STING, a weapon possessed by many plants and small animals, in various forms, employed to pierce and in most cases also to poison, the flesh of animals to be killed for food, or from which injury is received or expected. In plants this office is performed by stiff, sharp, hollow hairs emitting an acrid juice. (See NETTLE.) Such stinging-hairs sometimes cause extreme irritation in the skin and mucous membranes of even the largest animals, and hence cause the plants to be avoided, thus protecting the species against harm. The simpler marine animals (Ccelenterates) are widely defended by sting ing instruments, consisting of coiled poison carrying threads which dart from microscopic capsules in the surfaces of the integument.
(See NEMATOCYSTS; Insects are plentifully provided with piercing weapons. These in some cases are mouth-parts and in others are modified ovipositors. To the first class belong the sharp prolonged jaws, many plant-sucking bugs, or blood-sucking ones, such as the bed-bug, cone-nose (qq.v.) and others. In another group are found the gnats and mos quitoes, which inflict pain upon large creatures and death upon minute ones by stabbing with their complicated beaks, which consist of a bundle of lancets and saws. (See MosQurro).
Many caterpillars are defended by nettle-like hairs, each of which is a specially modified spine and able to inflict so great annoyance that hairy caterpillars generally are studiously avoided by most animals. The sting,)) prop erly speaking, however, is found among in sects only in the hymenoptera, as bees and wasps, where it is a modified ovipositor (q.v.). In wasps (q.v.) it serves a special purpose in paralyzing the insects stowed away alive with the eggs in the nest cells. Spiders are said to Ssting,B but in reality they bite, in some cases, poison. Scorpions, however, possess what is properly enough termed a sting in the pointed telson or tail-piece appended to the extremity of the abdomen, with which a poison-infected puncture is inflicted (see Scoitmort). Some fishes, as the sticklebacks, surgeon-fish, and notably the sting-rays (q.v.), has certain de fensive spines, by which highly irritating wounds may be inflicted. The use of the fangs by poisonous snakes, also is often spoken of as stinging.