[Tom] This week on Arizona Illustrated the king of Sting, and the reason I was stung by more things than anybody else was, I was trying to get enough data to support or reject my hypothesis.

[Tom] Pandemic pets Julius and Bailey [Julius] If she wasn't here and I was by myself, I think it would have been much more lonely.

[Tom] Catalina State Park.

[S teven] I love the diversity of You know, you have the desert and then you have the mesquite bosquet and you have the uplands [Tom] and the wormhole.

[Michael] They treat the soil, they treat the roots of plants.

They make plants yield faster and bigger and better.

Welcome to Arizona illustrated, I'm Tom McNamara, and today we're here at Scenic Gates Pass, home to a variety of desert wildlife, including venomous snakes and insects, and the sting of insects is our first topic.

You're going to meet a man who's been stung thousands of times for science.

Justin Schmidt is a renowned entomologist and author.

And here we take you for a glimpse inside the laboratory and the work of the man dubbed the King of Sting.

I think I got the moniker King of Sting because, well, I've been stung by more things than anybody else.

You get stung and just... Wahoo!

Holy cow!

Saying, "ow" it keeps throbbing and throbbing They really, really hurt.

And the reason I was stung by more things than anybody else was, I was trying to get enough data to support or reject my hypothesis that the sting was important in the evolution of sociality.

This is the desert blond tarantula and they make wonderful pets.

they'll live about 20 years.

Once you get them, let go of my thumb there so I can get my hand free.

Whoops.

Don't.

They're kind of clumsy.

Back in you go, little girl.

I'm Justin Schmidt, Entomologist and Toxicologist.

I work at Southwestern Biological Institute and the University of Arizona Department of Entomology here.

I just have a few desert creatures here.

This one, I'm not going to touch this one is called a velvet ant and they call them cow killers.

and you say, Why would you call them a cow killer?

Well because if you pick them up you will be stung when they sting you say, Holy cow, that would kill a cow.

Basically, I study anything that's predator prey relationship but with particular emphasis on stinging insects.

We have more species of scorpions than any other state.

Aren't we lucky I think we have about 56 for sure.

They just hurt like the Dickens for most people.

And it goes on causes numbness and just sheer, utter pain.

They're so venomous that the idea for them is they run into a competition.

If you have longer legs and arms, you can kind of be at a distance away from whoever you're you're grabbing and keeping them so they can't get you and you go way up over the top and sting them.

Of course, once you sting them that's the end, you've won insect sting pain is a mechanism that allowed evolution of sociality.

In other words, if you're defending yourself and a little sting, little pain isn't much defense, but a lot of pain is.

And so it turns out that the more pain you can produce, the larger you can make a social colony, which is going from a solitary individual raising your own offspring to all of a sudden a big colony like a honeybee colony or ant colony.

Normally what happens is I'm out in the field somewhere and opportunity strikes.

Well, that comes with a sting or two ...or more.

If you have harvester ants, Quee can live up to about 45 years, which is pretty much the world record for longevity and insects.

So right down here we have a Maricopa Harvester Ant Colony Harvester ants have colonies that range from 500 to 15,000, depending on the species.

And they need to have powerful sting to protect them against things that want to eat them lizards, frogs, toads, things of this sort.

What we're going to do is this is called an aspirator that I've made, which is basically sucking tube so you can collect a few ants it's just a convenient way to collect the ants.

It's got a screen right here so that you don't want to suck the ant into your mouth that would not be a good idea.

I'm going to try and pick up a couple of them here.

I got two so far there we got three ants that should do.

So I had to dissect probably 10,000 harvester ants, to get enough venom in order to determine the toxicity and the biochemistry of the venom.

I look at two things of stinging insects.

first of all, the painfulness of the sting how much it hurts.

And second of all, how toxic how damaging is a sting.

The pain scale basically is one to four.

one being very minor is it hurts a little bit, but not serious enough.

Won't shut you down or anything of that sort.

And two is typically like a honey bee or a yellow jacket, and that's darn painful.

