[Animals] World's most painful ant sting targets nerves in the same way scorpion venom does Add Tag

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Bullet and greenhead ants produce toxins they inject with every sting, which prolong nerve signals to the brain and lead to trembling, uncontrollable and long-lasting pain in mammals.

Ants that inflict the world's most painful stings do so by injecting venom that targets their victim's nerve cells, new research has found.

Australian greenhead ants (Rhytidoponera metallica) and bullet ants (Paraponera clavata), found in Central and South America, are not to be messed with. These insects' stings unleash a flood of toxins that cause trembling, uncontrollable and long-lasting pain in humans and other mammals.

In his 2016 book "The Sting of the Wild" (Johns Hopkins University Press), entomologist Justin O. Schmidtdescribed being stung by a bullet ant as "pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like walking over flaming charcoal with a three-inch [8 centimeters] nail embedded in your heel."

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Victims of these ants have also likened the pain to that of being shot, giving the insect its name.

"Bullet ant stings can be painful for up to 12 hours and it's a deep drilling pain you feel in your bones with sweating and goosebumps," Sam Robinson, a biopharmacologist at the University of Queensland's Institute for Molecular Bioscience who led the new research, said in a statement.

Related: Killer bees stung a man 250 times in swarm attack, but he survived. How?

Now, Robinson and his colleagues think they know how these ants pack such vicious stings.

In a study published May 23 in the journal Nature Communications, the scientists showed that the ant venom targets specific proteins in nerve cells that are involved in pain perception.

Greenhead and bullet ants produce toxins that bind to mammalian nerve cells when they sting. Researchers already knew bullet ants produce a substance targeting nerves called poneratoxin, but it remained unclear howthis substance produced such intense and long-lasting pain.

link: https://www.livescience.com/animals/ants/worlds-most-painful-ant-sting-targets-nerves-in-the-same-way-scorpion-venom-does