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Red Velvet Ant

A bright red velvety bug is racing along the ground, almost too fast to keep up with. It looks like a huge hairy red ant. This is an Eastern Red Velvet Ant, Dasymutilla occidentalis, and she’s not actually an ant at all. It’s a parasitoid wasp, and this female is looking for a place to lay her eggs. Bumble Bees, cicada killers, and mining bees lay their eggs under the ground, and the Velvet ant will lay her eggs on their developing larvae. Even though the females are wingless and can’t fly, she has some amazing defenses here: that bright color serves as a warning to birds that she isn’t good to eat, and she has the ability to inflict a painful sting that gives her the nickname “cow killer. They don’t actually want to sting, but if they felt threatened they might. We’ll leave her to her digging around.