Here’s the place to share your fear/admiration(?!)/personal story or outright disgust. To set the proper mood, everyone turn on their blacklights.
As a young lad growing up in along the undeveloped edge of San Diego, I spent many an hour hunting lizards. One day, I was trying to dig a lizard out of a hole, when I felt a sharp pain on my fingertip. I pulled my hand out of the hole and a small scorpion emerged. Right then and there, I knew I was going to die. I rode my bike home and went to bed, waiting for the end. However, other than the initial pinprick, no other symptoms occurred. After about an hour, I was quite relieved…I had survived!!
I grew up in northern Louisiana where scorpions exist but they aren’t all that common. There is one exception however. Newly constructed houses were always filled with them as was ours when it was completed when I was almost 5. They wandered around the bathrooms, in the bathtubs, and just about everywhere else. I guess they came as eggs in the building materials or something.
I wasn’t especially scared of them but I knew they could sting badly and stayed away from them. One day, I was outside with my family and walked over to a leftover brick pile. I picked one up sticking my fingers in the holes. Those sons of bitches found an ambush tactic on me. The sting hurt badly but I didn’t have any allergic reaction other than my finger being screwed up for a couple of days.
I lived in rural Mexico this summer. We didn’t have screens on all the windows, so it was rather typical to have lizards, hummingbirds, wasps, spiders, toads, and all sorts of creepy-crawlies hanging out in the house.
I adjusted pretty well, even to the family of wasps living in the light fixture in the living room.
But one fine day I had peeled off all of my clothes and was standing in the bathroom ready for a shower when I found myself toe-to-… um, claw, with a large, very sharp-and-pointy-looking scorpion.
You couldn’t have gotten me out of that bathroom faster.
That is my terrifying scorpion story.
Actually, it is a bit scary, when I think about the fact that I was hours away from any sort of medical treatment. I’m not even sure what the consequences of a scorpion sting are, since my knowledge of them is pretty limited to seeing cowboys in old B-movies shake out their boots before sleeping on the desert floor.
Many years ago when I was in the Navy, we had a picnic for our shop’s personal and families. We discovered the park where we had the picnic also had a number of scorpions. One typical picnic activity is playing badmintion but we soon tired of using a regular shuttlecock. So we used scorpions. The only problem with them is they started falling apart about the 4th or 5th time they were hit with the racket. We also tried to have scorpion races but most would not cooperate. The some of them would starting attacking the other scorpions. So we had scorpion fights. By the end of the day we had reduced the scorpion population at that park quite a bit.
Our dog started barking at the back door slider. When we looked out we saw the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen in my 52 years: a 5 inch long Giant Hairy Desert Scorpion (I can’t link to a picture, I’ll just gross myself out again, but you can google it, if you dare). Thing was running back and forth hunting moths, which was probably cool, but disinterested scientific observation escapes me when confronted by a
Giant Hairy Desert Scorpion.
I want to point out again, my dog was barking. At an insect (or whatever you call those disgusting lobster nightmares).
I saw an ugly black armor-plate looking one on the wall of a stall selling drinks a half mile away from the Chitzen Itza pyramid. It was about 4 1/2 inches long, 3 inches wide and 2 1/2 to 3 inches high. I couldn’t stamp on it in sneakers and know for sure that it would die and that I wouldn’t get stung.
“We’re going to be in hot tropical climates” she says. “You have sandals; you don’t need to pack boots” she says…
Oh god. Where do all you people live so I know never to visit you?
And how do you know if they’re poisonous or not? I was watching some National Geographic special on this family where everyone got bitten by one at some point…in the kids, the side effects tended to be pretty bad.
Count Blucher, I just want to say how much I love the term, “lobstrosities.” I’m going to be using it from now on for something. I’m not sure if it will be for scorpions, or for something else. But it will be used.
This dude was my roommate for a few years ( heck of a nice guy ), so I’ve probably seen more scorpions ( live and “bottled” ) than your average person times maybe 1000 :
I picked up a brick with a scorpion under it once upon a time; it stung me several times in the palm of my hand. If one were to pick up a nice, cherry red charcoal briquette and press it down into the palm one would have some slight idea of how painful those stings were. I was very sick for three days following that little incident. I was stung by scorpions a couple of other times, but the one with the brick was the worst. What I get for being dumb enough to be born in Texas.
From what I remember, the lottle ones are the bastards. They’re all poisonous, the the big ones, generally, are slower, and less dangerous. The little ones are the ones that can make you hurt for days and days.
We spent a month on a rainforest reserve in Belize. The big black one showed up everywhere, but made absolutely no effort to evade the coming of The Boot. The tiny ones in Arizona were something else. I think Starbucks delivers triple espressos to them each morning, the way they move around.
Yanno, there’s a good chance, that after my sister is done with me, she’ll be coming after you, for showing me this, when she gets a couple of those suckers in her stocking this year.
They’re really cool to catch. You wave one hand in front of them, and they aim their armament in that direction, and they’re helpless from behind! Just come in behind them, and pick them up by the end of the tail, and all they can do is wriggle and shout scorpionic curses at you. First time you try it, its nerve-wracking, do it once, and you can hardly stop.
My guy school mentor’s wife put on her cowgirl boots one morning without shaking them out; one of them contained a wee little brown scorpion who deeply resented being disturbed. Long story short, she passed out from the pain, the boot had to be cut from her hugely swollen foot and she was hospitalized for the best part of a week. It really was touch and go as to her survival for the first couple of days.
When I was a kid, scorpions were as common as dirt where I lived; scorpions in houses were just a fact of life. I would cheerfully murder all the the little brutes and celebrate their extinction.
:
