Book Review – The Sting of the Wild by Justin O. Schmidt

We sometimes discover new books in interesting, unexpected ways. I am always excited when that happens. I discovered Justin O. Schmidt’s ‘The Sting of the Wild‘ through an episode of Jimmy Kimmel’s show. Schmidt was the invited guest for that episode and he had brought with him his favourite stinging insects and introduced them to the audience and then spoke about this book. I was excited when I saw that episode, because it is nice to see scientists at talk shows talking about the work they do. I got this book after a while and finally got to read it this week.

‘The Sting of the Wild‘ is about stinging insects. In the first part of the book which runs into five chapters, Schmidt gives us an introduction to stinging insects and talks about how their stinging capability might have evolved from an evolutionary perspective. In the second part of the book, Schmidt focuses on individual insects, talks about their life histories and their lifestyles, their relationships with humans and other animals from the animal kingdom, how they use their sting and how sharp and painful their sting can be. He creates a four-level sting-pain scale and tries to rate each insect’s sting using this scale. Some of the insects which are featured in the second part of the book are sweat bees, ants of different types including fireants, harvester ants and bullet ants, wasps of different types including yellowjackets, tarantula hawks, mud daubers and velvet ants, and of course everyone’s favourite, the honey bee.

During the course of this exciting adventure into the stinging insect world, Schmidt reveals some surprising facts. For example :

The male of a stinging insect cannot sting, it is only the female which stings –

““Careful, don’t let him sting you” is an all-too-familiar phrase to warn against stinging insects. But male stinging insects do not sting. You read right. Males do not sting. Why not? The answer could not be simpler—they do not have a stinger! Even if a male bee (or ant or wasp, for that matter) attempted to sting, it lacks the equipment. The stinger is a highly derived, egg-laying tube, and males cannot lay eggs. They simply cannot evolve a stinger similar to a female’s stinger. Consequently, males are harmless, have no ability to hurt large predators, and do not even aid their sisters to defend against predators. Threaten a male bee or a wasp, and it flees or hides.”

In the case of some ants, the intense pain from the sting lasts for nearly eight hours –

“One might be tempted to generalize from experience with stings from honey bees, yellowjackets, baldfaced hornets, various wasps, bumble bees, sweat bees, and even fire ants that all insect stings are sort of like a bee sting, differing mainly in intensity. Anyone who has been stung by a harvester ant knows better. Harvester ants are docile giants of the temperate ant world, unobtrusively going about their business of harvesting seeds for food. They have no attitude like fire ants and cause no harm if left alone. If they are sat on or pinched, however, they deliver a sting that is nothing like a bee sting. The pain is intense, comes in waves, and is deeply visceral. The intense pain lasts 4 to 8 hours, not 4 to 8 minutes, as with a typical honey bee sting.”

In another place, he says this about the sting of Maricopa ants, a type of harvester ants –

“Don’t let the delicate, lithe body shape or unassuming demeanor of Maricopa harvester ants fool you. The stings of these ants really hurt. The throbbing pain can last 8 hours, decreases only slowly, and the ants readily autotomize their stings into humans or other unfortunate animals. These ants were the most painful stingers we encountered on the summer’s trip. To add veracity to their message, the venom of the ants at this particular location is the most toxic known ant, wasp, or bee venom, some 25 times more toxic than honey bee venom and 35 times greater than western diamondback rattlesnake venom.”

There are some wasps, called Tarantula Hawks, which eat tarantula spiders, which are many times their size.

Some queen ants live for nearly forty years and continue to produce offspring to populate their colony during that span –

“What are the longest-lived ants? Harvester ants currently appear to win the award, outlasting all other ants…The longevity of a harvester ant colony has been exasperatingly difficult to pin down. Answers are all over the place, from an average of 15 years or 17 years for a colony reared in the lab, to 22 to 43 years and even up to 29 to 58 years…The western harvester ant is the species suspected to live the longest of all harvester ants. For her 56 colonies, she calculated that the last colony would live to 44.9 years of age…To live up to 45 years, a queen harvester ant must remain amazingly safe and secure.”

Bullet ants deliver the most painful sting. Or as the author puts it –

“I am confident that bullet ants are the holy grail of stinging insects and deliver the most painful sting of any stinging insect on Earth.”

