00:04 Harvester ants are intriguing because not only are they among the most painful of all stinging insects but their venom is 30 or 40 times more toxic than say rattlesnake venom.

00:16 If you pick them up by hand well you might just get stung.

00:22 The biggest risk around here is not being stung by the harvester ants.

00:30 I use an aspirator as we call it, so what I do is I can very carefully pick up the ant. If you do it right you can pick up just the ant. And not a whole mouthful of dirt. It takes a little bit of practice but you get good at it after a while.

00:46 It’s a little awkward in here.

00:49 I’ve been to 22 or 23 different countries and over this time I estimate that I’ve been stung by a thousand to 1,500 different times. Don’t like it but you know it’s an occupational hazard.

01:07 My research consists of testing various venoms from insects. I’m doing biochemical and pharmacological tests on them. On the medical level we can use insect venoms for helping our own welfare, say chronic pain from surgery or arthritis or cancer or something of this nature.

01:31 That’s the tip of the abdomen including the stinger. We’ll put that little venom into there.

01:38 The idea is we’d like to make a specific drug that targets just the pain and doesn’t have all these side effects which are so devastating.

01:58 So I’m coming up on a collection of Pacific cicada killers. These are probably the fastest wasps that I know of. They’re incredibly hard to catch.

02:15 Most of what they’re doing right now is these are males. They’re sparring with each other trying to set up territories to attract the females for mating.

02:31 I finally got one. He’s in the net.

02:36 Come on fella. Come up to the far end where we can…That’s a good guy.

02:46 Oh I succeeded! Well hello there little fella. Oh I know, you’re not happy.

02:52 How can you not admire the beauty of something like this cicada killer. You see he’s got this clever trick. He’s acting like a female because females are of course the ones that can sting. I’m sneaky enough to know that he’s just a sweet, loveable male and that he can’t really hurt me.

03:12 I’m fascinated with venoms because they allow us to understand the evolution of sociality. But also it helps us understand ourselves. We’re social animals and we can compare our sociality with insects and see what do we have in common? And we can learn from their stories. We can learn to love the insects.

03:31 Or even if we’re afraid of them, if we can understand them we can be a little less afraid and a little more tolerant. And that will improve our joy of