V. spinigerus stillborns

I've been waiting on one of my female Vaejovis spinigerus to birth since spring. This past Sunday (I write this on Friday, and the following pictures were taken on Thursday evening) I saw her in the "birth basket" stance, so I assumed she was going to give birth shortly. Then, nothing happened. Nothing happened for the next four days, either. Then on Thursday evening, I checked on her and saw she had a large white glob of something in one of her pinchers (she dropped it when I got the camera).


Yep, that's a cluster of stillborn scorpion embryos.


I have no idea how this happened or what caused it, but I have one thing to say about it:


I may email Kari McWest and see if he has anything to say on the matter.

U. mordax Community

Yet another post about my favorite scorpion . . .

I finally reached one of my scorpion goals by setting up a community of this species: one male and five females collected in different areas of Oregon. The male and two of the females were those featured in this post, one female is the one featured in this post, one was the largest featured in this post, and the final female was collected in Eugene in 2007.

Here is the tank in its entirety:

Here's that stone on the right side at a different angle, to show one of the hides I provided:

I believe this is the female caught on Cougar Reservoir and the female that had a brood this summer:

And here is the male and one of the females caught on the same night:

The two others were hiding somewhere that I couldn't access as easily.

I believe the two most-recently caught females may be gravid, so I could have some more broods on my hands before long.

And just for fun, here's a map (looking east) of where these specimens came from:

Mordax not communal at 2I . . .

So I saw a couple more little corpses when I checked this morning (), and decided to separate them this evening. I only found nine.

+ 26 in original brood
- 5 given to friends
- 4 unknown deaths (that number doesn't bother me so much)
- 9 recovered
------------------------
= 8 cannibalized

I guess that isn't too bad, but a 50/50 survival/cannibalism rate still kinda sucks. My H. longimanus only had 20% cannibalism.

So I think I'll be separating my next broods.

(I've been leaning towards specializing in this species and downsizing my collection a bit, so this is a handy piece of information to know for my two other gravid females.)

Successful U. mordax Hunt

(Pardon the photo quality in advance -- we were using my friend's point-and-shoot, which as I'm sure you know, wouldn't work too well in the dark.)

After one pathetic attempt (one female) and one completely fruitless attempt, I went back to Botkin Road with a friend of mine in the hopes of finding some U. mordax. It seems we did it right this time -- the right spot at night (as opposed to the wrong spot at night, or the right spot in the day).

The first spot we found anything at was on an exposed hill that would have been in the sun a few hours earlier. We found one female and one male underneath some pieces of plywood laying on the dirt.

BL pic of one of them:
The male:
They were found on the portion of the hill below the road -- looking above the road didn't turn anything up. We went up the road about another 1/4 mile to another exposed area. The soil on the hills here is really REALLY loose, and so we found nothing checking the second hill, either. We were about to give up when we blacklit under a rock that was laying on some more stable soil on the hill.

Two second instars! They were found within six inches of each other. I would have loved to get a pic of the both of them, but one ran away before we could get the camera. Here's a couple shots of the other one:

We let those two go. The guy I was with thought he heard something, so we did a sweep of the hill with our lights before heading back to his truck. I swept my blacklight across the hill and something green caught my eye. It was another female about ten feet from me! We scrambled up the hill and easily scooped her into the cup that we photographed the little one in and decided to call it a night.

A few pics from when we got back . . .

Tyler's first handling experience:

The male / female from underneath the plywood:
The second female: