One of Coyote Peterson’s most popular YouTube videos shows him writhing around in agony on the ground. He’s just been stung by a tarantula hawk, a giant wasp that is considered to have the second most painful sting of any insect.
For the first 15 seconds Peterson is unable to speak. He just screams and grabs at the dirt.
“That is the most intense pain I’ve ever felt,” he says when he finally gets his breath. “Don’t think I can talk.”
Peterson – his real first name is Nathaniel – is the host of the Brave Wilderness Channel, a YouTube-only show that sees him travelling around the US and Central America encountering animals and insects and often being attacked by them.
Brave Wilderness has been running for two years, and Peterson’s videos have 525m views. His encounter with the tarantula hawk – aptly named because it flies around tarantulas stalking and stinging them – has been watched over 13m times.
Some of the other videos include: STUNG by a COW KILLER! – in which Peterson is stung by a velvet “cow killer” ant – and PINCHED by a HUGE CRAB!, where he is pinched by a large crab.
The titles are clearly clickbait, and some of the videos are reminiscent of the popular MTV series Jackass, where a group of men would perform self-injuring stunts.
“I’m Coyote Peterson,” our host tells us in the tarantula hawk video.
“And I’m about to enter the sting zone with the tarantula hawk.”
But Peterson, who is currently preparing to be stung by a bullet ant – said to possess the most painful insect sting in the world – said his aim is actually to “create an educational series” which can warn people about certain animals while giving viewers “a vicarious experience”.
“If I were to just take a bullet ant and let it walk around on my arm or look at it in a glass capsule you’d have more people saying: ‘Ah, that was interesting, but it would have been a lot more interesting if you’d let it sting you’, because that at the end of the day is what people really want to see and we’re aware of that,” he said.
“At the end of the day what we’re really hoping is these extreme episodes bring in the audience that then does find the episodes that are more conservation-based.”
Brave Wilderness has a whole subsection of videos called “Coyote’s backyard”, which are more educational in nature. His daughter Olivia – nicknamed “pup” – and other children are featured in some of the clips as Peterson takes them looking for different animals and insects in a variety of locales.
Peterson, 35, grew up in Newbury, a rural town about 20 miles east of Cleveland, Ohio. He said he spent a lot of his childhood seeking out animals, particularly snapping turtles, and reading books about them.
Peterson has no formal animal training – he studied film at Ohio State University – but had the idea to combine his passion for animals with his film-making skills while talking with friends. He and a small team started developing the show and it was eventually picked up by the Discovery Channel as a web-only series.
“We were heavily inspired at the time by the show Man vs Wild with Bear Grylls,” Peterson said.
“And we said, well how can we take this concept of being in the wild and instead of killing and eating the animals, how do we present them in the fashion that Steve Irwin and Jeff Corwin and Jack Hanna did?”
In case it isn’t clear from Peterson’s reaction in the tarantula hawk video, he said that getting stung by it really, really hurt.
“When you do something like that your subconscious has this buildup of: ‘How bad is it going to be?’, and I think you almost sometimes over-anticipate things. In the case of the tarantula hawk that wasn’t true; it hurt just as bad as advertised,” he said.
“Everything I’d read said the pain subsides in about five minutes but it was about the longest five minutes of my life.”
For the bullet ant film, Peterson will travel to Costa Rica, where local guides will help him capture the ant. Then he will get it to sting him.
The bullet ant is named as such because the sting has been compared to being shot. The pain, which can last up to 24 hours, has also been described as “like walking over flaming charcoal with a three-inch nail embedded in your heel”.
Peterson said the video will be released just in time for Christmas.
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