STRAY neuron

I was watching a Florida-FSU game earlier today and one of the players came out of the game with an injury later dubbed a “stinger”.

I decided to Wikipedia the term, as I was curious whether a precise medical definition of a “stinger” existed. It did not, at least not on Wikiepdia, but I did run into an interesting pain index of various stings.

Having been stung by every type of bee, wasp and ant himself, entomologist Joseph O. Schmidt rank various stings this way:

• 1.0 Sweat bee: Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.
• 1.2 Fire ant: Sharp, sudden, mildly alarming. Like walking across a shag carpet & reaching for the light switch.
• 1.8 Bullhorn acacia ant: A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone has fired a staple into your cheek.
• 2.0 Bald-faced hornet: Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door.
• 2.0 Yellowjacket: Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine WC Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.
• 2.x Honey bee, Africanized bee and European hornet.
• 3.0 Red harvester ant: Bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail.
• 3.0 Paper wasp: Caustic & burning. Distinctly bitter aftertaste. Like spilling a beaker of Hydrochloric acid on a paper cut.
• 4.0 Pepsis wasp: Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath (if you get stung by one you might as well lie down and scream).
• 4.0+ Bullet ant: Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch nail in your heel.

If you’re thinking you should stay away from bullet ants, you should not have too much trouble…unless you’re planning on visiting South American rainforests, of course.

Bullet ants are used by some indigenous people in their initiation rites to manhood (Bequaert, 1926). They are first knocked out by drowning them in a natural chloroform, and then hundreds of them are woven into sleeves made out of leaves, stinger down. When the ants come to, boys slip the sleeve down their arm. The goal of this initiation rite is to keep the sleeve for a full ten minutes without showing any signs of pain. When finished, the boys’ (now men’s) arms are temporarily paralyzed because of the venom, and may shake uncontrollably for days.