And, of course, the fascinating, but probably well known fact about honey bees.

“Unlike, most wasps that are carnivores, honey bees are strict vegetarians (vegans, if you wish) that feed on pollen and nectar from flowers, plus sugary liquids from other sources, including honeydew-producing insects.”

One of my favourite descriptions in the book was about solitary wasps. It goes like this.

“Solitary in the sense of wasp biology means lack of sociality, that is, not living in colonies with sisters, brothers, mothers, and growing young. Instead, solitary wasps live a life of the single female who must do everything herself so that her offspring survive and carry on her lineage. Solitary wasps are true single moms. Male wasps do no work whatsoever to assist in producing the next generation.”

That passage gave me goosebumps. I always liked solitary wasps – sometimes one of them, I think a Mud Dauber, has buzzed around in my home trying to build a nest, and I knew instinctively that it was a mother which was going to have babies. Now, after reading this passage, I love them more.

There is also an astonishing fact that Schmidt reveals about some solitary wasps.

“Momma wasp has the special ability to choose the sex of her babies. Hymenoptera are oddballs in the genetic world. Females are produced from fertilized eggs, and males are produced from unfertilized eggs…it…means mom can choose to produce a son or a daughter by selectively allowing stored sperm to fertilize the egg. In the tarantula hawk world, females are valuable. They do all the work, take all the risks of capturing the spiders, and have to drag a spider sometimes eight times their weight to their burrow. Thus, females need to be big and strong to do the job efficiently and to produce the most young.”

During the course of the book, the author also describes how he got interested in studying insects and became an entomologist (insect biologist). (It seems he took the scenic route to get there, having done his undergraduate and graduate degrees in chemistry.) It is fascinating to read. He also talks about some of the great entomologists. I was fascinated by one in particular – Howard Ensign Evans. He has written books about wasps – those great, inspiring, insect single moms – how can we not love him? I want to read books by him.

Justin Schmidt’s pace flows smoothly and the pages fly. He enlivens the facts and anecdotes with humorous lines, like this :

“Animal survival is simple in theory: fill one’s stomach with nutritious food, and don’t end up in anyone else’s stomach.”

Occasionally, Schmidt also offers an overall commentary on science, like he does here :

“Science is rarely sterile. Scientists are adventurers like ancient explorers sailing to undiscovered parts of the globe, who do not know what they will find or discover but seek the thrill of the unknown. Contrary to movie caricatures, scientists are not eccentric, crazy, brilliant people in strange laboratories concocting various magical brews or wild computer programs. Scientists are people, equally exciting or boring, like our usual acquaintances. Science is the process of discovery, distinguishable from other human endeavors. The discovery process is self-correcting; that is, if evidence disproves a scientific concept, that old idea is either discarded or modified consistent with the new factual information. In practice, this process is not usually as smooth or as rapid as described. Most scientists make their greatest discoveries early in their careers and, because they are human, become attached to their discoveries. Within the scientific community, new ideas stimulate new experiments to test the ideas, generating new facts and information. Good scientists will look at new facts and modify or outright discard their ideas if they are shown to be wrong. But this is difficult. Nobody wants to think that much of what he or she accomplished in life is wrong. Young scientists are typically spared emotional attachment to earlier ideas and form their ideas mainly based on current facts. Thus, science tends to progress through younger people, and old ideas tend to die with the originators of those ideas. Through this cynical view, science progresses one coffin at a time.”

‘The Sting of the Wild‘ is a fascinating book. Though the focus of the book is supposedly the stings of insects and how and why they evolved and how painful they can be, the life history of insects that the book describes is fascinating. After reading this, we start seeing stinging insects not as annoyances which disturb our peace when we are the middle of our work or enjoying a relaxing day, but as living beings like us, which have problems and challenges which are not very different from what we have – how to find a mate, how to build a home, how to raise one’s young ones and bring them up to be independent beings, how to get food, how to protect one’s home against enemies and predators – we can almost feel the pressures and the challenges that nature exerts on an insect mother’s or insect colony’s life everyday. It is brilliant. I loved it. It is definitely one of my favourite books of the year.

Have you read ‘The Sting of the Wild‘? What do you think about it?