Within minutes of our first meeting, and more or less in response to my saying good morning, Justin Schmidt began lamenting our culture’s lack of insect-based rites of passage. He told me about the Sateré-Mawé people in northwestern Brazil, who hold a ceremony in which young men slip their hands into large mitts filled with bullet ants, whose stings are so agonizing they can cause temporary paralysis; when initiates pass the test, they’re one step closer to becoming full members of society.
Schmidt believes we could learn something from this. By trade, he is an entomologist, an expert on the Hymenoptera order — wasps, bees and ants — but his interest in this insect ritual was not merely academic. He has two teenage boys, and, on this particular morning at least, I found him wondering whether they might benefit from a pain ritual to help introduce them to adulthood.
“I mean, it wouldn’t kill them,” Schmidt said. “And I think that may be the key to the whole thing: It can’t kill you and yet something very real is happening.”
It was a bit before 7:30 on a windy weekday morning in Tucson, and Schmidt had just dropped off his 14-year-old at school. At 69, Schmidt has a head of red hair that stubbornly refuses to go gray and a boyish face that glints of mischief. We were driving in his 1999 Toyota Corolla down a road that may have been a desert highway or a city thoroughfare: My East Coast eyes couldn’t tell the difference. We pulled up to a traffic light, next to a giant saguaro cactus whose short, upturned arm gave it the look of a crossing guard gesturing us to stop.
Schmidt’s new book, “The Sting of the Wild: The Story of the Man Who Got Stung for Science,” weaves his theories about stinging insects through a narrative of his personal experiences digging in the dirt. For many readers, the highlight of the book will be the appendix, his celebrated Pain Scale for Stinging Insects, which rates the pain level of dozens of insect stings, an index he created mostly by firsthand experience, either by suffering stings incidentally during field research or, in some cases, by inducing them.
Because stings of the same magnitude don’t necessarily feel the same, Schmidt has written haiku-like descriptions for each of the 83 sting entries:
Anthophorid bee, Pain Level 1, “Almost pleasant, a lover just bit your earlobe a little too hard.”
Maricopa harvester ant, Level 3, “After eight unrelenting hours of drilling into that ingrown toenail, you find the drill wedged into the toe.”
Termite-raiding ant, Level 2, “The debilitating pain of a migraine contained in the tip of your finger.”
Club-horned wasp, Level 0.5, “Disappointing. A paper clip falls on your bare foot.”
Sometimes, the images are less concrete, more impressionistic. The redheaded paper wasp, a three on the scale, is described as “the closest you will come to seeing the blue of a flame from within the fire.” This surprising lyricism makes an eloquent argument: that the ancient secrets of the insects are accessible to us. Through his pain scale, Schmidt brings the human and insect worlds closer — or rather, he shows how they’re already close, already in constant communication through the language of pain.
Since the 1990s, Schmidt’s pain scale has been the object of media fascination. It has appeared on the BBC and in the recent superhero movie “Ant-Man.” He embraces his role as a kind of culture stuntman, because he wants people to feel moved by his mysterious subjects. And yet, as he often observes, most people are too preoccupied by fear to appreciate stinging insects. To Schmidt, this fear itself is part of the story in that it speaks to our long, complicated relationship with these creatures: We’re predators, and insects are particularly canny and creative prey.
When Schmidt recalls a certain agonizing sting, a memory that remains vivid decades after the pain has faded, he’s not just spinning a tale. He’s documenting a theory about how sting pain functions: as a deterrent, whereby it creates a memory of pain that stays with a predator for life. Pain helps a predator learn. Schmidt’s book is, in a sense, a memoir of one predator’s education.
When we arrived at the corner of Saddleback and Brichta Drive, I was struck by the fact that Schmidt’s “home lab” is really a home. In 2010, when he, his wife and two sons moved to the hills of western Tucson, Schmidt kept their former house for professional use. Outwardly it still resembles its neighbors: a simple brick ranch structure, fronted by a sandy yard with large cactuses and palms. Inside, though, it is undeniably a lab, with countless jars of specimens in soil, each carefully identified with handwritten tags, and with tanks full of buzzing, marching insects. There are so many documents, research accouterments and souvenirs from international insect hunts covering his walls and shelves that he began posting species charts on the ceiling.
Schmidt started out as a chemist, but then realized, he told me, that he “didn’t really like chemists or the smell of chemistry labs.” One Christmas, when Schmidt was in his early 20s, his first wife, Debbie, a zoology student, gave him the book “Wasp Farm,” Howard Evans’s gripping, almost novelistic account of wasp watching. Schmidt realized that he was still enthralled by a desire to understand the secret lives of insects, a subject he first discovered as a child in the woods of Appalachian Pennsylvania. Later, in grad school at the University of Georgia, he and Debbie were each stung while collecting specimens of Pogonomyrmex, a genus of harvester ants, in order to determine the chemistry of their venom. The sensation waxed for many hours and caused “a deep ripping and tearing pain,” as Debbie described it at the time. It was different from anything they had experienced. Schmidt was intrigued.
