Topical Salve

Upon spying a 2 cm tuft of red fur crawling through the grass, the following thoughts crossed my mind:

1) I wish I had my camera.
2) What IS that thing?
3) Bright colors. Hmm… Probably shouldn’t touch it.

While observing it, the tuft started burrowing into the lawn. Fortunately, it being Southern California with watering restrictions being imposed by the city since last summer (one good thing about droughts, I guess), the ground was quite solid, and resisted its efforts. This afforded me the opportunity to go grab my camera.

When I returned, the red tuft had not made any progress. Unfortunately, burrowing into a lawn does not a good photograph make. Obviously, the next step was to coax the little red tuft to higher ground. Recalling thought #3, I found a small stick and started prodding at the red tuft. Prodding the abdomen did nothing for me — it tried even harder to burrow into the lawn. So I moved the stick to where I estimated its head to be and started poking away. This seemed to irritate the red tuft to no end. It started the insect equivalent of screaming at me — rubbing two abdominal plates together that let off a high pitched shrill. My perseverance was finally rewarded when the little red tuft backed out of its much-too-shallow burrow and started crawling across the lawn to get away from me.

I put down the stick and madly worked the focus ring of the camera while trying to get in front of the remarkably-quick-for-its-size red tuft. After many tens of photos, and an incursion far deeper into my neighbor’s yard than I intended, I withdrew from the red tuft and let it go on its way.

Back inside the house, after deleting the out-of-focus images (read: most of them), the hunt was on again. This time to answer thought #2. Bugguide.net informs me that the red tuft is a velvet ant — genus Dasymutilla — though I’m not able to guess a species based on the photos in their database. The thing is, it’s not actually an ant. It’s a wasp. The wingless ones, like the one I was pestering in the lawn, are the females (my Star Trek-inspired excuse for keeping the picture even though she’s in soft focus. Plus, you know, red shirt.). They crawl around looking for ground-dwelling bees’ nests or other wasp’s nests in which to lay their eggs. The velvet ant larvae either feed on the hosts, or the food stockpiles of the hosts.

All very interesting, but that’s not what gave me pause. What gave me pause was the other common name for the velvet ant — cow killer. It gets this name from its ability to inflict a sting so sever it is said to be able to kill a cow.

Kill.

A cow.

Sure, it’s most likely hyperbole (not willing to test that theory myself, thank you), but still. This is probably not an insect you should be handling (kudos to me for thought #3!), or pissing off by prodding it with a stick (um…), then getting nose-close to, to take macro photos of.

… Yeah.