Anybody's been stung by either one of those know they really hurt.

Everybody used the same old, tired, boring picture of a honey bee stinging something.

It was so ugly and I thought, Let's see if we can get something better.

So I hired the photographer to help me get the better picture of what we wanted to show.

As you can see the stinger into my arm there.

And you can see the jewel little round silver white thing That's the venom sac.

You see the bee exiting ripping out of the bee.

So it shows all the action in one point, and the pain of that was basically a two because I had to sit there and endure the pain without yelling or jerking or doing anything rash like that or else we wouldn't get the photograph.

The three is something much, much worse, kind of like a harvest ant that hurts for 1-4-8 hours.

throbbing pain And 4 you don't want to go there It's like ten times worse than a three.

That would be an example of something like the tarantula hawk Whereas the Tarantula Hawk stings you and it's just kind of paralyzing you're in just such pain.

You can't function.

And they, of course, are given the name Tarantula Hawk because they will actually attack and sting a tarantula and paralyze the tarantula, lay one egg on, just one egg.

And that egg hatches and feeds on the paralyzed tarantula, one of these, you go, Oh my God, it feels like a 20,000 volt wire just zapped you when you get stung.

These things are a 4 on the pain scale.

In other words, it's about like 100 honeybees all at once.

You know, when I wrote "The Sting of the Wild" the reason I wrote it was, to instill a sense of joy and beauty and awe of what what I have for being a privilege to be able to study these things.

You don't have to be stung like I am.

You can.

You can miss all that but we'll take you on a safari and adventures of what happens in the field, how they affect the evolution of science And just interesting stories.

History, it brings us together.

And it's fun!

Coping while isolated or living under quarantine was a recurring theme that we all grappled with during the height of the COVID 19 lockdown.

Now, many found comfort from the people in their household.

Sometimes it was our furry companions who offered us the solace we needed.

Meet owner Julius and his cat Bailey, who made the most of the pandemic by exploring new photography techniques together.

[slow electronic music] (Julius) This is some homemade photographic paper that I that I using the same method as they would in, like the 1850s or so.

And then this is a photograph of The last thing I did before the pandemic was acquired this this big old printer from the 1 and so I had so much work to do.

I had a four by five camera and we would just take pictures all the time and explore darkroom stuff and film photography.

It was actually really enjoyable to have all that time.

My name's Julius, and this is my cat, Bailey.

We met through a neighbor about 16 years ago, and we've been together ever since inseparable.

I shut down like everybody, and I started getting weekly tests and one of them, I had it and was asymptomatic.

So, you know, I of course, went into quarantine and after that it was really difficult to stay open.

I would go to the post office and run into somebody and you know say hi and chat for a few minutes to catch up.

And then I'd get a call a few days later saying that they had COVID.

Even though I'd already had it, I was just being really extra cautious, so I did the whole quarantine every time, you know 14 days, 14 days, and then they changed it to 10, so I would do 10.

A lot of people would check on me and be like, are you OK?

Like, do you need supplies or anything or just making sure that my mental health is OK but I was actually fine.

We would hang out and take pictures together.

[mid tempo electronic music] She wasn't always so good at modeling over the years, she's gotten really used to me, setting up lights next to her and posing for a long period of and me like picking her up and putting her in a certain spot and being like, Stay here, and she's like, OK .

We both like our space, but we're both vocal about our needs.

If she is using a room, she'll let me know, and be like, Hey, get out.

I'm using the living room.

She'll just like, yell at me.

Show usually go into another room Or if I want to play drums.

[drum playing ends] She'll usually go into another room after she, you know, chastises me a little bit for being loud.

[drum playing ends] Bailey come here [Cat meow] If she wasn't here and I was by myself, I don't I don't know, I think it would have been much more lonely The relationship that is wholly unique in my life that I don't think I will ever experience with another creature And yeah, and it's it's strange, because like we're different species and we understand the world very differently.

But I think that's also something that makes our ability to communicate with each other all the more special.

