What's the most painful sting in the world? - BBC

Would you rather be walloped by boxer Mike Tyson or take a jackhammer to the kidneys? That's what it feels like to receive two of the world's most painful stings. When it comes to which is the worst, it's all a matter of taste.

Stinging animals – from familiar backyard buzzers to curious sea creatures – use a cocktail of chemical defences including neurotoxins and inflammatory agents to defend themselves or subdue prey. While biters (such as spiders and snakes) use their fanged mouths to administer venom, for stingers it's the other end you should steer clear of.

We asked experts about the most painful stings in the animal kingdom, setting aside lethality. Here's their ranking.

Stinging insects: Wasps, ants and bees (oh my)

The father of the modern getting-stung-on-purpose field was Justin Schmidt, an entomologist from Arizona who developed an eponymous sting pain index by subjecting himself to jabs from at least 96 species of insects, including bees, hornets, wasps and ants. He sorted stings into four tiers of pain, adding evocative, almost lyrical descriptions of each unique sensation (thankfully for us, Schmidt was an entomologist with the soul of a poet!).

The first level is home to the trivial. The sting of an anthophorid bee, for instance is "almost pleasant, a lover just bit your earlobe a little too hard". Level 2 sees some heavy hitters, like the honey wasp: "Spicy, blistering. A cotton swab dipped in habanero sauce has been pushed up your nose." And the fierce black polybia wasp: "A ritual gone wrong, satanic. The gas lamp in the old church explodes in your face when you light it."

The seven species in level 3 carry Schmidt into real torture: Dasymutilla klugii: "Explosive and long lasting, you sound insane as your scream. Hot oil from the deep fryer spilling over your entire hand."

Only three species ever earned a level 4 designation from Schmidt.

Schmidt's first level 4 was the bullet ant, an inch-long arthropod from the rainforests of Central and South America often called the "24-hour ant" for how long the torment from its sting lingers: "Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like walking through charcoal with a three-inch nail embedded in your heel."

Next came the tarantula hawk, a spider-hunting wasp the size of a golf tee with a near worldwide distribution. "Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair dryer has been dropped into your bubble bath," Schmidt wrote, noting the effect lasted only a few minutes.

Finally, the warrior wasp ( Synoeca septentrionalis ), a colony-dwelling wasp native to Central and South America. "Torture. You are chained in the flow of an active volcano. Why did I start this list?"

Schmidt died due to complications from Parkinson's in 2023, but his heir apparent is Coyote Peterson, a YouTube personality who has subjected himself to stinging species that Schmidt never ranked. What Peterson lacks in formal science training, he makes up for in willingness to sacrifice his left forearm for the education and entertainment of millions of people who watch him writhe and sweat and scream on his channel, Brave Wilderness.

Peterson used Schmidt's pain index as a roadmap, aiming to "create the movie version" of Schmidt's 2016 book Sting of the Wild, he says. "Let's honour the 1 to 4 scale, but let's find out what other number fours are out there."

After travelling the globe to experience 30 species' stings, Peterson nominates two more species for level 4 status: the Japanese giant hornet, popularised in 2020 as the " murder hornet ", and the executioner wasp.

"The Japanese giant hornet was unquestionably the worst on impact, like getting hit in the face by Mike Tyson," says Petersen. "I whited out. It was instantaneous and explosive." Native to Asia, this hornet had a brief but splashy tenure in the Pacific Northwest of the United States between 2019 and 2024.

The executioner wasp ( Polistes carnifex ), though, is Peterson's all-time winner. "The pain lasted maybe 12 hours," he says, but it was the after effects of the venom that stayed with Peterson – literally.

"There were some necrotic properties that rotted out like a pockmark, like a divot on my forearm. That is the only sting that physically ate flesh away, and I still have a scar… like a cigarette burn," says Peterson. Scientists have yet to pin down the composition of the executioner's venom, but some of its relatives use enzymes that damage tissues by activating the immune response.

Jellies, more sting than squish