a system where if it's a diploid like you and me, we get half our genetic chromosomes from our father and half from our mothers. We get the set of 23 from each parent and that makes us in the case of Hymenoptera. If you haven't set from both [the male and the female], he turned out being a female individual, but if the mother did not mate or ... or decided that ... oh, there's provision I have, there's food that I have for the offspring. It's too little for making a female does. The most solitary wasp [the females are bigger] need more nutrition and she says, "Well, I won't fertilize the egg and that is ... clever little system, they store the sperm in a spermatheca. The sperm will go down on a long tube and there's a sphincter. They're pretty much just like we have a sphincter when we have to go to the bathroom that we don't just, you know, urinate in our pants all the time. We have an ability to let it go or not let it go and they have the same type of mechanism for this sperm, and so she decides, "Oh, I want to make a male, for example, and the honey bees, they want to make a male drone honey bee going out during the mating season and finding other queens." So, pinch that off and just lay the egg without getting it fertilized, and so then with one set of chromosomes, it becomes a male. So, a two ... it becomes a female, if one ... it becomes a male and the female can choose which one she wants to do, which is really kind of cool.

Brett Barry  9:41  
That's amazing and so she has, I guess, a lifelong supply of sperm that she rations as needed.

Justin O. Schmidt  9:48  
Exactly, in fact with fire ants, it's been estimated that they use about three to five, maybe seven ... sperm per fertilized egg at most and so they can really be quite frugal and releasing the sperm because as you can imagine if you're a fire ant and you're fairly small and you're a queen, you have a colony of 50 to 300,000 ants that are needing to be replaced at least once a year because they, you know, kind of die of old age, wear out that sort of thing. You got to live for five to seven or eight years. You have to be awfully penurious with your sperm or you going to run out. If you've run out, that's the end of the colony ... kind of dies and it's the same thing with honey bees, which is one of the reasons that beekeepers recommend changing the queen at most ... at the very minimum every two years because, yeah, they'll keep laying eggs [a third and a fourth] and sometimes a fifth year. But by the time you're getting those multiple years, you're basically getting drone producing queens that they're laying a whole lot of males, which don't do any work or anything. You just eat up food that doesn't make any honey for the beekeepers, so you want to get rid of the queen before she starts running out of her sperm for making workers.

Brett Barry  11:05  
So let's talk about honey bees. The sting scale or index that you created is anchored to the sting of a honey bee, which you put, I think, is at a two and so everything is in relation to that. But you say that honey bee venom is some of the most toxic venom of any stinging insect. How can that be? Because you've also said that you've been stung close to a thousand times by honey bees, so why ... why am I talking to you right now?

Justin O. Schmidt  11:35  
Alright, it has to do with the dose. If a honey bee was a thousand times bigger, I probably wouldn't be talking with you. It's what I often tell people that I say, "You can view the honey bee is one five-hundredth of a rattlesnake with wings," and so if you get 500 honey bee stings, that's about equivalent to a rattlesnake bite; rattlesnake being obviously much bigger is a medically important situation when you get bitten by a rattlesnake. Most people don't die of a rattlesnake, so the 500 bee stings also don't kill most people, but if you get double that [1,000] or triple that [1,500], then you're in serious risk of the same thing. It's like getting bitten by three different rattlesnakes all at the same time, you know, while you're in serious trouble. You might not make it. But, fortunately, honey bees is small enough that, you know, if you're a little adversary, for example, beekeepers are particular in your area and the Catskills and in the northeast and in any of the cooler climates of the world. They have a lot of trouble in the winter with mice coming into their colony. The mouse is, of course, warm-blooded and very active and so they can outmaneuver the bees, which are kind of numbed in cold and so they cause a lot of trouble and damage in the hive, but bees can ... when it warms up enough, they'll attack the mouse in as little as about four or five stings or actually kill the mouse because, you know, mice are little. So if you crawl in yourself, you know, it's gonna take 1,500 to do you and it gets you out of the colony, but a mouse is only takes four or five, just a matter of size.

Brett Barry  13:17  
And it seems like most or many stinging insects can strike again and again, but a honey bee can only do it once, right? It actually detaches and implants its entire stinging apparatus. Can you explain what happens there?

