From the National Post 

THE AFICIONADO OF AGONY

The Economist brought word Thursday morning that the famous American entomologist Justin Schmidt has died at age 75, apparently from Parkinson’s disease. (There aren’t very many famous entomologists: one supposes Schmidt would run third behind Alfred Kinsey and E.O. Wilson.) Originally a bee researcher, and later research director of the Southwest Biological Institute at the University of Arizona, he acquired renown unexpectedly as the creator of the Schmidt index, which provides a quantitative rating of the pain from about 150 different insect stings — all of which he had experienced personally, and in some cases often. 

In its serious scientific form, the Schmidt index, being an attempt to capture the fundamentally subjective experience of pain, had to be kept crude. Schmidt’s original scale runs in integer values from zero to four, with the sting of an ordinary honeybee — a familiar experience to most humans, whether entomologists or not — fixed at two. (Later papers give half-integer values like 1.5 to some individual species.) 

Only three tropical species — the bullet ant, the tarantula hawk (a wasp) and the warrior wasp — are capable of inflicting the life-altering misery that earns a 4.0. Schmidt would compare the bullet ant’s attack to “walking over flaming charcoal with a three-inch nail embedded in your heel,” and the warrior wasp’s to being “chained in the flow of an active volcano.” 

Schmidt began accumulating this data through ordinary scientific habits. Being interested in the chemistry and evolutionary biology of venomous insects, he found himself around them a lot, and when he inevitably got pierced or gnawed, he just took careful notes. He noticed early in his career that the pain of insect stings doesn’t correlate well with their actual lethality, and he gradually established that high venomousness goes hand-in-hand with sociality. (All ants are social, but there are “solitary” species of bees and wasps.) Any sophisticated insect colony makes an enticing target for predators, and their defences against blundering large creatures like Homo sapiens evolve correspondingly — to kill or harm, as well as discourage. 

In studying all this, Schmidt rarely went out of his way to experience insect bites. But from the original publication of the Schmidt index onward, magazine feature writers found him irresistible; they characterized him as a macho self-experimenter with a weird appetite for pain, and he didn’t discourage this mythmaking. 

Gradually, he added fanciful notes to the Schmidt index and developed it into a unique work of literary art. In the scientific papers, the bite of the elongate twig ant (Pseudomyrmex gracilis) is represented by a bare “1.” In Schmidt’s superb 2012 scientific memoir, The Sting of the Wild, however, P. gracilis is: “Reminiscent of a childhood bully. Intimidating, but his punch only glanced your chin, and you live for another day.” 

The bite of the African ant Platythyrea lamellose, a two on the index, is “like wearing a wool jumpsuit laced with pine needles and poison ivy.” The Florida harvester ant’s assault, rated three, is “bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a power drill to excavate your ingrown toenail.” 

Schmidt’s index doesn’t have the ultra-tight statistical underpinnings that a similar quantitative scale would get in, say, psychometrics. He was confident in the inter-rater reliability of the scale mostly, it seems, through conversations with other entomologists. But one of the fun features of The Sting of the Wild is that Schmidt was also a careful student of past scientists’ notes on insect pain. 

Lest anyone doubt that the bullet ant belonged at the top of the index, Schmidt presents testimony from kindred spirits writing in 1853 (“I can only liken the pain to that of a hundred thousand nettle stings”) and 1915 (“The pain almost drove me out of my senses for fully twenty-four hours.… When the Brazilians declare that four tucandeiras will kill a man I believe it”). Some of the insect venoms that contribute to such sensational effects are still unknown, and Schmidt’s hope was that his organization of subjective experience would provide clues to practical medical benefits. But he can be appreciated strictly as an artist, and, after all, who ever suffered so much for his art?

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