Subsequently, Schmidt has refined his scale, culminating in a paper published in 1990 which classifies the stings of 78 species and 41 genera of Hymenoptera. Notably, Schmidt described some of the experiences in vivid and colorful detail:
- 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 and European hornet: Like a matchhead that flips off and burns on your skin.
- 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.
The sting of the Bullet ant is described as causing "waves of burning, throbbing, all-consuming pain that continues unabated for up to 24 hours.The ants are also used for initiation rites by some indigenous people in the Amazon.
oi, that's gotta hurt!
ReplyDeletequestion: How do you measure the amount of pain?
ReplyDeleteApart from problems like getting used to the pain or the opposite, getting a little more sensitive to pain, it's pretty hard to measure pain.
You can't say something hurts twice as much as the previous ant, maybe it's 1.5 or 2.5 times.
All you can say about it is whether it hurts more or less than the previous ant. It's just an ordinal measurement.
So this brings me to the following question:
Do the numbers on the scale make any sense?
I think not.
No not much sense, it's a qualitative scale based on the experiences of an entomologist. But it probably gives a pretty good indication.
ReplyDeleteI can only hope for those indians that it is a logarithmic scale :)
ReplyDeleteNice post!