Justin O. Schmidt  13:31  
Yeah, that's right. The honey bees ... and actually, they aren't the only insects in the world. They're just the only ones that we see most of the time. Because there are out where I am in Arizona, we have some harvester ants, which are fairly big reddish ants and they can also leave their stinger in you, and if you go into the tropics like Brazil or Colombia or Panama or, you know, these warmer areas, there's about a dozen different kinds of wasps that also do that. So what's going on in here is that often when a insect stings you, it's a very superficial sting because you feel the pain and you take action to get rid of this thing: your insect. You karate chop it or brush it off or whatever and it takes some period of time; probably half a minute or so to really get a good solid dose of most of the venom into the skin of the animal being stung or the person being stung. So if you're a paper wasp like a vetted, if you'd let it just hang on to your ... to your sock for 30 seconds, you probably heard even more than you did as it was, but the honey bee what it does is it loses its sting, so even if you remove the bee which, you know, often happens, you don't realize ... all this little tiny thing you don't even see it. That's the stinger and it's busy working away and left behind because you got rid of the bee. Problem solved ... wrong! Problem not solved. The stinger is still there, but most animals wouldn't know that. I think in many cases, people don't observe the stinger either and can't get it out. So then it will stay there for a couple of minutes and rather than delivering ... say 10 or 15 percent of the venom that the sting sack has, it'll deliver about 80 or 90 percent ... almost all of it will go in, and so that way he plant one sting and you get a really good whammy and it's worth sacrificing one beat out of, you know, 20, 30, 50,000 bees. What's the loss of one bee? It's pretty trivial loss to the colony, so it's well worth getting the extra benefit of the ... of getting all the venom in.

Brett Barry  15:48  
They're sacrificial. They ... they will lose their stinger and kill themselves basically to protect the ... the ... the overall community.

Justin O. Schmidt  15:58  
Exactly or they actually it's kind of maybe more interesting that it's sort of like at this point; now the bee knows that it has a finite time to live ... maybe a couple hours, maybe it's cooler weather, it can make most of a day, but it's basically past tense. So what do you do if you have nothing else to do? You just harass the bejesus out of the target, you know, and say you're getting stung with a bee has lost a stinger would do is buzz and try to attack your eyes, grab onto your eyelash, your eyebrows or view. If you have a mustache or a beard, you know, grab on the hairs and pull on him and buzz ferociously ... just distract you, which does couple of things. It first intimidates you. It's very intimidating having this bee: eyeball to eyeball, you know, a couple inches away from you: chewing on your eyelash, and second of all, it's distracting you, so that her sisters who still have a stink and give you another sting or two or a ten or whatever number takes to get you out of the threatening area of the hive.

Brett Barry  17:04  
What kills the bee?

Justin O. Schmidt  17:05  
Now, basically, I think it's just the same as if, you know, we got eviscerated you, you lose your ... in their case, they basically dry out because they have no longer ... they have no gut. Their whole gut comes out with them, so it's like pulling your stomach and everything out. You have this wound and then, you know, you're drying out. You can't drink any water [rehydrate to keep short term survival]. Of course, in our case, you know, we're going to bleed to death and we're going to be dead in a couple of minutes, but the baby will live long enough until it runs out of energy to power the wings for flying or until it dries out, and if it's flying, he probably can't do that more than 5 or 10, maybe 20 minutes at most, depending on, you know, how ... how much food it had before it, you know, lost its stinger.

Brett Barry  17:10  
Do you think she knows? Do you think she knows that her minutes are numbered once she delivers that sting?

Justin O. Schmidt  18:04  
Yeah, that's ... that's one of the interesting questions is science. You know, we like to be stuffy in science and say, "Wow, you know, insects and animals don't think so, you know, they're just robotic or, you know, whatever," but the end result is as if she were thinking, we can argue whether she's actually thinking or not, but she clearly knows and behaves as if she were thinking and clearly as if she knows that her ... her time is limited because shifts into a whole new behavior. You could argue that, you know, while it's just the switch in the brain, which goes from, you know, normal behavior to all of a sudden kamikaze behavior. You know, well, I'm not going to argue about the fine points of, you know, what the mechanism is, but clearly the bee is behaving as if ... as if she knows that this is, you know, the end of it and that she's, you know, got a limited lifespan left and about all she can do at this point is try to make the best for protecting her sisters and brothers back in the colony and doing that by whatever time she has left of being useful and harassing the threatening agent.

Brett Barry  19:16  
Just more generally speaking with all these many insects that ... that have the ability to sting, why do they sting? It seems like kind of common sense, but can you put it into words for us?

Justin O. Schmidt  19:27  
It basically what they're doing is they're protecting the home front. It's kind of a situation, if you have, you know, just a small insect and say, "a mud dauber wasp," which most people are familiar with, they made the clouds and mud on the walls around your house or your shed or that kind of thing. They're just one little skinny wasp. They're not enough good protein and nutrition to be worth bothering with something big like most birds or lizards or mammals aren't going to waste the energy to try to eat them because they take more energy to catch the darn thing than you get out of eating, and so it's not worth attacking it, but with the stinging insects like the paper wasp and the honey bees and many of the ants that have big colonies ... it's, all of a sudden, a situation where now rather than the nutrition of one simple small insect, and yet, hundreds or thousands of in one place and if you're a honey bee colony, you get the added benefit that not only do you get lots of mature, you know, workers, but also immature in the, you know, the grubs, which you just little packs of wonderful juicy protein and fat, plus you get this yummy honey. So, therefore, it's worth the effort of something bigger to go and take the risks and do the energetic hassling to get this reward. So the ... what the sting does is that provides a way to deter this enthusiasm of the predator that your enthusiasm when you get stung in the tip of your nose when you're sticking your nose into a honey bee colony, thinking ... "Oh, good, I'm going to slurp up some of this nice yummy honey. We pretty quickly get the idea. Um, no, I don't think I want to do that and the sting is the idea provider for doing ... for chasing your way."

