House Slippers on the Dresser

But I thought house slippers went on the floor right beside the bed. Well, they do usually. We've decided though that it is better to place your bare feel on the floor, after carefully looking at where they are to be placed. Then one can reach the slippers from off the dresser and not have to worry about crowding a scorpion with your toes.

We had not given that strategy all that much thought until the other evening. As she walked in the dimly lit hallway to the bedroom, Jane started to reach down to pick up a dust ball. The dust ball picked itself up, curled its tail menacingly arched up over its back and scampered under the closet door.

When I moved the bag in the closet that contains our small hand-sweeper, the scorpion, about three inches long if its tail were to be stretched out, was on the wall just above the base-board. A swat only knocked it to the closet floor where it retreated into a crack too narrow for its escape, I mistakenly thought.

So, in addition to this apartment being a Mouse Motel, it is also a Scorpion Sanctuary. That latter status is afforded the creatures only because they move fast and can squeeze into the tiniest places.



Scorpions are predatory arthropod animals of the order Scorpiones within the class Arachnida. They have eight legs and are easily recognized by the pair of grasping claws and the narrow, segmented tail, often carried in a characteristic forward curve over the back, ending with a venomous stinger. Scorpions range in size from 3.5 in (Typhlochactas mitchelli) to 7.5 in (Hadogenes troglodytes). Our Texas variety, The Striped Bark Scorpion (Centruriodes vittatus) gets to be about 3.5 inches as an adult. If I can get to a little one on the floor in our apartment, I try to prevent its maturity.

The little rascals are nocturnal, hiding in cracks and under stuff in the sunlight, to avoid whatever might find them tasty. They do have an unusual characteristic though. They glow in the dark! Well, at least if you shine an ultra-violet light, like a black-light, on them, they appear fluorescent greenish in color. As is apparent in the picture above, not ours, it's from Google Images, one of these could look like a dust ball in dim light. Our fellow volunteer, Bob, left his hand-held black-light at the Visitor Center, so I'll bring it home today to scan the dark corners of our habitat.

Scorpions of our Texas variety prey on small insects, even tiny lizards and such but can ingest food only in a liquid form; they have external digestion. The digestive juices from the gut are egested onto the food and the digested food sucked in liquid form. Any solid indigestible matter (fur, exoskeleton, etc.) is trapped by tiny hairs in the pre-oral cavity, which is ejected by the scorpion. In that they consume only liquid food, they resemble the scruffy, guitar-playin' ole boys we see on the porch at the trading post in Terlingua (our nearest town). Those guys don't have any apparent stingers but most of their nutrient comes in liquid form from tall brown bottles and aluminum cans with labels like "Lone Star" and "Tecata."

I have to admit that I have a characteristic or two in common with scorpions. They can consume huge amounts of food at one sitting. They have a very efficient food storage organ and a very low metabolic rate combined with a relatively inactive lifestyle. Unlike me though, this enables scorpions to survive long periods when deprived of food; some are able to survive 6 to 12 months of starvation. Also unlike me, if you'll excuse an excursus into bowel habits, scorpions excrete very little; their waste consists mostly of insoluble nitrogenous compounds such as xanthine, guanine and uric acid.

Interesting as all this may be and as fascinated as you've been learning about these arachnids, I think you'll agree that the fall infestation of Asian Lady-Bugs in Ohio is much preferable to having slippers on the dresser and scorpions on the floor.