(funky music)

You see this wasp here?

It's called a tarantula hawk.

If one happens to sting you,

you're going to start to freak out.

This is because it has, perhaps,

the most powerful sting among insects.

The pain is positively electric.

No joke, the recommendation from an actual scientific paper,

is to just lie down and scream.

Ahhh, ahh, ahh.

Your natural response will probably be

to run around frantically.

But you're only gonna fall down and hurt yourself.

So just lie down and start screaming.

Here's the good news,

the risk of a sting is pretty low.

For all its might, the tarantula hawk is docile.

That's because its sting is so astonishingly powerful,

that everything around it has learned to leave it be.

Do be on the lookout though, if you're a tarantula.

A tarantula that has somehow mastered

the English language to understand what I'm saying.

A tarantula hawk is so called,

because it torments the spiders

and turns them into food.

Not for itself, but for it young.

When one finds a tarantula, it approaches cautiously.

On account of the spiders giant fangs.

But inevitably, the wasp gets under the spider,

and flips it on its back.

Then drives its stinger into the

unfortunate arachnids belly.

The tarantula is instantly paralyzed.

Which allows the wasp to drag it into a burrow.

Here it lays an egg on it

and seals the doomed spider inside.

When the egg hatches into a larva,

it devours the spider alive.

And this can take weeks.

So if you get stung by a tarantula hawk,

just remember that things could be much worse for you.

And hell, it's a great excuse to lie down

and take a load off.

Ahh, ahh.

Ahh, ahh.