[mid tempo electronic music] I have my commercial work that is like portrait sess and architectural photography and things like that, which are wildly rewarding and that I love, but my personal work that I do in photography, which is landscape photography, I think it's really, really helpful and important I think it's really, really help important to my mental well-bein Uh oh, this one.

But whenever I'm exploring a new photography technique, Bailey is always my first subject.

And I think getting obsessed with things is a good thing.

Really following things through and just going down a path that you don't know the end of can be really nice.

I can get obsessed with her, and I can get obsessed with photography and explore things really fully and deeply.

And it's like the more you explore, the more fractal.

The thing that you're exploring where all of a sudden what you was one avenue of exploration becomes 10 in each of those As you go down those paths, they to break apart into all these avenues of exploration, and it's been really fun exploring it with Bailey exploring these threads.

[slow moody electronic music] Just a few miles north of Tucson is a place that might have been a housing development with a golf course.

But instead, thanks to an effort to save the land in the 1970s and eighties, it is now one of the most visited destinations in the Arizona State Parks and trail system.

Here is a visit to Catalina State Park.

(calm instrumental music) - I've been here as the park manager for approximately 10 years.

I love the diversity of it, you have the desert and then you have the mesquite bosque and you have the uplands.

And then if you want, you can hike from here on the Romero Canyon Trail and get all the way up to Summerhaven where there's aspen and it's like Colorado and a ski resort up there.

So I just love the diversity.

I love the spring when we have really good wildflowers and we'll have poppies and lupine and all sorts of wildflowers.

I also love the seasonal water flow.

We have two washes, the Canyon del Oro Wash and the Sutherland Wash. And I love when those are running with water and a lot of our trails cross those.

And so you have to jump across boulders to get across.

And so I love when the water is flowing here in the park.

- It's different every day, every time you come.

Early morning, or in the evening, as long as you aren't out after dark.

It's just a great place.

It's peaceful.

I like that I can bring my dog, on a leash, which is great.

(instrumental music) - We sold everything we had back in Ohio and all we have is the truck and trailer, two horses and two jack russell dogs.

And I smile all the time.

My name's Bob Grinnell and me and my wife were traveling with our horses around the country and we wanted to come out here to Arizona and spend the winter.

And we wanted to stop out here at Catalina State Park, it's a beautiful park.

We've been here before and we just want to come do some trail riding and camping and hanging out.

- So you're changing out your concert series.

So who's our next concert?

The park is about 55 hundred acres and the previous park manager, I don't think he counted them, but the estimate was about over five thousand saguaros that are in the park.

(instrumental music) Behind me you see a really great example of an old saguaro.

They say that saguaros tend to grow their arms around 50 to 75 years.

And so you can see how big the arms are and how many there are, so you can guess how old this one is.

What I love about this big saguaro is that it provides habitat for so many different species of animals.

Some of the birds and wildlife that we get here, we have bobcats and javalinas and mule deer and white tailed deer.

We do have mountain lions.

I definitely like the reptiles and the lizards.

And so my favorite lizard is the zebra tailed lizard.

We have a lot of snakes, some people don't like snakes, but we have a lot of snakes.

We're really a birding destination.

We were just designated an Important Bird Area through the Audubon Society.

It's called the Catalina Sky Island Important Bird Area.

We just got that designation with the Saguaro National Park and the Forest Service.

- Wow, that looks really cool.

My name is Robin.

We're out here doing a nature study.

We came looking for birds.

I mean you can look at something in a book but being immersed in it is just a different experience.

You get to see how the birds move, or any of the other animals move, if they fly or if they hop on the ground.

It's just completely different.

- What's neat about this Romero Ruins Trail, Francisco Romero, who was a rancher basically in the 1850s roughly, came and ranching, that's what he wanted.

He wanted to ranch.

On this Romero Ruins Trail, you'll see ruins that are from Hohokam but then Francisco Romero built his homestead here.

So in terms of representing Native Americans, we have in the visitor center, some artifacts that are in a display that they can come and see and visit and read about and look.

So there's some pottery, different artifacts from the Hohokam history.

