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Submitted: June 8, 2012
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Cow Killerby *melvynyeo

Photography / Macro / Nature

For a wasp to be called a Cow Killer... how cool is that!

Mutillidae are a family of more than 3,000 species of wasp whose wingless females resemble large, hairy ants. Their common name velvet ant refers to their dense pile of hair which most often is bright scarlet or orange but may also be black, white, silver, or gold. Their bright colours serve as aposematic signals. They are known for their extremely painful sting, facetiously said to be strong enough to kill a cow, hence the common name cow killer or cow ant is applied to some species. Unlike a real ant, they do not have drones, workers, and queens. However, velvet ants do exhibit haplodiploid sex determination similar to other members of Vespoidea (JH Hunt 1999).

The exoskeleton of all velvet ants is unusually tough (to the point that some entomologists have reported difficulty piercing them with steel pins when attempting to mount them for display in cabinets). This characteristic allows them to successfully invade the nests of their prey and also helps them retain moisture. Like related families in the Vespoidea, males have wings but females uniformly are wingless. They exhibit extreme sexual dimorphism; the males and females are so different that it is almost impossible to associate the two sexes of a species unless they are captured while mating. In a few species the male is so much larger than the female that he carries her aloft while mating, which is also seen in the related family Tiphiidae.

In mutillids, as in all Hymenoptera, only the female is capable of inflicting a sting because the stinger itself is a modified female organ called an ovipositor-- female mutillids have unusually long and maneuverable stingers. In both sexes a structure called a stridulitrum on the metasoma is used to produce a squeaking or chirping sound when alarmed. Both sexes of mutillids also bear hair-lined grooves on the side of the metasoma called felt lines. Only one other vespoid family, the Bradynobaenidae, has felt lines, but the females have a distinct pronotum and an elongated ant-like petiole.

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