Brett Barry  21:17  
Now, you say that there are some animals who either don't care or are unaffected. Raccoons, skunks, bears ... you said that they will enjoy a good yellowjacket nest. Are they immune to the sting or just willing to deal with it for a good meal?

Justin O. Schmidt  21:31  
We don't really know. I think they're just willing to deal with it, and one of the examples that you get from the ... some of the older literature, particularly in Africa, there's this thing called a ratel or honey badger. It's basically you think of a wolverine in the tropics, it's a rather large member of the weasel family and they're called honey badgers because what they do is they will destroy, they're very strong like a wolverine, they can tear open a nest or even a tree, they can break the tree apart, get the nest and eat the honey. They seem to know how many stings they can take because they'll take several hundred stings, then they usually back away at that point. But every so often one of them gets a little bit too enthusiastic and it can actually be killed, so that suggests that they are not immune to it. You know, it's one of these things that I wanted to do years ago when I had contacts in South Africa where there were honey badgers that were causing beekeepers trouble: attacking hives and tipping them over and eating the bees and just generally being unliked. I kept saying, "Can somebody catch one of these darn things alive for me? Take it to a veterinarian or a doctor or somebody. Get a bunch of blood out of this thing. You know, just take a blood sample and keep that frozen and send it to me." Because if they did that, then I could test that. In fact, we did that with ... it turns out we have one example, which we discovered back in the mid-1980s. We have these harvester ants, I briefly mentioned early on, that are eaten only by horned lizards and horny toads. They're sometimes called—they're a big fat lizard that is so slow and such, they can't catch much of anything other than harvester ants. They can eats hundreds of them at a time, and we said, "Well, how does it do that? These harvester ants are really, really toxic. You know, one sting will kill a mouse and, you know, how come these ... these lizards are eating hundreds of them—and it turns out they do have an immunity in their blood. They are a thousand times more resistant than, you know, we are a mouse or something because they neutralize the toxin and the ant venom. So I could test the same thing for honey badgers, which would be the ideal animal to do that with because they kind of make their living—large part on eating honey bees and get a lot of stings. So we don't really know. They may or may not be resistant, but they can certainly be killed, so that suggests to me that if they are resistant and it's only partially resistant.

Brett Barry  24:18  
And I was really interested to learn that all of these insects or groups of insects [bees versus wasps or types of hornets], they manufacture different types of venom and that sting pain doesn't necessarily equate to the level of toxicity.

Justin O. Schmidt  24:32  
Yeah, it's kind of interesting that all of them if they have a big colony of bees or ants ... bees, wasps, you know, whatever you are ... if you're a big colony, yeah, the common problem that there's a bonanza of nutrition, just waiting anybody who can overcome your defenses and eat you; eat all of you—and so, you have the common problem. How do you defend yourself against these kinds of attacks? The best solution [most immediate solution] in most cases is to really make it hurt—and so there's severe selection pressure on each individual lineage and they're often quite distantly related, so they're not, you know, really close relatives. Each lineage is getting the same pressure. How does our venom get painful? So that we can deter predators—and so they resolve the solution is to be painful, but how you get there varies depending on who you are, you know, which ... which group of insects you are—and so they all kind of converge on the same solution because that's why it's the best solution, but they get there by ... whatever idiosyncratic route that evolution takes them on to get them there.

Brett Barry  25:42  
And the chemical composition is totally different in some cases, so you say that wasps have a histamine that, you know, creates swelling and itching and a lot of people, but that's not necessarily the case for bald-faced hornets.

Justin O. Schmidt  25:57  
Yeah, most hornets and wasps are ... they are somewhat closely related, they're all in the same ... same subfamily. Actually, the thing that really causes the pain in them is not ... not so much of the histamine, but these wasp kinins. Wasp kinins ... the best thought of is something like in our bodies, we have something called bradykinin and it's nine amino acids ... short little peptide that causes extreme hard pain and accelerated heart activity. So it's, so to speak, a hormone or mediator of our ... of our body activities—and so what the wasp has done is taken this basic structure and added a few more amino acids 16-18 total rather than nine and they ... these extra acids [amino acids] what they do is they stabilize it. Key point is bradykinin breaks down very, very quickly in the body. So you stabilize it a little bit, and then inject that to the sting and it causes pain and really nasty pain. That's why you're hooping and howling and jumping around when they sting you, you know, through your sock and your elbow, hopefully not on the tip of your nose and that's what causes the pain in them, whereas melittin and the honey bee is an entirely different peptide. It's 26 amino acids and it tends to be almost like a super detergent. It just started ... starts breaking up cell membranes and causing extreme pain. It's also a cardiotoxin, so it's direct poisoning to the heart. It's quite a different molecule. We don't know what most ants ... what the pain inducing compound is we ... we do know the bullet ant is called poneratoxin, which is a ... again ... an entirely different peptide, but it causes extreme pain, so their ... their chemistry is they're all different, but their end results are always the same.

