Battle of the Arachnids:
A juvenile female Black Widow catches a scorpion.

One of the benefits of living in southern Arizona is the nice variety of cool insects we have. Of course, that's not much of a benefit for people who are scared to death of spiders and bugs and such, but it makes me happy. Since we're in a rural area, we have even more insects than the city people do.

Over the years, I've taken a fair number of insect pictures and finally got around to adding them to my website. I've never had a high-end camera capable of taking really good pictures of small creatures (one of these days...), so these aren't the really impressive, artsy type of insect pictures some people turn out. I keep taking them anyway.

For the most part, we live in peace and harmony with our bugs. The more dangerous ones, such as Black Widows and scorpions, we capture and relocate outside. This strategy has worked well for us with one notable exception: I was bitten by a Black Widow in December of 2009. If you are interested in finding out what a Black Widow bite is like, click the Bitten! button below. It was an interesting experience - at least after the nastiest symptoms wore off.