On Scorpions

 I don't know what it says about my character that people think Scorpions make perfectly appropriate gifts for me, but they do. The species I usually end up with is the Stripe-tailed Scorpion. It's the commonest species around, its not dangerous, it tends to eat whatever you offer it, from meal worms to whatever dead insects you pick up. I kept one for over a  year once, until one day I found it dead. For all I know that's how long they live. (Note in the picture the stripes in the tail.)

The scorpion is the iconic desert creature. Jillian Cowles, in her opulent and very complete book Amazing Arachnids, has pictures and discussion of the twenty species of scorpions found in Arizona. Since arriving in Arizona a couple of years ago I had acquired a scorpion from time to time, and I admit, even using the big photographs in her book, I have had a very hard time identifying any of the species. I didn't have much luck in getting them to feed, either, so I finally turned them loose. Also they often seemed to have rather slender pincers, which was in the description of the very venomous Bark Scorpion, a species we had not yet seen, and for all we knew these were Bark Scorpions, which Cheryl didn't want to have around the house, since our very inquisitive and hands-on four-year-old grandson regularly spent time here.

That brings us up to date.

My daughter-in-law's mother found a scorpion in her house and, thinking I might want it, saved it in a jar, and asked her daughter to ask me if I would like to have it. Just in case it might be something unusual I said I certainly would like to see it, so my  daughter-in-law brought it to me.

 "Is it just a Stripe-tailed?" she asked.

Yes," I answered, scarcely glancing at it, and tipped it out into an empty aquarium. Since scorpions like to hide out of sight during the day, I put in a gnarled piece of bark for it to hide under. Later, someone else wanted to see it, so I reached into the aquarium with my hand and picked up the piece of bark and turned it over so we could see the markings on the scorpion's back and get our first chance to identify it. But instead of sitting on the ground under the bark it had turned upside down so it could cling to the "roof" of the piece of bark, so we still couldn't see its back.

That night after I went to bed it suddenly occurred to me that the Bark Scorpion, the dangerous one, was noted for hanging upside down on the "ceiling"of whatever it was it had taken shelter under, and suddenly I was trying to remember if I had closed the lid of the aquarium carefully, or if I had closed my study door so the cat would not hear something rustling in the aquarium and go in and try to tip it over, something it had done before.

  It didn't bother me enough to cause me to get up and investigate, but when I woke the next morning I went straight in and, using a stick rather than my fingers this time, I turned it up and examined it carefully, and sure enough it was a Bark Scorpion.

Bark Scorpions, like the Stripe-Tailed, are one of the few that are identifiable at sight, though in this case it is because they are so sinister looking (unless it's just because you know their sting has caused deaths, at least in old people in poor health). Here's what they look like.

You can make them even more sinister, if you know that they fluoresce. If you shine an ultra-violet light on them they shine up even more eerily (plus that is the easiest way to find a scorpion in the dark.) 

I enjoy having this one but since I can't get it to eat anything, in the end I will have to let it go. What I'll do (once I get it into a jar to carry it) is I will take it down to the bottom of our land and release it in a tangle of cholla (and hope we don't hear later that our neighbor was stung).