There is a fucking SCORPION in my room!

The BBQ Pit
1

First, let me preface this with this:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

Thank you.

So I have a decent day at work, head home, make dinner, pop out with my housemates for dessert at a cool 50’s type diner here in San Diego, then call up some friends and go dancing at the hot Friday night gay boi club and find myself surrounded with a bevy of beautiful Asian boys, and even though none accompanied me home, I had a faboo time - been quite some time since I did that.

So I come home, a little tired, and make a nice cup of tea. When I reach for the teabags, however, I see that my cupboard is once again filled with ants. This would be a bad thing, except for the fact that they were swarming over the poison we laid out for them, so I know they will all be dead, and with them their evil queen, so I resis the urge to Raid them into non-existence. Satisfied with that course of action, I head towards my computer to finish out my evening before going to bed.

As I enter the computer room, I look down to see…

A FUCKING SCORPION NONCHALANTLY WALKING ACROSS THE FLOOR!

So, if I may reiterate…

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

At this point I am seriously freaking out - my housemates are long since asleep, and I know I’m a grown man and can handle this myself; however, the irrational part of my brain is too busy going, “FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!” to really be of any use to me. (Needless to say, we didn’t get these kinds of things in Pennsylvania; instead, I move to California, home of earthquakes, brush fires, traffic james, wolves, rattlesnakes, black window spiders and, of course, SCORPIONS!)

So, not wanting to get too close to the little fuck, I grab a Tupperware bowl, put it over him, and weigh it down with a box of Pop Tarts. (There’s some irony in there somewhere, but I’m too wigged to appreciate it right at this particular moment.) I pop into IRC chat to bemoan my freaking-outness, and Monster104 promptly tells me to save it for him, so he’s getting a new pet at Dopetoberfest next month. (Other people, such as Ooner, suggested I pick it up by the tail. Still others, like MrVisible, start regaling me with urban legends about scorpions and bugs in general. These things, of course, are not generally aiding my state of freak-outishness.)

So there it sits. Staring at me through his little plastic burpable prison. I can tell he hates me. He’s using his magic scorpion telepathic powers to call his brethren to his aid, or at least to convince them to hide in my shoes and in my toilet and in my underwear. I’m typing this with my feet on a chair. I am, when it comes to such things, a little girl, and wish desperately for my dyke-ish housemate to come home to either dispense of it or put it in a jar for me. (What do I feed a scorpion to keep it alive for another month? I’ll let Monster figure that out.)

On the one hand, it fascinates me (I’d always wanted a pet tarantula as a kid); on the other hand, I don’t find it so fascinating when it’s CRAWLING ACROSS MY ROOM! I can’t ever go barefoot in this house again.

So, yeah, I’m wigging. And here I thought it was going to be a good weekend…

Esprix

[de-AAAAAH!ed the post just enough to make it fit the forum-Czarcasm The AAAH!inspiring]

[Edited by Czarcasm on 09-15-2001 at 09:16 AM]

2

Donate it to science:

http://melkor.unibe.ch:8080/philnat/benjamin.gantenbein.1/personel.html

If you do decide that you want it as a pet, scorpions eat smaller insects, and grasshoppers are readily available at most pet stores.

3

Try Texas and brown recluse spiders. And cock-a-roaches big enough to lasso.

<cringe>

I feel for you, though. How good are you at the long-distance shoe-throwing event?

4

I just sprayed a huge Huntsman spider which was watching me with all 8 eyes from above the door. Armed with a long stick and the trusty can of Raid, I sprayed it till it was white, and now it’s disappeared somewhere eep! I have all the lights on and my feet up on a chair also. I won’t rest until that spider is either dead or far, far away from me.

5

So how are you going to get it to another container, and what are you going to feed it?

By the way, you rock.

----:)/ x o x o x
----///\\

6

Don’t forget to check your shoes every morning. Shake them out real well.

7

Silly. The scorpion is just there to munch on the ants, and no wonder he’s pissed at you. You’ve laid out lunch for him, and when he shows up, what do you do? You squeal and put him behind bars. Or under plastic, as the case may be. Shame on you.

Seriously, I don’t know what scorpions eat, and I wouldn’t advise keeping it. Or at least, not keeping it alive. I’ve heard that scorpion stings are quite painful.

8

I lived at the bottom of the Grand Canyon from 1990 to 1993 when I worked at Phantom Ranch (you know, the dorms and cabins for hikers and mule riders) Down there, the little yellow Centroides scorps are EVERYWHERE and I got stung twice, on the thigh in bed and on my foot when putting on a shoe. Those little bastards HURT like a motherfucker!

Even so, they did a good job of getting rid of other bugs, like spiders, so I tried to avoid killing them by lifting them up on a dustpan and tossing them outside.

If you do get stung, apply white vinegar to the wound, The acetic acid in the vinegar neutralizes the scorpion venom.

9

Put on your cowboy boots (after checking them carefully) and two step on it’s ass.

Better yet, find a cowboy to do it for you.

:slight_smile:

10

You can go to the pet store to get crickets to feed it. You may also want to pick up a black light, as scorpions glow under them.

11

:eek:

When I was in the process of moving from Texas to LA after high school, my parents also moved from Plano to a ranch in East Texas. Until their house was finished, they lived in a trailer, and I stayed the weekend to help them get moved.

