eeewwwww....

There are gruesome creatures here in the southwest. I, the midwestern girl transplant am freaked out. Last night I learned about...

The Tarantula Hawk Wasp: a species of spider wasp, which hunts tarantulas as food for their larvae. These suckers have a blue body and red wings- they are actually really beautiful but scary and huge. We didn't have these in Michigan! We have normal bugs there like mosquitoes and ants.
Oh, and the best part is why they are called what they are...they capture, sting, and paralyze tarantulas, then they either drag the spider back into her own burrow or transport their prey to a specially prepared nest where a single egg is laid on the spider’s body, and the entrance is covered. The wasp larva, upon hatching, begins to suck the juices from the still-living spider. Yum! Did I mention that they have the most painful bite in the insect world?


Just the fact that we have tarantulas here (I HATE spiders) is disturbing enough. Yes, I have seen quite a few of them also, one in my garage, one in our backyard, others crawling around in various places, yuck. It's all fascinatingly freaky to me.

Here are a couple of my other favorites...

**The Potato Bug or Jerusalem Cricket. Yeah, these are nasty looking, little alien bugs.

***The Scorpion- ewww...

And I'm sure there are much more waiting to be discovered. Creepy.