Weird Wind Scorpions

By BRUCE LUND

Teaching a high school insect class has given me a kind of odd respect and status. Students and faculty stop me walking across campus, in the halls, and come to my class to ask about an insect they’ve seen, or to bring them to me in all kinds of living and dead states. I’ve gotten used to hearing, “Hey Mr. Bug Man, what’s this bug?”

And so it was that a nervous-looking teacher down the hall brought in a tightly-sealed jar holding one of our strangest desert neighbors which he had captured – Yikes! – in his classroom.

His critter turned out to be a Wind Scorpion, a member of an invertebrate group called the Solpugids (say that 3X fast) with an insect-scorpion combination look about them – about as far away from our standards for cuddly and loveable as possible. While fairly common residents all around us in the desert, we rarely see them seen since they live under rocks, boards or in burrows in the day, emerging at night to hunt insects, spiders, and other such delectables. Finding one inside a building is most unusual.

Being fascinated by this strange Wind Scorpion, students made a desert terrarium to observe our friend. During construction, I remarked that these fierce, inch-long predators are similar to shrews in needing to constantly eat to survive.

Wondering if I knew what I was talking about, one of my students dropped a cricket into our miniature desert habitat. The instant it hit the dirt, Mrs. Wind Scorpion lunged and grabbed the luckless cricket in her huge jaws causing all of us to jump back in amazement at the speed and ferocity of the attack.

One of the curious facts about Wind Scorpions is that they have the largest jaws of any invertebrate relative to their body size, and within seconds her long jaws were shredding the cricket with scissor like movements and devouring it before our eyes. – obviously this was a dangerous critter to be reckoned with if you were cricket sized!

Right away, the students’ first questions were self-centered and defensive: Does it bite? Is it venomous? Yes, it can bite, but like so many other invertebrates, it rarely does so unless handled roughly – and then you get what you deserve. And no, they are not venomous.

Perhaps because they live mostly underground, the eyes on the top of the head are primitive and incapable of seeing images. However they efficiently detect movement and shadows, and whenever fingers moved near the terrarium, Mrs. Wind Scorpion took up her defensive position, facing the movement with gnashing jaws and waving her long front pair of appendages. These are called pedipalps and while they look like a fifth pair of legs, they are not used for locomotion, but have sensory hairs and are used like fingers to manipulate food in eating.

Mrs. Wind Scorpion proved to be an entertaining guest and watching her dig burrows showed her to be a first-class dozer operator. Starting at the edge of a rock and using her pedipalps and jaws just like a dozer blade, she scraped and pushed a shallow pile of stones and dirt a few body lengths away. Back she went, pulling and pushing more material from under the rocks and shoving it over the edge of the first pile until she had excavated her burrow a couple of inches deep with an impressive tailings pile out in front. A quarter hour later and satisfied with her efforts, she rested from her labors for the rest of the day, safe in her underground shelter.

That she was a Mrs. Wind Scorpion was obvious from visible eggs on her abdomen. A few days later she laid them in the ground. With some research, students found that some species stay around the eggs, protecting them until they hatch and then feeding and caring for the young until they can hunt and defend themselves. Our female appeared not to be one of those species, showing no attention to the eggs. Of course, this could have been a result of her artificial situation.

While some 900 species are known worldwide, mostly from arid desert areas, little is known about them. Their wind scorpion name comes from their resemblance to scorpions and that they move fast – like the wind. Because some species in Old World deserts hunt during the day, other names for them include sun scorpions and camel spiders. Whatever name you might know them by, these are weirdly fascinating critters.

Bruce Lund is a retired biologist and has a lifelong love of nature instilled by his grandparents and some remarkable teachers. He has lived with his wife, Flo, in Moapa since 1997.