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Fun Facts
Did You Know?
Mutillidae are wasps. The female is wingless, which is why most people categorize her as something other than a wasp when they first see her, she walks like an ant, she is on the ground like an ant, and she is the size of a large ant. The wasp identification needs knowing the family, and most people walking across a sandy path in North Louisiana do not arrive with that knowledge already loaded
If This Animal Could Talk...
"Watch closely, respect my space, and let my habitat explain the rest of the story."
The velvet ant is the insect most likely to stop a North Louisiana resident in their tracks and make them question what they are looking at. It walks alone, fast, across sandy or open soil, covered in dense bright hair that looks painted on, squeaking audibly if handled, and stinging severely enough that someone at some point decided to call it a cow killer. The cow's perspective on this naming convention is not documented.
It is none of the things its appearance suggests, it is not an ant, and it is not particularly interested in cows. It is a wingless female wasp that wandered North Louisiana's sandy soils for millions of years with no awareness of how alarming it appears to people who have never seen one.
A Few More Facts
How they hunt and forage: Adult velvet ants feed on nectar from flowers, fueling their foraging activity through the warm season on open sandy soils and at sandy-path margins. The solitary nature of the female's activity and the amount of ground she covers searching for host nests needs sustained energy, and flower nectar provides the carbohydrate fuel for that movement. The larval stage eats the host insect. The female deposits eggs on or inside the larvae or pupae of ground-nesting bees, solitary wasps, and occasionally other Mutillidae. The hatched larva consumes the host, pupates in the host's cell, and overwinters before emerging as an adult the following warm season. The host does not survive. The velvet ant larva is a parasite in the clinical sense, it depends on a living host for its development and the host's survival is not in its interest.
Live birth or eggs? no
When young are born: The hatched larva consumes the host, pupates in the host's cell, and overwinters before emerging as an adult the following warm season.
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Accessibility
Accessibility
The velvet ant produces a loud, startling squeak, stridulation from specialized body structures, when disturbed or handled. That sound carries several feet in still conditions and registers clearly before any visual contact in sandy-path situations. Moving through dry leaf litter near a trail margin, a velvet ant produces a faint rustling audible at kneeling height in still, quiet conditions.
Each eastern velvet ant's habit of crossing open sandy paths at midday in summer puts it at standing-height observation without any terrain challenge. Sandy roadsides and open longleaf trails in the northern parishes produce encounters from paved pull-offs and maintained gravel paths.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Does Velvet Ants live in North Louisiana?
Yes. The velvet ant is the insect most likely to stop a North Louisiana resident in their tracks and make them question what they are looking at. It is a wingless female wasp that wandered North Louisiana's sandy soils for millions of years with no awareness of how alarming it appears to people who have never seen one. The velvet ant belongs to the family Mutillidae, a diverse wasp family with several hundred species in North America and multiple species present in North Louisiana's 26 parishes.
How do you identify Velvet Ants?
A female eastern velvet ant runs roughly three-quarters of an inch long, stocky, with a covering of dense velvety hair the point is bright red-orange on the abdomen and black on the head, thorax, and legs. The texture of the hair is unusual enough that the name fits: it does look like velvet, and the contrast between the red abdomen and the black head and thorax makes the coloration unmistakable at a distance
What does Velvet Ants eat?
Adult velvet ants feed on nectar from flowers, fueling their foraging activity through the warm season on open sandy soils and at sandy-path margins. The solitary nature of the female's activity and the amount of ground she covers searching for host nests needs sustained energy, and flower nectar provides the carbohydrate fuel for that movement
Is Velvet Ants dangerous to people?
The velvet ant sting is severe for an insect its size. The stinger of the eastern velvet ant is proportionally long relative to the body, longer than the stinger of a honeybee at the same body size, and is driven by a musculature that allows repeated stinging without the sting apparatus becoming detached. The velvet ant does not die after stinging
