New Toy

Trevor has this annoying habit of finding out what I buy for him for each gift-giving holiday.  He ALWAYS knows what is coming!  So, it was no surprise to me that on Saturday before Father's Day, he was asking for his black light that he knew I purchased for said holiday.  He has been scorpion hunting in our yard recently and I thought he would enjoy some help.  Boy did he ever!  He was almost giddy when he ran inside to tell me what he found! 

Here is what they look like with the black light.  But the prize find of the night is in the next shot.

Here she is!  Proud mama of 15-20 (as far as we could tell).  They were all clinging to her back.  We have never seen this before and it was so interesting!!  We found out that the babies do not glow at all when they are this young.  They looked like brown blobs all over her back (regretting not getting a picture of that!!).

These little guys fell off mama when we decided to separate them from the other barbarians.

Here are the other boring scorpions he found that night.  We had them all together, but alas, I began to feel sorry for mama scorpion.  Trevor had accidentally cut off her stinger when he lifted her out of the Aloe Vera plant with his needle nose pliers.  She was so defensive to the other scorpions, my heart went out to a fellow mother just trying to protect her babies.  My mom scoffed at me when I was telling her about them.  "Don't feel sorry for them!!  Scorpions don't have feelings!  They are evil!!"  Even after that tongue lashing, I still had compassion towards the mother.  The final straw was when I witnessed one of the other scorpions snatch a poor defenseless baby off his mama's back and proceeded to devour it.  I was horrified!  Trevor saw how distraught I was and took pity on them (and me).  He moved the family to their own bucket.  The companion scorpion who was in with them was already dead.  He apparently did not survive the pliers.  Trevor put it in there so they would have a source of food.  We tried and tried to find crickets to feed her, but they are in short supply now for some strange reason!  Last year we had THOUSANDS of them invading our yard and home.  I'm guessing the plethora of scorpions we found tonight have something to do with this!  We did supply her with an unsuspecting beetle to tide her over while we tried to find a spare cricket.  She turned up her nose at our gift and decided to find her own form of nourishment..her babies!  I completely misjudged her defensiveness as being protective toward her babies!  I guess my Mom was right!  They are evil!  I told mama scorpion she was not a good mother.  Trevor ended up squishing them the next day.  After seeing her true character, we were no longer sympathetic.