Imagine my surprise and horror when I went to the bathroom and looked into the tub next to me. There were scorpions. Many scorpions. And each time I went in there, there would be more scorpions. My mother tried to flush them down the drain into the septic tank with a towel. BIG mistake. One crawled up the towel and stung her. It hurt like hell, and I called the hospital for instructions. The nurse told me to make a paste of Adolph’s meat tenderizer and apply it to the sting. The enzyme in the tenderizer helps dissolve the venom and eases the pain and makes the sting less severe. At any rate, my dad went into the attic (where the nest was) and cleaned it out with a blowtorch.

I’d advise calling an exterminator ASAP to see if there’s a nest in the house. Shake your shoes out every time you put them out, and shake your clothes out as well. And if you’re gonna keep it for a month, talk to someone at a pet store or call the San Diego Zoo expert on scorpions to see how to handle it.

Better still, fill the tupperware with alcohol. The scorpion will last longer that way :wink: I did that with a scorpion and it was cool.

Robin

12

ONE scorpion and you’re this freaked out? Pshaw. Try living in Arizona, next door to a neighbor that had a nest of 'em and couldn’t/wouldn’t get rid of them for YEARS.

Which meant that we got the fallout. Which meant that you’d them on the bottom of the pool. Or on the back patio. Or in the kitchen. Or on the walls. Or scuttling across the carpet, which was nearly the same shade as they were, and made 'em twice as hard to see. Or two inches away from your foot when you stumbled into the bathroom in the middle of the night.

Or lurking in a box of rags in the garage, waiting to sting you, which is what one finally did when I was about 13. Not only did it hurt like hell, I had an allergic reaction to the venom. You know that painful tingly feeling you get when you try to walk on a leg that’s fallen asleep? That’s the sensation that gradually spread up my arm, down my torso, and into my face. Then my throat started to close - it felt like there was something caught in it that wouldn’t go away no matter how much water I drank. And I lost fine muscle control, which meant my eyes kind of jerked and wavered when I moved them around.

I ended up going to the hospital overnight for anti-venom shots and treatment, and my right arm stayed numb for about a week.

I’d second the recommendations to stomp it, if nothing else as vengeance on its cousins that caused me to live in terror and shake out my shoes every morning as a kid.

13

I read this the other way at first (unless Esprix has even more talents we don’t know about). :slight_smile:

14

Esprix: I know you’re very freaked out, but I have a serious suggestion if you want to find out if it is a dangerous species or not.

First of all if you were in virtually any other CA city but San Diego, I’d tell you not to worry at all. Most scorpions in CA are utterly harmless. However San Diego county ( and a few other border counties in the desert along the Colorado drainage ) does have ONE nasty species. Even then, it is very unlikely to be life-threatening to an adult. It will however, hurt like hell. I will say that the odds of you having that toxic species in your home is fairly low ( these are much more common in Arizona ).

So a few general things first - The bad one will usually be a pale yellow, will be fairly slender ( not “chunky” ), and no more than 2" long ( at the most ). But those are subjective characters.

The *absolutely diagnostic character ( for that area only ) is this: Look at the scorpions stinger in its “new home”. You’ll see that the last segment is a bulb with a forward-curving sting on top. Follow the forward curve of the sting back along the bulb. If there is a little “tooth” or ridge right below the sting ( what is known as a sub-aculear tooth ), then it is the bad one. If it is smooth all the way down it is not.

There is an illustration of this here:

http://ag.arizona.edu/urbanipm/scorpions/scorpions.html

Here is a photo( unusually dark, I think ) of a the animal in question ( Centruroides exilicauda ):

http://wrbu.si.edu/www/stockwell/photos/c_exilicauda.jpg

  • Tamerlane
15

Oh Esprix!

Don’t fuck scorpions! They never cuddle afterwards. :smiley:

16

Descriptions of the sensation of being stung by a C. exilicauda ( WARNING!!! DO NOT READ IF SUCH THINGS MAKE YOU ANXIOUS OR FREAK YOU OUT! ):
I’ve heard two accounts. One fellow described it as like taking your hand and hitting it as hard as you possibly could with a sledgehammer.

The other described it as akin to sticking your hand on a burner, turning the heat up too high, then leaving it there.

Neither of the above gentlemen suffered more than mild systemic effects. However, children and older people are at more risk.

I should emphasize that MOST scorpions in the U.S. are essentially harmless. This is the only medically significant species ( barring an anaphylactic reaction, which is a threat with anything, of course ).

  • Tamerlane
17

That’s it. I’m never moving out of Michigan. Our bugs aren’t all that large, we don’t have scorpions and the only venomous snake we have is the Massasauga (sp?) Rattler. (They live in swamps, so you just stay away from the swamps)
And unless you go up north where we have bears, no dangerous mammals to speak of.

And I am never going to complain about the mosquitoes ever again.:smiley:

18

Esprix, there’s a scorpion in your room and the second thing you do is boot up the ole’ computer?

I wouldn’t suggest catch-and-release in your situation. Cowboy boots and the boot scootin’ boogie sound like a good idea.

19

You find one scorpion in your kitchen and you’re freaked out? Holy bejesus, try living in Colorado. We have them everywhere, but the don’t bother anyone. Occasionally the cats like to play with them and get pinched for it, but they’re no big deal, swat them with a shoe just like you would a spider.

Or you could come visit, and see the myriad of scorpions, black widows, tarantulas, bats, rattlers, bull snakes, brown recluses, skunks and badgers that visit us every night.

Chill out.

It’s just a little bug :smiley:

20

Yep. Put on the cowboy boots. This is what cowboy boots are designed for…riding horses and squishing scorpions.

Just make sure you shake out the boots first.