Velvet Ant

No. Velvet ants are wasps, in the family Mutillidae, and the resemblance to ants is limited to the wingless females, which have a similar size, a hairy segmented body, and a habit of running over the ground. The giveaways are that female velvet ants are covered in dense, bright, plush-looking hair, they do not have the elbowed antennae or the narrow petiole "waist" nodes of true ants, and they are solitary — there is no colony, no queen, and no workers. Male velvet ants have full wings and look like fairly ordinary wasps; the two sexes are so different that they were sometimes described as separate species before anyone watched them mate.

Very painful, but not dangerous. Entomologist Justin Schmidt, who built the well-known insect sting pain index, rated the velvet ant sting a 3 out of 4, describing it as "explosive and long lasting" and comparing the sensation to hot oil from a deep fryer poured over your hand. The pain can last up to about 30 minutes. Despite the folk name, the venom is not potent in the toxic sense — it is designed to hurt and deter, not to kill — and there is no evidence it could actually harm a cow, let alone a person, unless someone has a rare allergic reaction. Only females sting, because the sting is a modified egg-laying organ; the females also have an unusually long, mobile sting that can reach almost anywhere on their body if you try to hold one.

Adult velvet ants feed only on nectar and water and live just a few weeks. The ecological action is in the larvae, which are parasitoids. A female velvet ant searches the ground for the nest burrows of solitary bees and wasps (such as sand wasps, digger bees, or bumble bees), digs in, and lays an egg on or near the host's mature larva or pupa inside its brood cell. The velvet ant grub then eats the host from the outside and pupates in the cell. As for predators, very little successfully eats an adult female — the combination of warning colours, a rock-hard rounded shell, a foul smell, a warning squeak, fast evasive running, and the sting defeats most birds, lizards, and small mammals, and studies have filmed predators repeatedly failing to subdue one.

Across the deserts of the southwestern United States, dozens of velvet ant species that are not closely related have evolved nearly identical colour schemes — several distinct regional "uniforms" of red-and-black, orange, or white-and-black. This is Müllerian mimicry — because every one of these species is genuinely well-defended with a hard body and a severe sting, it pays them all to share one advertisement. A young roadrunner or lizard that tries a single velvet ant, gets stung, and learns to avoid that pattern then leaves every look-alike species alone, so the cost of "teaching" predators is spread across the whole group. It is one of the largest known mimicry rings among insects.