Brett Barry  27:56  
And it's not just level of pain, so if we go back to your sting index, you've assigned a number somewhere between zero and four for each of the stings you've gotten over the years from many different species. But, in addition to the number, there's a really pretty interesting description, almost like you're describing a meal or a nice bottle of wine. So the pain ... while the level may be the same, it could be different, just like a headache is different from a cut or a burn.

Justin O. Schmidt  28:28  
Oh, exactly. The reason I did that is human beings aren't really computers. Computers like numbers and often you're gonna accuse us as scientists ... we like numbers. I like numbers. I admit that and I can use numbers zero, one, two, three, and four to plug into various mathematical systems to test the hypothesis that I'm interested in and see whether it's supported by the ... by the data [the numbers]. Most people look at that and yawn. You know, that doesn't really relate. We ... we don't get up close and fuzzy-wuzzy with numbers. You know, we use music, we use dance, we use poetry, we use pros, you know, song, you know, all of this is the way we communicate by language. It's something that is our natural way of communicating and then getting an understanding of what is really the situation rather than the number—and so that's why we put the descriptions on the kind of given an emotional. Ah, I can understand that ... that makes sense, but GOSH, I don't want to go there. Alright, it's not so bad. You know, that's okay. I can put up with that. So that was where the origin is. It's simply a second mode of communication that, in general, the more different systems you have for communicating, the better your chance of getting through the third one that we had, which was kind of visual, which I think it's kind of fun is to have that sliding bar where you have the ball showing how intense from really painful hot on one end and do nothing on the other end, and you can see the ball where it's positioned on that scale and say, "You can kind of get a visual idea. Ooh, it's up near the high end and I don't think I want to go there. Yeah, it's a low end, you know. What the heck! It's not gonna chase me away from my barbecue grill, but I'm planning for this Saturday, so we'll just ignore that one.

Brett Barry  30:27  
Have you ever been stung by something that you thought ... oh, maybe four isn't a big enough number for this scale?

Justin O. Schmidt  30:35  
Not really, no insects. Now, there are some other culprits that probably would rate higher. I only work on ... on a queue at hymenoptera, so just the group is seeing ants, wasps, and bees. But there are a lot of other things out there in the Catskills and areas of that sort. You will have these giant toe biting bugs: "Belostomatidae Bugs." They're about two or so inches long and they live in.

Brett Barry  31:02  
Whoa, wait a second. To find out where these giant toe biting bugs live in the Catskills, stay tuned. I know it's a cheap cliffhanger. But first, this quick message from our sponsor: The Catskill Center. Founded in 1969, the Catskill Center is committed to the protection and preservation of the environmental, cultural, and economic resources of the Catskills with a belief that the vitality and prosperity of the Catskills depends on wise stewardship of our natural resources, thriving local communities, and robust collaboration with others. Their work includes the Catskills Visitor Center, two public land preserves, advocacy for the Catskills and Albany, regional collaboration, natural resource protection, and more. Learn more about the Catskill Center and become a member to support their work in the Catskills by visiting catskillcenter.org. Now, what was he saying about those toe biting bugs?

Justin O. Schmidt  32:03  
About two or so inches long and they live in the water and they eat things like fish and frogs and I'm told I haven't been bitten by one, but if they bite you, that really hurts is what people say. So you have things like that and out here we have giant centipedes, which can be six inches long. I've known a number of people have been bitten by them and they throbbing hurt for, you know, sometimes a day or so and they probably would also be a four, if you were making a comparison. Again, I haven't been bitten by them. I don't make a habit of trying to get bitten by these things. And then, of course, you have the medically important ones, which we don't want to go there. You know, you could get bitten by a black widow and from everything you read in the literature that would certainly be more than a four. But then there's a couple of kinds of pain. I just deal with the acute pain, which is what you get in a moment of the sting for maybe than media time after that: 5-10 minutes, maybe half an hour or whenever that initial pain finally recedes, then there's the delayed pain, which he experienced with a paper wasp sting to your ankle. The immediate burning would go away after 5 or 10 minutes in most cases. But then, delayed hours later, you start getting swelling and itching and burning kind of a body's reaction to the pain and that would be what the black widow would have. You have these muscle contractions. We have extreme stomach pain. You know, muscles are just spasming ... these sorts of things, but the actual bite of the black widow itself is fairly more or less painless—and so I ... I guess you could say some of the things like vipers, rattlesnakes, fertile ants is down in the world tropics. Russell's Viper ... some of these things in the old world, if you get bitten by one of those, that's immediate pain, which is continuous from the moment of bite through, you know, hospital treatment and for hours sometimes, you know, days later. So those would obviously be ... be different, but you don't want to go there. I mean, that's life-threatening. You just don't, you know, want to examine that you don't even really want to think about doing something like that. But otherwise—probably the highest that you have in the northeast, in general, would be twos and those would be the paper wasps or honey bees.

