Justin O. Schmidt died Feb. 18. The Tucson insect expert was famous for getting stung by his research subjects and creating a pain scale to rank the experiences.
Henry Brean He made scientific discoveries about bee nutrition and insect defenses, but pain is where Justin O. Schmidt really made a name for himself.
Often that led to him getting poked by something. By Schmidt’s own estimates, he was bitten or stung at least 1,500 times by about 150 different species of insects over the course of 50 years.He said a lot of his stings were the result of"simple sloppiness" while handling insects for his research. Other stings were intentional, like the time he saw a great big cicada-killer wasp on a flower outside his lab and scooped it up with his bare hand.
Schmidt first began exploring the different kinds of pain associated with stinging insects in the early 1970s and published his first version of the pain index in the early 1980s. Over the ensuing decades, he expanded and refined the index as he encountered the pointy ends of more and more bugs. "Stung by a tarantula hawk? The advice I give in speaking engagements is to lie down and scream," Schmidt wrote in"The Sting of the Wild."
A friend to bugs"He was a great spokesman for insect science and biology as a whole," said entomologist Gene Hall, who manages the insect collection at the UA. He was also an outspoken advocate for insects, eschewing pesticides and bristling at phrases like"killer bee" or"murder hornet" that invite fear instead of understanding.Buchmann said his friend was an expert on a number of different insects. It was Schmidt who figured out that harvester ants like the ones so prevalent in Southern Arizona produce one of the most lethal venoms in the insect world, albeit in extremely tiny doses.
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