The velvet ant larva then hatches and proceeds to eat the host pupa, before it itself pupates and emerges from the nest as an adult velvet ant. Their hosts can be spread some distances apart, and as ...

The species in question is Traumatomutilla bifurca, a type of velvet ant – which is, somewhat confusingly, actually a species of wasp. Some of these wasps don't have any wings, but they do have ...

The scarlet velvet ant is very well known for its extremely painful sting. Less well known is that the velvet ant is not actually an ant at all—it is a type of wingless parasitic wasp. The ...

The molting fluid of ant pupae functions as “metabolic currency” in the ant colony and may have enabled the evolution of eusociality. Viviane was a Churchill Scholar at the University of Cambridge, ...