The ants, an Australian species with a notoriously painful sting, were collected from a colony in Brisbane for the first comprehensive study into their venom.

Dr Sam Robinson from the University of Queensland's Institute of Molecular Bioscience said the chemistry behind animal stings could improve understanding of pain physiology and contribute to the development of pain treatments.

“If we can understand how these creatures exploit our normal pain pathways to cause pain, it will teach us more about how pain works,” Dr Robinson said.

“The first step for us was to get the ants so we could figure out what’s in the sting of the ant, what chemicals are there, and what causes the pain.

“A colleague found some in Brisbane and dropped them off and asked if we wanted to study them.”

Dr Robinson said until now, there was no precedent for getting venom out of ants - other to get themselves stung.

“But that’s not particularly useful,” he said, “because you want the venom to study it.”

Instead of holding the critters over a researcher’s finger, the team held them over a tube where they could “aggressively sting” little droplets of venom onto a thick, waxy paper which could then be rinsed off.

“We were able to get milligram quantities of venom this way, which is a huge amount for us,” Dr Robinson said.

“The toxins we identify are never going to be candidates [for] drugs. They cause pain, but they’re not going to be used to treat pain.

“We hope to find new chemical strategies that will teach us more about pain itself, and that information can be used to make better treatments.”

Co-researcher Dr Eivind Undheim from UQ’s Centre for Advanced Imaging said the venom of bees and wasps had been a subject of research for some decades, but there had been little research on ant venom.

“Ants are found on every inhabited continent on Earth, and many of us are familiar with the sting their venom can produce,” he said.

“But, despite the ubiquity of ants, analysing their venom has been neglected by researchers, likely due to ants’ relatively small size and venom yield.

“Our study revealed that the venom of the giant red bull ant is composed of a suite of peptide toxins, and that these are closely related to those found in the venoms of bees and wasps.”

The team got “stung a fair bit” in the course of the research according to Dr Robinson, who said it was all in a day’s work and was similar to “milking” snakes for their venom.

“Unless you’re allergic, the venom doesn’t pose a long-term threat," he said.

“They sting through the paper, they treat that like your skin - but we hold the animal with a set of tweezers.

“Defensive stings in particular are usually intensely painful, and contain toxins that directly target our pain-sensing neurons.

“That means we can use animal venoms to study the human nervous system and learn more about how pain travels through the body and how to develop compounds that block it.”