Brett Barry  34:36  
When did you develop this scale and how did it come about?

Justin O. Schmidt  34:39  
It was a long process. I ... I was a chemist before I changed entomology—and so I became what's called a chemical ecologist, which means you apply chemical techniques to try to understand the behavior and biology of, in my case, insects. So I was thinking well by this chemical ability. I want to study some kind of an insect system that has chemicals related to it and I could study flies. Well, there's nothing chemically related there except how they ingest food, which was more biochemistry rather than what I was doing chemistry anyway ... simpler molecules. Well, then they can be the obvious example of stinging insects. They inject something into you and it hurts and it's toxic that suggest chemicals, right? Okay, let's go. So I started in Georgia, which is got a lot more stinging insects, and you say ... due in the northeast and I was working on this ... this harvester ant, which goes up about as far as North Carolina and they were known in the literature: the naturalist and the taxonomist in the biologies is that ... WOW! You get stung by one of these ... they really hurt and not only do they hurt ... they caused the hairs on the part of your body. Say, "Your arm ... they get stung to stand up right like a frightened dog and they make you sweat." So both of those chemists say, "Aha ... neurotransmitters!" Something is affecting neuromuscular system is something affecting the Andrew consistent ... that's got to be a chemical. So I started working on those and I was working on basically just the chemistry of what was in the venom and, wow, process of collecting. He gets ... OUCH! Jeez, these things really hurt and I, you know, I grew up in Central Pennsylvania, so I knew all about bumble bees and yellowjackets and bald-faced hornets and honey bees and sweat bees and I missed one or two ... probably carpenter ants, which nip a little bit. I've been stung by all of these things and none of them hurt anywhere near as much ... nor did they feel the same. They felt qualitatively quite different from the harvester ant, so I just kind of record that in the back of my mind and did some of the good chemistry on them and found out harvester ants are incredibly complex in terms of the chemistry of the venom—and so then the next question was ... well, is this unique? Is this or it's just most insects like harvester ants and we just hadn't really looked at them ... we'd only really looked at yellowjackets and honey bees; mostly work done by the Germans and 50 years ago or so—and so we knew about those two, but what about all these other, you know, hundreds of different types of stinging insects? So I went on a survey to try to see if the chemistry of those was similar or different. In other words, how unique ... how exciting is a harvester ant venom compared to the [quote] normal or ordinary, you know, routine of stinging insects. Well, the process I started getting stung by these things ... usually accidentally and I record just in my notes. You know, misery likes ... get something useful out of their misery, so I just record, you know, how much it hurts ... just kind of ... just for conversation or I hadn't really formulated any particular idea at that point ... I just recorded it. Then, I came in 1983 to writing a paper on the destruction of blood systems by stinging insects. In other words, breaking up your red blood cells, which if you break up enough of them, you're going to become anemic and your kidneys are going to get clogged and you're going to basically suffer immensely and maybe even die. So I see ... this might be one of the chemical ways that venoms work is by breaking up red blood cells—and so just as incidental ... along with that, I said, "Well, let's see, we correlate pain with ability to break up blood cells." So I wrote this in a fairly new journal of pharmacology, you know, not exactly entomology, not exactly normal biology, but more medical, pharmacological journal—and the answer was ... they didn't seem to correlate, but in order to do this, I had to generate the sting pain scale of, you know, zero to four and I found out ... no, they weren't correlated with ... that was basically the genesis of it at that point. Then I said, "I have two things to worry about. One is the toxicity of the venoms that I'm studying and the other is how much they hurt and how we can use these two sets of data to understand the system much better." So that was pretty much, you know, how it just kind of is my wife says, "The blind cat stumbled into the dead mouth." I just kind of serendipity stumbled into the idea of a pain scale is being a scientifically useful tool.

Brett Barry  39:58  
And you said, "Usually accidentally, which ... which leads me to believe that maybe curiosity got the best of you and you allowed yourself to be stung by more than a few insects."

Justin O. Schmidt  40:10  
Well, usually wasn't curiosity was the public railing at me. Schmidt ... WOW! How much is this one hurt? So I don't know. I haven't been stung by ... why not? WOW! Because they don't sting readily. Why not? Why? Yeah, we don't believe. We think you're just a coward. Okay, and after the fourth or fifth time, I hear this ... giving scientific presentations and all. It turns out the Texans were particularly frightened of mud-dauber wasps ... the ones that big, long, skinny things about an inch and a half long and make the dirt clods on your walls.

