#venomous insects

[colorsoutofearth]

Velvet ant (Dasymutilla occidentalis)

Photo by Mac Stone

[bpod-bpod]

Toxin Treasure Trove

Like many slug moths, named after the curious shape of their caterpillars, the Australian mottled cup moth (Doratifera vulnerans) knows how to protect itself. Its caterpillar (pictured, in its grey form) can inflict painful stings with its venomous spines, and advertises this danger with startling colours, a strategy known as aposematism. Delving into the precise composition of D. vulnerans’ venom reveals a surprisingly complex cocktail, involving multiple families of peptides, short chains of amino acids, fulfilling several roles: acting against microbes, nematodes and insects, as well as causing pain to vertebrates. Despite evolving independently, many of the toxin components resemble substances found in other venomous arthropods, like spiders and wasps, but with their own unique variations. Venomous animals have yielded a host of important compounds for medicine, used to treat conditions from hypertension to diabetes, and the diversity of slug moth toxins could provide the next source of biomedical inspiration.

Written by Emmanuelle Briolat

Photograph by David Paul, sourced from Museums Victoria, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Research by Andrew A. Walker and colleagues, Institute for Molecular Bioscience, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD, Australia

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), May 2021

You can also follow BPoD on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook

[biology-geology-beaches-india]

The Scientific Research Notes Of S. Sunkavally (years: 2002-2011).

3176-3178.

[numb3rs]

hell no.

[emperornorton47]

[drhoz]

On Handling Resin Bees

ichangedurlsagain said: You are brave!

Nah, not really - it's not like it was a Velvet Ant, or one of the similarly infamous hymenoptera. And even those species will generally not sting you, if you don't given them an excuse - after all, venom is metabolically expensive to produce (in those species that even have it) and they won't use it on you without good reason.

And the worst I could expect from the Golden-browed Resin Bee would be a bit of a pinch if she decided to bite me.

[doctorbuggs]

do you have any poisonous creatures? (sorry if that's a stupid question haha)

I have several poisonous creatures. The milipede on my forehead in my profile picture (LeRoy) is quite poisonous but I wouldn’t consider him dangerous at all. That probably sounds a bit confusing so I’ll clarify a bit. The terms poisonous and venomous are often used interchangeably but they don’t mean exactly the same thing. Venomous organisms are typically the ones we’d consider dangerous. They have to inject their venom into your bloodstream somehow to make you sick by biting or stinging you. So things like Scorpions, wasps, and giant centipedes are venomous.

Poisonous usually connotes an organism being dangerous if you eat it. My millipede is full of hydrogen cyanide. He can’t sting or bite you and he’s totally friendly under basically any circumstance but you’re gonna get rushed to the ER if you ever take a bite out of him. Many creatures are poisonous that we would never think of as dangerous because no one eats them: ladybugs, many butterflies and caterpillars, and fireflies (don’t worry though, their venom is intended for much smaller organisms than us so you’d have to eat a heck of a lot of em to really get sick.)

So yeah don’t eat my millipedes or my caterpillars. Aside from that all my pets are totally harmless. I take my bugs to schools all the time for outreach and afterschool programs and I want the kids to be able to handle all of my bugs without having their preconditioned fears reinforced so I tend not to keep anything venomous.