Creepy Crawlies and other things to guard against...

When we came down to Oaxaca for our ten-day scouting trip in July, our hosts/friends Don and Patty warned to us to keep an eye out for scorpions...e.g. to not leave clothing on the bed or floor and to check all shoes before putting ones ten little piggies in.  Other than the occasional (outdoor) rattlesnack, what does Colorado have to offer in the way of pesty-creature training.  Oh, the Black Widow and mythical Brown Recluse spiders, perhaps?  Well at first it seemed that we had left safe lands and entered into a terrifying realm where a late night trip to the bathroom could result in a terrible arthropod sting and a trip to the hospital (or, if a retainer had been paid, a HOUSE VISIT from your doctor....I shit you not, Doctors here never got the elitist indoctrination of their Norte Americano bretheren and still gladly travel to your casa when you're ill. Anyway....).  So we checked our bed and pillows every night, always shook our clothes and shoes out before donning them, and only stood up on the floor at night with a light on to ensure no pests were prepared to ambush us.  We saw nothing the entire time.

So when we went to rent this house in San Felipe del Agua (SFDA) we asked about scorpions and other such dangers.  The owners assured us they "rarely" saw scorpions and the deadly snakes stayed at the very bottom of the property. Deadly snakes? Excuse me?  WTF!?!?

So when we arrived here in on August 16th we renewed our shoe smacking and clothes shaking practices.  But days passed without any scorpion OR snake sightings.

What we DID see were other items to fear instead:

1) Mothra:

The moth on the left is a "normal" sized moth...like a typical Miller moth common to Colorado.  The moth on the right startled us when it flew into a window screen of B's room one night.  Sounded like a small airplane was running into our house.

Obviously, a strict diet of anabolic steroids and sugar cane, coupled with a steady workout routine lifting cinderblocks daily has lead to SuperMoth's six inch wingspan.  I bet the bats have to take out knife and fork when they catch and eat one of these babies.  Anyway, after our initial fear subsided (and a few pictures were taken) we dropped Mothra from the Fear List...at least until one gets stuck in our hair some night while walking outside.  Like moths everywhere they just can't help themselves when the electric light calls to them. 

Oh, they come in other flavors (i.e. colors), too. E.g. tan, white, grey.  The body sans wings is about the size of my thumb, typically.  Wingshape varies, too. Size? Always BIG.  Bet they're fun to hit at 100KPH on a motorcycle (and machismo prrevents one from wearing head or eye protection, it would seem).

2) Spiders:  Our landlord (via a post-lease signing email) had also warned us that we would see spiders but that was life in this part of the world.  He told us that the housekeeper would kill the bad ones and show us which ones were harmless (and thus to be left alone to hunt pests).  We discovered some of these the first night we arrived at our new SFDA:

Those first two photos are of a small "Wally" spider....at least that is what I call them as they seem to prefer walls, hanging there fang-down waiting for their next meal.  They are VERY fast when they decide to move.  They are very flat with black and white/grey stripes running across all parts of their body.  Additionally they seem to be territorial, as each night we'd see the same Wallies pretty much hanging out in the same wall spots.  They are gone when we wake up, but return every night.  Or at least they did until we discovered our next spider type....

I came out of the bathroom late one night and found one of these guys crawling across the bedroom floor headed straight for Mer's shoes.   These two following pictures came from the next one we discovered a few days latter during the day.  It is smaller than the first one we found which was probably 150% the size of this guy.

Now I thought these were Wolf spiders, but now I'm not sure.  They don't match this photo of a (Mexican) Wolf spider nor any of the others on the list: http://www.mexicovacationtravels.com/family-travel/commom-eight-legged-natives-of-mexico.html

The legs of the Wolf spider look much thicker than these guys.  Anyway, the next night or so Meredith called me in to B's room where she had gone to check on him as he slept.  There a few feet above his bed on the wall it's up against hung one of these big-assed spiders.  Maybe 3.5 inches, oops, 9cm across.  Mommy decreed it was to be an extermination not a relocation.  SPLAT!  Quite a mess it left on the wall. 

So the next day we ask the housekeeper (in our VERY limited Spanish and her somewhat limited English) what level of the danger this spider poses.  I'm afraid she misunderstood our concerns as the next few days saw the disappearance of all the Wallies plus many sites of chemical massacre (e.g. large areas scattered with hundreds of dead ants, more moth bodies than usual found in the morning in the areas under the porch lights).


3) Finally after almost a week here I went out one morning to carry the trash to the trash collection area (worthy of a post in its own right, I assure you).  When I picked up the trashbag I found this underneath. I.e. a very sluggish and small scorpion.  Once again that is a clothespin for scale.  I was surprised how small, slow, and hard to kill this little guy was. The photo is out of focus...perhaps I was shaking.  :-)

 Now into our fourth week here we've all gotten pretty lazy about checking our shoes and such.  As with all things, given some time, the strange becomes familiar and thus the new scary becomes the boring and overlooked.