Brett Barry  40:44  
Yeah.

Justin O. Schmidt  40:44  
They're pretty much around the world, so it's a universal insect and Texans for some reason or at least some Texans seem to be petrified of these things and, I mean, they are scary, they're long and skinny, and kind of ... out of worldly looking things and you look at him and say, "GOSH, you know, I think must be kind of pretty ... pretty damaging or scary. But I said, "Well, they're solitary insects. They, you know, just poor single mamas out there catching spiders and stinging and paralyzing them and putting them in her mud nest to feed her young and, you know, who wants to bother eating this tiny little skinny runty thing, which doesn't have much nutrition, and if you try to eat her young with all the spiders, you have to get a mouthful of mud." You know, YUCK! That's not much fun either—and so I predicted that they'd have very little pain because they basically have no need for. You know, nothing's gonna really attack them—and so I finally one day because of the social pressure ... over many years ... went to a place where I knew there were a bunch of them by a stock tank where they were collecting their mud pallets for making their nest and I grabbed them and I kept applying them to my arm. The first two were kind of duds. I couldn't even get him to sting me.

Brett Barry  42:01  
[LAUGHTER]

Justin O. Schmidt  42:01  
Third one, finally, come on, please sting me darn it and we had just do it, so I can get this over with and she finally did sting me, and like I said, "It was underwhelming and say the very least ... it was had most about a one, so then that was the intentional sting and pretty much all of the things that I've been stung by intentionally were in that category: they were solitary wasps or solitary bees or something that doesn't readily sting," and in all cases, they were predicted based on biology to not hurt very much. There was possibly one exception, which was the giant ant: the Dinoponera gigantea ... it's the world's largest and it's 25 millimeters long or about an inch long, and I call them a gentle giant. You can have him walk on you. They don't see. They're totally unaggressive. They live in small colonies of ... are anywhere from eight individuals up to maybe 50 or 60, so they're small colonies of big ants. They got confused by some of the early naturalist or medical people who are notoriously poor at being able to identify insects in particular and they were blaming them on the bullet ant ... is saying, "You know, the giant ant was actually confused as a bullet ant and it really hurt," and I said, "Nah, I'd never known anybody to get stung by them." I collaborate for years with a researcher down in Brazil. He'd never been stung on him. He's written several papers on them. I'd written quite extensively on none of us had ever been stung. Yet there was this ... this rumor out there, they really hurt. So I said, "Well, okay, I guess we're gonna have to make this thing sting me," so I grabbed one and made it sting me and it was a two, basically, so that was a ... worst self stain that I got, which a two is considerably less than a four of a bullet ant and that was only when I really made it sting me. You know, otherwise, they can crawl on you. I've got pictures of myself and pictures of my professor when I was down there with him ... crawling on us and, you know, they're completely harmless, so you're not going to get stung by them unless you maybe sit on one or, you know, something like that.

Brett Barry  44:24  
Is the bullet ant your worst sting?

Justin O. Schmidt  44:26  
Oh yeah, absolutely.

Brett Barry  44:28  
What was the word that came out of your mouth when that happened?

Justin O. Schmidt  44:31  
Probably some expletives that I've forgotten long since.

Brett Barry  44:35  
[LAUGHTER]

Justin O. Schmidt  44:35  
Usually, that's what you do. I'm ... I'm a great fan of expletives when you get stung, and people say, "Well, that's not very scientific and it's not very, you know, gentlemanly-like and I thought ... while when you're out in the field, you're not probably being a gentleman anyway, and when you're in pain, anything that will reduce the pain is considered, at least in my mind, beneficial.

Brett Barry  45:00  
[LAUGHTER]

Justin O. Schmidt  45:00  
So as long as you're rolling around swearing, you know, that's taking your ... a lot of mental energy to do that ... that mental energy can't be focused now on how much it hurts, so you're distracting. It's kind of a distraction away from the pain, so I'm all for it.

Brett Barry  45:16  
Good. I'm on the right track with the few stings that I've gotten in my lifetime. Do you have a current count on the number of different species that have stung you over the years?

Justin O. Schmidt  45:24  
Yeah, we're up to about 84 right now, so I've added one since the book that was a self sting as well. I was ... I was in Florida, there's this introduced by honey bee size: "orchid bee." They're the beautiful bees you probably seen in some nature shows that, in particular, in Costa Rica. They'll track them down and they're absolutely gorgeous. They pollinate orchids and ... and one of the scientists who worked on them ... repeated that he once grabbed a [quote] male by mistake and a female and it really hurt him. So I thought, "Hmm, it's kind of interesting ... solitary bee, yes, it's pretty big. You know, they're about bumble bee size, sometimes even bigger, so it's a big individual, but again, they're solitary." So, you know, they shouldn't have any real threat of needing particularly potent venom, but then I got this report of how much they hurt. So I said, "Well, we've got two different opinions here. One is my theoretical prediction. The other is an actual, you know, kind of a testimony of a sword—and so an anecdote—and so I thought, "Well, the fellow down in Florida was working on this introduce species." It's a very small orchid bee and I emphasize that because there's one of the really big whoppers. It might hurt a little bit more, but I grabbed it and made it sting me and I forget what it was. I think it was about a one, maybe one and a half. I'd have to look in my notes. It wasn't anything particularly surprising, so I guess if somebody finds a big fat, juicy one from Panama or something like that ... that's a female ... I'll have to get stung by that and see whether it rises to a two or ... or perhaps even a three, but my prediction is it probably wouldn't.

