I have been sitting here at the computer, having a nice time going through my favorite websites, when I see that it is past 12:30pm and I need to be getting to bed.
I get up to start getting ready, and I feel like a pinprick on my right leg, just at the top of the sock. Now, I work a lot cleaning metal parts with a motorized wire wheel brush, so it isn’t unusual to stick myself with a wire that has come off the wheel and lodged in my shirt or jeans.
But this ain’t that.
I brush against my leg, then suddenly I feel a hot wire stick me just below the knee. Man, it sure is amazing how fast you can get out of a pair of shoes and jeans when a scorpion is crawling up inside your pantsleg.
Sure enough, out he pops when I get out of the jeans. Haven’t seen but a couple of scorpions in the house this year. Been expecting more due to the drought, but just not as common as in years past.
The offending scorpion has died messily for its action, but now my leg hurts like a mofo. Not going to be able to get to sleep now, not for a while.
Holy crap, stanger, if that happened to me I think I’d just keel over from the sheer horror of seeing a scorpion come out of my pants. Got any Vicodin or other painkillers? Do those help for scorpion stings?
In January, when it’s freezing cold here and blanketed in snow, instead of cursing the bad weather, I’ll just think, “Well, at least I live in a place where scorpions won’t crawl up my pants leg!”
Some years back, my parents moved to East Texas, where they planned to renovate an old house. In the interim, they moved a trailer to the property.
I was helping them move. When I went in to use the bathroom, I noticed one or two scorpions in the bathtub. A few hours later, I noticed a few more. After we knocked off for the night, I saw a whole lot of them. There was a nest just above it and the scorpions were falling through a hole in the ceiling.
My mother tried to flush them down the drain with a towel. One of the little beasts crawled up the towel and stung her on the thumb. Once she stopped swearing, she thought she might die, so I called the hospital and asked what to do. The nurse who answered the phone in the ER said to use a paste made of meat tenderizer because the enzyme in the tenderizer would help with the venom.
The next day, my father brought his little blowtorch and burned the nest out. No more problems.
A few years after that, my (now ex-) husband and I were living in the house. A largish scorpion came into the house through a crack in the wall. My husband caught it with barbecue tongs and put it in a jar of industrial-strength isopropyl alcohol. I kept the jar to serve as a warning to others. It apparently worked, because I never saw another scorpion.
I now live where there are no scorpions. They still give me the willies.
Regarding the matter of scorpion size /venom strength ratio, yes, Indiana Jones (Kingdom of the Crystal skull) says:
*“How big was the scorpion? “Huge!”, Öh, good,” “Good?”’“With scorpions, the bigger the better… But if you get stung by a small one, kid, dont keep it to yourself, OK?!” *
However, I’ve looked reasonably hard and can find absolutely no evidence to support this. The closest thing approximating this suggests that scorpions with larger pincers relative to their body size use those as an effective means to capture their prey and, therefore, don’t need an extremely toxic venom. Venom is a means to acquire food, not a protection mechanism. Those with proportionately less robust pincers may utilize a stronger venom. But again that’s wrt proportionality, not mass.
So if there really exists some overall size/lethality ratio, I’m just not finding it.
It’s another example of taking a couple of specific cases and generalizing them into a rule.
There is a large, hairy species of scorpion found in the southwestern U.S. (it may be the largest indigenous to the U.S., in fact, but I’m not sure), which classifies more as an annoyance than a danger. Hurts a bit, but no biggie.
There is a small, straw-colored species of scorpion found in that same area that has quite potent venom. Definitely a dangerous critter.
If you take these two data and turn them into a general case (without considering hundreds or thousands of other scorpion species in the world), then smaller = more dangerous.
It was a little over two inches long. I don’t know if there are more than one type around here, but this one wasn’t the big fat ones like I usually see.
I have been stung before, so I know I am not allergic, but it still hurts like the dickens. The stuff that lessens bee stings and such doesn’t work on scorpion stings; different kind of venom. All I can do is wait it out. Took a while to fall asleep, though.
Yep. Centruroides sculpturatus. Not something you want a close encounter with. And just to make it worse:
Have you ever noticed after reading/typing the same word a bunch of times, it starts looking wrong? Scorpion, scorpion, scorpion. It just doesn’t look right now.
Several years ago, I was staying in a little motel near San Angelo, out in West Texas. I got up in the morning, went through my morning ‘routine’ and slid my shoes on.
Suddenly the side of my right big toe felt like someone was hitting it with the flame from one of those tiny butane torches. I danced around on one foot like a drunken monkey, uttering a string of profanity that blended all together into one giant, compound mega-cuss word. When I finally got my shoe off, a small (maybe 2" long) and very squished reddish-brown scorpion fell out. Even in his/her death throes that little tail was still thrashing around for more Jettboy flesh to sting. My toe hurt like a sonofabitch and swelled up so bad I had to wear flip-flops for 2-3 days.
When I first moved to Phoenix, a buddy told me 1) A scorpion sting feels kind of like holding a burning charcoal briquette and 2) You WILL get stung.
14 years and still no stings, knock wood.
A few years ago a friend and I were rock climbing outside of Globe. I took the first approach and, near the top there was this gorgeous, gift from the gods two-handed jug. I put a hand on either side, pulled myself up, yelled, “Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit,” and let go.
Right between my hands was one of the largest, blackest scorpions I’d ever seen. Once I got my breathing back under control I went up a slightly different way.
My parents had a holiday home in an area just North of Sydney.
Permit me to attest to the fact that just because you know to bang the heel and then shake out your shoes before putting them on in no way prepares you for a funnel-web spider falling out of them when you do.
To this day I attest that the resultant flipping out, screaming like a girl and leaping onto the bed was a stunt performed by someone bussed in for the feat.
