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Vinegarones
Last updated on Wednesday, January 01, 2003
One late-summer Saturday, Richard, Molly, and I left town for a visit to a lodge in the Gila Wilderness. That night, in darkness unmarred by electric lights, quadrillions of stars blazed in the velvet-black sky. Not far above the southern horizon, we recognized the most southwestern of constellations: Scorpius the scorpion, with her tail of stars curled over her back, and the bright orange star Anatares marking her pincers.
Later, in our room in the adobe bunkhouse, we turned on the light in the bathroom, and found Scorpius there too, or at least her relative. A huge whip scorpion - about six inches long - crawled slowly out from beneath the old clawfoot bathtub. I'd never seen one that large, and I wasn't entirely sure that I wanted it creeping over me in its nighttime perambulations. So, feeling a bit cowardly, we trapped it under the washbasin before going to bed.
Whip scorpions, or vinegarones, are related to both spiders and scorpions. But unlike the latter and some of the former, they are not venomous, although they look quite formidable. Their 3.5-inch-long, blackish body resembles an overgrown scorpion, with stout, inward-curving pincers as long as my thumb extending forward from their tiny head. Four pairs of slender legs stretch from their many-segmented abdomen; the first pair function as antennae, sweeping the ground in front of the whip scorpion, like a blind person feeling their way with a white cane. (Not that whip scorpions are blind; on the contrary, they possess eight perfectly serviceable compound eyes - two just above the mouth between the massive pincers, three on each side of their head. But they hunt in the dark, capturing their prey by feel.)
Instead of a scorpion's graceful upcurved abdomen ending in that venom-injecting stinger, whip scorpions' flattened, oval abdomen hugs the earth, ending in a tiny collar from which protrudes a several-inch-long, slender, whip-like tail. When disturbed, whip scorpions defend themselves by spraying a vinegar-scented acid from a gland at the base of their tail whip - hence vinegarone, their other common name. The acidic spray contains an agent that corrodes the victim's armor. But despite their fearsome appearance and pungent spray, these arachnids are not harmful to people.
Whip scorpions are nocturnal. They spend their days hiding among soil-surface debris, under logs and rotting wood, or indoors in humid, dark corners. They emerge at night and crawl about, searching for small insects.
The whip scorpion that startled us that night was a giant vinegarone, North America's only species of the 70 or so found worldwide. In the morning, we inspected it, able in the daylight to admire its fearsome appearance. Then, wishing it well, we carried the vinegarone carefully outside and liberated it in a dark cranny of a nearby stone wall.
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