Insects are our friends

As I can tell many people are getting scared at all of the insects we have been seeing, I want to add a message about how insects are really our friends. Of course, I have always loved butterflies, but I am even starting to love spiders now! I know you probably cannot believe it but look at the pictures of me holding a giant tarantula! I loved it! Talking to the guides down here, I am learning how safe spiders really are. There are not any down here that will kill you or even hurt you very badly. Most of them will not even bite you. For example, tarantulas are actually very safe! We have seen some other very large spiders and guides have picked them up. This is really helping my fear of spiders! I think I would even get a pet tarantula when I get back, but we have learned that too many people take these spiders from the wild and there are so many fewer of them out there now! Spiders are needed to kill these other aweful bugs that we have learned about. The guides at the butterfly museum were actually more afraid of other much smaller and more normal insects than spiders! The scorpions are really not bad either. They curl up as soon as they know you have seen them and will not crawl on you and bite you in your bed. The only thing to be careful of is to shake your shoes out before putting them on. See? Maybe this place will cure these fears after all! The butterfly garden was great and all of the guides were American. Maybe I will become a tour guide in a butterfly garden at some point in my life. Okay, just another one of my maybes that everyone can laugh at. ;-) I do need to add another little diatribe here, though. Our tour guide at the butterfly museum (who is a volunteer) started talking about something at the end of our tour that Scott and I had just been talking about the night before. This has to do with gas and the pollution that it causes throughout the4 world. Butterflies are not nearly as rampant as they used to be precisely because of the pollution caused by gas in cars. So think about your vehicles before you buy them and how good the gas mileage is in them. Think before you drive when you can take public transportation - save our butterflies!!!!











We also went to a frog pond, but the frogs were all behind glass so it was not as impressive. Most of the really colorful ones are actually tiny - like the size of a little toe - well, maybe not my little toe.