"The very few stings I have heard about happened when people were messing with the cicada killers and placed them in a situation where they had to defend themselves. "I cannot emphasize enough that the females are not aggressive!" Davis said. Unlike the Asian giant hornet, which can be aggressive enough to sometimes inflict multiple stings, Davis emphasized that the cicada killers aren't typically a danger to humans, even if their stinger can still pack quite a wallop. "Cicada killers are fascinating insects and despite the fact they are huge, to some scary looking, wasps are actually beneficial to us," Davis, an entomologist at Texas A&M, told Newsweek in response to emailed questions. While the murder hornet has smooth stripes, the cicada killer's are peaked, with a yellow and black contrasting pattern that almost doesn't look like stripes at all. While the Asian giant hornet has a wide, orange head that stands out from its dark thorax, as opposed to the cicada killer's narrow, color-matching head, it's the difference in stripes that make separating a murder hornet and a cicada killer simplest. In response, Davis and Porter released a video explaining the differences between murder hornets and their native Texan lookalikes. Porter told Texas A&M Today that about 80 percent of these have been cicada killer wasps. So far, the murder hornet hasn't appeared in Texas, but entomologists Holly Davis and Patrick Porter have identified hundreds of insects submitted by Texans as possible murder hornets. The confusion between the cicada killer wasps and the Asian giant hornet has kept the entomologists at Texas A&M's AgriLife Extension Service busy since Governor Greg Abbot asked the university to establish a task force to prepare for the possible arrival of the invasive species in Texas. The confusion of the two species has become common enough that insect researchers have released explainers to help people differentiate the two species. Taken by a Newsweek editor in Westchester, New York, the video (above) doesn't show an Asian giant hornet-the world's largest hornet, native to Asia but found in Canada and Washington state this year-but instead a specimen of Sphecius speciosus, more commonly known as the eastern cicada killer. New video of a large wasp dragging an even larger cicada features an insect found across much of North America, but which has become newly attention-grabbing because of its similarity to the so-called "murder" hornet.
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