This weekend I took a 2 1/2 day course on survival medicine.
We covered all kinds of appetizing things, but as regards
bugs here are a few interesting points:
1) Black widows & gila monsters - if you're bitten don't
treat the resultant pain & cramps with narcotics of any kind.
They maximize the effect of the poison. This was apparently
only recently discovered, in Arizona, when doctors first
used demoral and followed it up with morphine when a victim
sustained severe pain from a B.W. spider bite. In the case
of gila monsters, they don't have hypodermic teeth, but rather
have poison grooves down which the poison drips. If you get
them off quickly enough you can prevent envenoration. How
to get them off? Rip them off. Supposedly they have non-
socketed teeth, and you can just rip them off your arm. I'm
sure it's not pleasant, but it's better then getting poisoned.
Then you get to pull all the teeth out of your arm.
2) "Sun Spiders" Seen these Barry? They are ugly, but entirely
non poisonous. Same for the "whipping skorpion" which acutally
isn't a scorpion at all.