Laura Faunce, age 10, of Sarasota, Florida, for her question:

Does a fire ant bite or sting?

There are thousands of different ants and almost any of them can take a nasty nip at you with their pincers. But a few ant species can sting, really sting like wretched wasps. Actually, these ants have two weapons. They grab with their sharp pincers and stab with the stingers in their tails. One of these is the nasty little insect called the fire ant.

Some scientists suspect that the ancestors of the teeming ants were more like wasps. If this is so, then in the dim distant past most or perhaps all of them were armed with sharp stingers. However, for reasons unknown, most of the thousands of different ants have lost their stingers... In most cases, what feels like an ant sting, is really a sharp bite. All ants have pincer type jaws and most of them produce some sort of stinging poison to inject into the bite.

The minority of true stinging ants includes the various harvester ants that gather and store seeds in their nests. They are long legged ants of black or red. Their large mounded nests are found in the sandy Southland and also in Florida. If you poke your bare hand into the nest of a harvester ant, the ferocious little workers will grab your skin with their pincers and jab in their tail stingers.

The so called velvet ants prefer to live on  the prairies and the Great Plains. They are large reddish ants with fuzz, which gives them their velvety appearance. The sting of an average sized velvet ant is painful enough. But the sting of the larger varieties is so bad that people call them mule killers.

These and several other ants inflict painful stings with waspy stingers in their tails. But without a doubt, the worst of this group is the fire ant. Originally, these smallish reddish brown ants belonged in the Amazon jungles of South America. A hundred years ago, travelers reported that fire ant attacks were driving people from the region. Whole villages were deserted.

Then somehow these wretched little jungle dwellers were brought to the United States. They made themselves at home in Florida and several neighboring states. And nothing seemed strong enough to stop them from spreading. Like other such ants, they grab hold with their pincers and jab in their stingers.

Fire ants are called fire ants because their stabbing stings feel like red hot pins and needles. The swollen wounds may be painful for many days. But they do even worse damage in the wild world of nature. Surveys show that fire ants attack the nests of birds, destroying the eggs and killing the newly hatched chicks. The wretched creatures are reducing our populations of charming bob white quail.