Brett Barry  47:15  
I'm guessing there's no cumulative effects; considering the number of stings you've had over the years.

Justin O. Schmidt  47:20  
Not that we know of. In fact, one of the reputations among beekeepers is the beekeepers sort of are cantankerous and live forever. You know, you often see beekeepers there in the nineties or give up beekeeping in the late eighties ... early nineties. Some of them would live to a hundred and you never hear beekeepers, you know, dying. WOW! You know, we're all dropping off in the fifties and sixties. You don't hear of that. They're all pretty long lived and beekeepers are getting stung for many, many years and often they'll get stung every time they go out [one to 10 or 20 times] and I was with one beekeeper here. You know, short sleeves and I think he had a veil ... usually do because you don't like to get stung around your eyes. They swell and it's kind of a nuisance and he had like 50 bees that attacked his left forearm. He just wiped them all off and said, "Oh, what a pity! I just killed 50 bees and been merrily onward," and he was more concerned about the bees than himself and he just that ... that's beekeepers for you. Many of them will also say that they ... they help prevent their getting stiffen joints from arthritis and, you know, that sort of thing, so they argue that stings are actually beneficial rather than deleterious.

Brett Barry  48:42  
Well, there is a medicinal or medicinal qualities to be venom, right?

Justin O. Schmidt  48:47  
Oh yeah, as long as history has been recorded ... there's been apitherapy where people use bee stings or in the case of the New World ... there were no honey bees, they're an old world species. So in the case of the New World, they would use wasp stings or ant stings or something of that sort ... something in stung and hurt that was a key ... they want the ant hurt and they've used those for various treatments of injuries or wounds or stiffness or that sort of thing. I wish we'd had some good anthropologist or good primatologist who could find and document whether, you know, the great apes, chimps, bonobos, gorillas, you know, whatnot orangutans ... one of our close relatives actually uses stinging insects in themselves to self-medicate. We know that they will eat certain leaves and this kind of thing, too, for medicinal purposes. I think it would just be absolutely fascinating if we could get an example of them actually using stings for their own health. If so, that would show us this has gone back for a while ... millions of years.

Brett Barry  49:57  
Now, if you don't want to get stung, there are signs you say that we can look for or perhaps listen for that may be happening just prior to the event.

Justin O. Schmidt  50:08  
Yeah, and I often ... I tell people ... make sure the wax is out of your ears and you're tuned into your ears. Listen, you'll hear a buzzing or something of that sort. Typically, what's going to get you in this situation ... least in the northeast are going to be yellowjackets going on into about October and they ... they nest in the ground or the base of trees ... often in yards and they'll be buzzing—and so you can often hear them ... that'll reduce some of the incidents—not always. The other thing I tell people to do is ... on a nice, sunny day ... go and walk around your yard before you mow it—preferably not after you mow it because it's too late at that point—and just look around the edges, especially eager tones, where the ... the grass joins up against the base of a tree or shrub or edge of a fence or something of that sort. Those are typically areas where yellowjackets will have their nest, and as you're walking around, try to look for see ... if you see a flash of light that's going on a straight line, that's a B-line or a wasp line in this case. If you see one, stop where you are and watch or back up a little bit if you're really close to it and just watch and see if you see another one. Oh, and there's a third one. UH-OH! It triangulate and look at where that flash is going. You know, you usually find the nest—and so then once you've found the nest course ... again ... you stay at a distance from it and you mark where it is in your mind and make sure you don't mow there or if you're insisting that you want a nice neat yard or neighbors are complaining that ... you're an eyesore in a community, get that yard mowed! You know something of that sort of you have to deal with that. Then, you can come back at ... at night with red light. The advantage of insects can't see red. Most of them can't ... certainly wasps can't come back with a red headlamp and you can get those in any sporting store they'll have, and then you can come in with this wasp spray [the aerosol-like spray-like can] you get at any supermarket or hardware store and just stick the nozzle basically down the entrance preferably ... well into the darkness, you know, midnight or something of that sort and just empty the can into them. That'll ... that'll take care of them. The one thing I might mention while you're doing this ... hold your breath. Because breath is how they chemically recognize you. They ... they will go up the stream of your ... your hot smelly breath from breathing, and therefore you get stung on the nose, your eyes or something, if there's a rogue individual that managed to escape your attempt to get rid of them. If you're holding your breath, it's kind of like closing your eyes and trying to see danger proceed ... he can't see it. So you're basically shutting off their nose, their ability to smell, so they have a lot harder time finding you. And I guess the last caveat you need to add is don't do this if you're allergic ... DUH! No, no, don't do it. Hire somebody to do it or get some nice, strong, robust teenager that, you know, wants to have an adventure and do something ... get stung once or twice that just makes a good story.

