As it happens, velvet ants, known colloquially to Brazilians as “sorcerer ants,” are actually a type of wasp, but the females, which are wingless, give the creatures their name. And ...

When you see a red velvet ant, the first thing you will probably ask yourself is “what the heck is that thing?” It kind of looks like a giant ant, but it also looks like a wingless wasp.

Crawling along the underbrush of the tropical savannas of Brazil, there’s a powerful and mysterious insect known as the velvet ant. Actually a kind of wasp, wingless females of this species ...

Scientists found that the dark markings on a species of fluffy wasp reflected less than 1 percent of light. By Katrina Miller The first thing to understand about velvet ants is that they are not ...

Gall of Indiana’s Hanover College and colleagues. Velvet ants are not actually ants. They belong to a family of more than 3,000 wasps found worldwide. Around 480 species have been reported from ...

Few creatures can tangle with a velvet ant and walk away unscathed. These ground-dwelling insects are not ants, but parasitic wasps known for their excruciating stings. Now researchers have ...

The wasp species known as the "velvet ant" has a pattern of white and ultra-black coloration. © shrike2 via iNaturalist under CC BY-NC 4.0 The Caatinga is a stark ...

Gall of Indiana’s Hanover College and colleagues. Velvet ants are not actually ants. They belong to a family of more than 3,000 wasps found worldwide. Around 480 species have been reported from ...