Lydia J. Borjon, PhD

Our paper on Velvet Ant venom is out at Current Biology! “Multiple mechanisms of action for an extremely painful venom” sciencedirect.com/science/articl… Velvet ants are among the most painful of all stinging insects. What makes them so painful? We used fruit fly larvae to find out 🧐 1/5

Nice coverage of our work by @physorg_com !phys.org/news/2025-01-s…

Another nice news article from @newscientist! newscientist.com/article/246272…

Nice news coverage of our work! Velvet ants have the Swiss Army knife of venoms sciencenews.org/article/velvet…

@Hoosierflyman Instead, defense against insects seems to be a more important. We tested if a velvet ant could defend itself against a formidable praying mantis. In multiple battles, the praying mantis tried to eat the velvet ant, but the velvet ant always managed to sting and escape. 5/5

@Hoosierflyman But then! Surprise! The peptide was not painful at all to mice! Other peptides, which are much weaker in larvae, caused pain in mice. Although we expected the simplest solution, that the pain-causing mechanism would be the same in mammals and insects, this was not the case. 4/5

Our paper on Velvet Ant venom is out at Current Biology! “Multiple mechanisms of action for an extremely painful venom” sciencedirect.com/science/articl… Velvet ants are among the most painful of all stinging insects. What makes them so painful? We used fruit fly larvae to find out 🧐 1/5