Working outside last night under the beautiful and brilliant Supermoon, I saw a large scuttling critter on the driveway running ahead of me. It was an Arizona giant desert hairy scorpion, Hadrurus arizonensis, about 5 inches long. I saw this as another opportunity to make an educational post for my worldwide audience. :-) So I scuttled inside myself to retrieve the ultraviolet flashlight and did a brief photo session with the beast under the moonlight. I have posted fluorescent scorpions before, but my camera is better now and I have a flash so that I can take a comparison shot of it under natural lighting conditions. It is unclear why scorpions fluoresce but a theory has surfaced that the tiny amount of UV light found on moonlit nights (moonlight is reflected sunlight after all and thus contains some UV spectrum wavelengths) aids scorpions in finding one-another to mate by making them more visible to each-other. Obviously the presence of a manmade UV light will exaggerate this trait far beyond anything that would even be seen under natural conditions. Regardless, it is extremely cool! A rundown on the biology of these big scorpions: While large and scary looking, their venomous sting is not very potent, usually ranked to be about as bad as that of a honeybee. By the way, scorpions and bees sting you, so dont be calling them bites, because a bite is done with mouthparts. Spiders bite, conenose bugs bite, and snakes bite - but bees, wasps, and scorpions sting and it is a totally different mode of delivering venom to a subject, anatomically speaking. (Re: How to annoy an ecologist.) It is thought that smaller scorpion species have evolved more potent venom because they are not physically as capable of subduing their prey with their lobster-like claws, so they rely upon venom to do the job instead. Large Arizona hairy scorpions are more than capable of managing prey with their pincers in combination with the venom, so theres less ecological pressure for them to become more toxic than with smaller species. This is the largest scorpion found in the US and one of the largest in the world. They are found mainly in southern and western Arizona, southern Nevada, and southeastern California, and around the northern Sea of Cortez in Sonora and Baja, Mexico. Baby scorpions are born alive and are carried on the mothers back for a week or two until they set off on their own. The lifespan of this species is likely to be 3 to 4 years in the wild.
Posted on: Tue, 12 Aug 2014 00:13:00 +0000
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