Brett Barry  53:45  
If you're not allergic and they're not necessarily nesting in a place, that's going to be a problem. What is the benefit of ... of these creatures in the ... in the ecosystem? Are they more of a benefit than a detriment as far as we're concerned?

Justin O. Schmidt  53:59  
Absolutely, social wasps are, in general, beneficial. Take the paper wasp is one example. They eat caterpillars. That's the only thing they eat is just caterpillars. We know caterpillars are what messes up a lot of crops and vegetables in your garden and that sort of thing. Because caterpillars are basically eating machines and that's what the paper wasp to eat is caterpillars, so they're actually quite beneficial—and so I tell people to leave them alone if at all possible. And, as far as yellowjackets, they ... they eat flies and biting insects, you know, horse flies or ... or house flies, you know, that sort of thing, as well as caterpillars and some other soft-bodied things. In fact, there was a ... an anecdote from British Isles ... oh, 150 years ago or so. They eliminated all the wasps as they call them in England [near the yellowjackets] and the next year they had this plague of flies, which were just driving everybody crazy. They attributed to the fact that they eliminated all the yellowjackets that are primarily feeding on the flies around barns and animals and that kind of thing. And, in fact, one of the things that you can do with students, which is quite fascinating, is watching bald-faced hornets and they will pounce on a fly that sitting near a barn wall or something like that. You can see them pouncing. They often find something like a ... the head of a nail, which is holding the board into the side of the wall and it's kind of looks like about a fly shaving or pounce on the nail. OOPS! That's not a fly, that's not very tasty, and they actually will learn from that, oh, that particular fly is not a fly and they won't pounce on it repeatedly, but they might pounce on another nail and you can watch them doing this and it's kind of interesting, so bald-faced hornets are actually quite beneficial as well.

Brett Barry  55:58  
One last question for you—it seems they've ... they've come to the West Coast, so we may be safe in the Catskills for now, but murder hornets ... are they coming or a media hype?

Justin O. Schmidt  56:09  
I think it's mostly just media hype and that kind of thing there. They're actually quite present in Japan, where people actually admire them there. I'm not expecting any big problem with the giant Asian hornets in this country for a couple of reasons. The main reason is that they're so big and so such small colonies with so low reproduction that we're gonna eradicate them all. We'll just make it as a kind of a cottage industry of getting a whole neighborhood ... look out for these things, and when you find them, you B-line them, you can set little like the Japanese will put little ribbons around their waist and follow the ribbons back to the colony, and then you can destroy the colony. Basically, I think they'll just be manually destroyed all the colonies before they can really get established. Now, if they did get really established where you had hundreds or thousands of them in around the Pacific Northwest of British Columbia and Washington and that sort of thing. It's conceivable that they could expand two forested areas of the rest of the west would to be mostly northwest. They're not going to make it to desert areas. One of the big worries would be ... if that happened many years down the road, you get hibernating queens, which common RVs and trailers, you know, these sorts of things from New York and Pennsylvania wanting to go out and see Glacier National Park, Yellowstone, you know, whatever—Olympic Peninsula and getting some of these things back to the east, where they would probably do actually quite well in the eastern forests, you know, would probably get into New York, maybe a little further north. But I'd say, "That's an extremely long shot and probability of that happening is pretty minimal."

Brett Barry  56:09  
And if we have to tie ribbons on their waists like the Japanese do, that seems like another good job for the local high school kids.

Justin O. Schmidt  58:06  
Exactly, yeah.

Brett Barry  58:07  
[LAUGHTER]

Justin O. Schmidt  58:07  
I don't see why our kids would be any less coordinated ... get the right enthusiasm and attitude.

Brett Barry  58:14  
Well, it's been a real pleasure speaking with you, Professor Schmidt. I enjoyed your book and thank you for personally getting stung by all of these different species, so that we can put our own stings into perspective.

Justin O. Schmidt  58:26  
Well, it's been my pleasure. I'm glad we got a chance to chat.

Brett Barry  58:30  
Justin O. Schmidt's pain scale for stinging insects can be found in the appendix of his book, "The Sting of the Wild," with rankings from zero to four and colorful descriptions like sweat bees, pain level 1, light and ephemeral, almost fruity ... a tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm to see where your stings rank and to learn more, check out Justin O. Schmidt's "The Sting of the Wild." Kaatscast is a biweekly production of Silver Hollow Audio. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and we'll see you again in two weeks. I'm Brett Barry. Thanks for listening.