I'm amazed at how many people say, "I've driven by your park every day and I've never gone in."

It's a pretty interesting history, a pretty complicated history, but basically back in the 70s, there was a group that wanted to develop it.

It was going to be a golf course with homes around that.

And then a lot of different private citizens, coalitions were involved, and said, "No, we want to protect this.

We want this to be open space."

And so basically what happened, 1983, at that time Governor Bruce Babbitt signed it into a state park, as Catalina State Park, in May of 1983.

I love wilderness areas and so I'm just so thankful for that group of people back in the 70s that had the foresight to set this aside.

(calm instrumental music) I think what drives me is I want to protect those wilderness values of the park and so we want to offer lots of environmental education programs.

We want to offer opportunities for solitude.

Because we're so close to the city and people need that.

because we're so close to the city and people need that.

[Tom] It's usually on a rainy day or a fishing day when we most often see worms, but these fascinating creatures are a daily source of passion for Michael Morse and Roll Garcia up there with inch by inch, a Tucson based permaculture business that uses earthworms to help plants thrive.

[quirky music] They're right under the surface.

They're just right under, they're waiting for their next meal.

They're pretty sophisticated animals and they have five heart along the length of their body, All it does is does this push fo from one end to the other.

Their population keeps multiplying, they go about double every three months if everything is optimal.

I'm the guy that does most of the work here, except I get help from my friend.

We feed them, we grow them here, in containers.

We have one great big tank, Some smaller containers.

They poop out castings and then we bag that up and we sell it.

Worms basically excrete castings, it's worm poop.

And that's the product that we sell is worm castings.

Here, is ten cups of worm castings.

It went from being small scale, just a little potted plants to full scale garden that I have here now.

And it's the greatest thing I could ask for.

(Voiceover) do Some pineapples over there, pomegranate.

It's more than what I could ask for.

So I started collecting worms, started the small worm bin in a little five by three... Tote from Wal-Mart.

I started making my own worm castings.

Well, the difference that you see in them is its next day result.

You give it to them tonight.

You'll see it tomorrow.

It makes your plants dance.

Literally makes your plants dance.

They treat the soil and they treat the roots of plants to make them more able to absorb nutrients from the soil and from fertilizers.

They also help prevent pests and bad bacterial infestations.

They make plants yield faster and bigger and better.

So they're kind of like the universal food supply for plants and for soil.

I was a tennis pro for 40 years.

I had courts made out of soil, so I knew something about absorption and about runoff and certain things like that.

But I had to learn kind of on the fly what the optimum scenario would be for worms.

They can't chew, so they have to have grit with their food to help grind up food, and they have all these enzymes that process it.

I suffered a seizure.

I wasn't supposed to be left home alone because I was going to be prone to seizures.

So my lovely neighbor across the street was going to be home every day and told me I could come over and spend the day with her when I was alone.

So I would come over here and I found out she had this garden And from there, I fell in love with it.

I went in just with the intention to buy some worms and just talking to them about how to make compost tea.

From there, his wife was just intrigued with what I was talking about.

Somebody my age was doing this rather than what somebody my age normally does.

They go hang out with their friends all day and don't want a garden or do anything progressive.

They just wanted to interview me and learn more about me, and after that, they offered me a job.

We harvest the material below, which is castings, We take it dry it somewhat, and we have a couple of machines here that we screen with.

[Machine starting] I do just whatever they need help with, so if we need to clean up worms that are going rogue.

so the rogues they get out of the bins all the time, they run around.

I learned that geometric pressure because of storms causes worms to freak out.

So I received a call from Michael and he told me all the worms broke out.

I spent the day picking up worms, finding worms coming out of the walls.

[dark ambient music] [quirky music] I haven't named them all yet.

But no, I actually haven't named any of them yet.

I don't have pet ones, but I'm always stunned at what they do.

So I appreciate them and I do, actually, I do have some affinity for them.

[Tom] Like what you see on Arizona illustrated.

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Thank you for joining us here on Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

See you next time.