In search of more data on the nature of stings, he packed his 1969 VW van and set out across America on a quest to collect specimens of the 20 or so native species of harvester ants. After his own, accidental trials with stings in Georgia, he decided to note the various types of pain that he experienced out in the field.
In chemical terms, there is a direct way to measure the damage caused by a sting: toxicity. After identifying the chemical components of a particular venom, you can measure the lasting damage these toxins inflicted on a victim’s organs. The melittin of a honeybee, for example, causes localized pain — a heatlike sensation brought about by destroying cell membranes — but it also travels to the heart and injures it. If enough bees sting an animal, the cardiotoxin component of melittin will work to arrest its heart.
But what about stings that are only minimally toxic? “Pain, the experience of pain, is a body’s warning system that damage has occurred, is occurring or is about to occur,” Schmidt explained to me. “But pain itself is not the same thing as damage.” What about the tarantula hawk, a solitary wasp, whose sting is far more painful than that of a honeybee but leaves no lasting damage at all? That kind of barely toxic sting, it would seem, succeeds as a defensive strategy purely by inflicting pain. An understanding of a sting’s toxicity, in other words, didn’t entirely capture how a sting works as a deterrent.
To go any further, he realized, he needed to invent a language to talk about pain. Thus the Schmidt Pain Scale for Stinging Insects was born. Using his own field experience with stings, and occasionally supplementing it with the testimony of his oft-stung colleagues, he began to develop a scale, from 0 to 4; the sting of the honeybee, Apis mellifera, was set as the anchoring value, defined as a pain level of 2. The pain scale would allow Schmidt to draw comparisons, to test hypotheses and to help him document theories on the role of the sting in the natural history of insects.
The approach is hardly scientific. His sample size was tiny. The scale wasn’t based on solid controls of variables, like the age of both insect and predator or the placement of the sting on the body of the victim. Even under the best of circumstances, pain is notoriously difficult to gauge; reliable methods for measuring nerve responses of pain were, and remain, imprecise.
But the pain scale was a useful start. As a tool, it has helped Schmidt explain a major hypothesis: that the adaptation of highly toxic stings was critical in helping insects transition from a solitary existence to one structured by advanced social orders, what is known as eusociality. Early insects lacked toxic stings because, as low-value prey, they didn’t need them. What those solitary insects did have — and their contemporary descendants, like tarantula hawks, still have — was a powerfully painful sting, which functioned defensively by inflicting pain on predators. Later in history, around the time insects began organizing into complex societies, they upgraded their defenses. Social insects’ colonies are stocked with tender and nutritious larvae and sometimes also honey, offering a high-value target, which meant they had to evolve to repel more highly motivated predators. So they began selecting for stings that were not just painful but also potentially lethal. Or, as Schmidt, sitting in his lab sipping his iced tea, put it, the sting pain of the social insect “delivered more than just an advertisement — it told the truth.”
When I met Schmidt in Tucson, I had just returned from an expedition into the Sonoran Desert of Mexico with a large group of field biologists. Schmidt had pulled out of the expedition because of the flu. Initially, I was disappointed that he couldn’t make the trip — I’d been curious to see him prowling the Chihuahua pines with his net, excavating harvester-ant colonies. But I discovered that Schmidt’s absence yielded its own insights; without him around, his colleagues were free to gossip.
“Oh, Schmidt?” said Bob Johnson, an ant specialist with a Bill Murray vibe. “Now there’s a case for you. I’d say maybe that guy’s been stung one too many times.” John Palting, a moth expert, who descended from his campsite every morning with an exquisite collection of specimens that he pinned the night before, laughingly recalled watching Schmidt at work in the field. “You’d do a double take,” Palting told me. “You’d walk by him, and he’d be doing this,” Palting made a gesture as though stabbing himself repeatedly in the wrist, “and you’d say: ‘Dude! Take it easy. We’re in the middle of nowhere here. If you have a bad reaction to that, I’m not carrying you out of here.’ ”
Later, back in Tucson, when I shared these reactions with Schmidt, he shrugged. “I know people think I’m a bit crazy. But I’m really not. I’m just trying to answer a different set of questions.”
Though he spent 25 years working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Carl Hayden Bee Research Center, there has always been an anti-establishment tendency in Schmidt’s work. Government science, he felt, was dictated by the bottom-line interests of industry — from beekeepers to large pesticide manufacturers — often in ways that conflicted with what he felt was good research. There was almost no interest or support for his work on other stinging insects, which offered no profit potential. (“Nobody cares about wasps,” Schmidt told me. “Or even ants, really.”) Even as he earned a promotion to the highest rank at the government lab, Schmidt did everything he could to sustain his independent research: building his house by hand, repairing his own vehicles, avoiding debt so he could pursue self-funded projects.
Although he has done his part to cultivate his public role as “The Man Who Got Stung for Science,” its confines also frustrate him. Reporters don’t generally call to chat about the role of stings in the evolution of eusociality. Most people just want to hear crazy stories about getting stung by exotic ants. Schmidt theorizes that the media fixation on sting pain is itself a potential data point. That behavior fits well with his observation that stings are brutally effective at lodging themselves in the psyche of potential predators.
Writing about social insects, E.O. Wilson casually refers to their “world domination,” a phrase that would sound alarmist if it weren’t simply accurate. Although estimates are debatable, Wilson has calculated the number of ants, worldwide, to be roughly 10 thousand trillion (1016), with a combined body weight equal to that of all humans. “The foreign-policy aim of ants,” Wilson has written, “can be summed up as follows: restless aggression, territorial conquest and genocidal annihilation.” The human conquest of earth is a recent and tenuous project; it would be more accurate to say that the planet belongs, as it always has, to the insects.
To be an entomologist is, therefore, to become a scholar of your own conqueror. By focusing on insect violence in particular, Schmidt has become attuned to all the ways in which human stories are mere subplots of that larger martial epic. When a website recently ran a photo of some Asian giant hornets (Vespa mandarinia) and made the insects appear almost twice as large as its true size, Schmidt saw it as a kind of propaganda piece: We take nature’s aposematic communications — bright colorations and imposing body shapes and sizes adapted to scare off would-be predators — and, master hype-artists that we are, make them even more eye-catching and alarming.
And what about his own creation, the popular sting-pain scale? Isn’t it a small masterpiece of propaganda for the other side? “Well,” he told me, with a grin, “if you can’t beat them, join them.”
Later, as the sun set, we drove to Schmidt’s house high in the hills of western Tucson. The moment we entered, Schmidt’s wife, Li, presented us with a pudgy, furry, gray-yellow Centris pallida — a desert bee that specializes in pollinating the paloverde plant — that she found lying on her windshield that morning. Schmidt’s 14-year-old son was walking around barefoot with a sand boa snake coiled around his neck. Later, under the dark desert sky, I saw red spotted toads jump into Schmidt’s brightly illuminated swimming pool, one after another, like women in a Busby Berkeley movie, then settle onto pool ropes and croak at high volume. Bob Jacobson, an old grad-school colleague of Schmidt’s, sat poolside, doing pitch-perfect impressions of an array of crickets, his long white beard swaying in the breeze.
Before supper, Schmidt and I went for a walk to check in with the colony of feral Africanized honeybees — killer bees — that he had invited to live on his property with a pheromone concoction he invented.
“They’re hardy,” he said of the bees as we wove our way, gingerly, through tall cactuses. “They’ve got good genes. You don’t see them suffering colony-collapse disorder. We should be working with them, in my opinion. But, you know, everyone’s so scared of them.”
I asked him about the protocol for a killer-bee attack. “Oh,” he said, “just turn around and run.”
The landscape, a tight maze of every kind of cactus, was one of the worst possible places to run.
About 15 feet from the hive, Schmidt told me to wait, as he approached it, to “check what kind of mood they’re in today.” But the killer bees, notorious for their aggressive defense of their home, were, on that day, placid.
As we drifted back to the house, I witnessed a reunion between old friends.
“There they are!” he exclaimed, as we approached a group of tarantula hawks buzzing around a leafless milkweed plant on Schmidt’s patio. Hovering over the bush, with their two-inch-long iridescent bluish-purplish-black bodies and singed-tangerine wings dizzyingly aflutter, they looked like dancing fairies.
The sting of the tarantula hawk is, in pain terms, the sting of stings. Its coloration is just an advertisement for its venom, whose composition is still unknown. Schmidt gives it a straight 4, the highest pain rating, more painful than the bullet ant (though not as long lasting). He describes it as “electric, a shock from the heavens.” It’s the kind of debilitating sensation that can take control of a person’s body. His sincere advice for people stung by a tarantula hawk is to lie down and scream.
Meeting a wild tarantula hawk, which is as visually pleasing as it is mysterious, I could understand why Schmidt talks about stings in the language of aesthetics, like a connoisseur. It isn’t about masochism, or machismo, but about the desire to grasp each and every molecule of a thing, even the sharp ones, which is, in that way, a bit like love. Seeing this flamboyant solitary wasp, whose venom helped keep it alive on earth many millions of years before humans first appeared, the beauty of the sting was self-evident: not for the pain it causes, but for the life it sustains.
