"A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain," Justin Schmidt wrote of the sting of the bullhorn acacia ant. "Someone has fired a staple into your cheek." The Arizona-based entomologist has died at age 75, but his name will live on for as long as people are interested in painful insect stings. Schmidt, who was stung by insects more than 1,000 times over decades of research, was the creator of the Schmidt Pain Index, which ranks stings on a scale of 1 to 4—and provides colorful descriptions. "Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail in your heel," he wrote of the sting of the bullet ant, a Level 4 pain that could last up to 24 hours. The Level 1 sting of the mud dauber wasp was like "jalapeno cheese when you were expecting Havarti," he wrote.
Schmidt, nicknamed the "king of sting," grew up surrounded by nature in Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, the New York Times reports. After getting a master's degree in chemistry, he turned to entomology for his PhD because he wanted to deal with "living, moving" nature, he wrote in his memoir, and the blending of chemistry and entomology led to an interest in venoms and other defenses. In 1980, he was hired as research entomologist by the Carl Hayden Bee Research Center. He compiled the index over decades. "I wanted to find out whether the most painful stings are also the ones that can do the most damage," he told the Guinness Book of World Records in 2019. "We could already measure the damage a sting inflicts by a variety of different methods, but we had no meaningful way to measure the pain."
After he retired from the Hayden center in 2005, Schmidt continued his research on the defenses of bees, wasps, and ants at the University of Arizona and the Southwestern Biological Institute. Martha Hunter, a professor of entomology at the University of Arizona, tells the Times that Schmidt was an "amazing natural historian. "The story is that Justin once grabbed a tarantula hawk, just to see what the sting would be like," she says. "It’s the last thing I would do." Schmidt described the sting of the tarantula hawk as "instantaneous, electrifying, excruciating, and totally debilitating."
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People stung by the wasp are advised to "lie down and scream," because the pain is so intense that "the victim is at risk of further injury by tripping in a hole or over an object in the path and then falling onto a cactus or into a barbed-wire fence," he wrote in his book The Sting of the Wild, which described the 83 different kinds of insect sting he had experienced. His wife, Dr. Li Schmidt, says he died Feb. 18 from complications from Parkinson's disease. (More entomology stories.)
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