The Indestructible Scorpion

MEET THE SCORPION, NATURE'S NASTY DESERT CREATURE

It's one of the oldest of Nature's creatures. Scientists say it probably has been on the Earth essentially unchanged for 450 million years. The early Romans viewed it as an agent of the devil. It's mentioned in the Bible. A constellation of stars is named for it. Aristotle wrote about it. It's your desert neighbor, the durable, dastardly, don't-mess-with-me scorpion.

Worldwide there are at least 1,500 different species, all of them poisonous. The United States can claim about 40 of them. Arizona has the honor of playing host to the only ones in the entire country whose sting is potentially lethal.

What makes the scorpion a survivor is it adapts. It spends most of its time hidden from predators. It can go a year without food. It gets all the water it needs from the bodily fluids of the insects it eats.

And it's mean. Scorpions, in fact, seem to hate everybody, including one another. Males and females mate, and then, often as not, the females eat the males. Young are born, after which the mothers sometimes eat them, too.

The poisonous scorpion sting, administered by a long looping articulated tail, is bothersome to deadly. Put on a shoe in which lurks a desert scorpion, and you'll get a real hotfoot.

The animal's sting makes an adult uncomfortable but can kill a small child. However, we've had no fatalities in Arizona for many years. Credit for that goes to an antivenin developed in the 1940s by the late Dr. H.L. Stahnke, an Arizona State University zoologist.

His son, Jerry Stahnke, a Mesa lawyer, says the antidote got its first test when the one-year-old daughter of a Tempe family was stung. By the time she reached a hospital she was in convulsions. Stahnke's antivenin was administered, and she recovered.

ASU still is the only producer of scorpion antivenin in the United States. The university provides it as a public service to hospitals and emergency clinics.

Producing the antidote is a fairly simple operation. Scorpions are nocturnal. So Lorin Honetschlager of Mesa, retired supervisor of the animal research center at ASU, sets forth at night with an ultraviolet light (scorpions are florescent) and gathers up the creatures.

"I go out five or six nights and pick up anywhere from 300 to 800 of 'em," he says. He finds them under stacks of firewood, in manure piles, in cracks and crevices of concrete-block houses, in cluttered carports, and under tree bark.

Honetschlager uses electric shock to milk the venom out of the scorpions. Then he delivers the venom to Marilyn Bloom, ASU research specialist in charge of producing the antivenin.

She keeps five goats: Patricia, Patience, Prudence, Penelope, and Pamela. To obtain the antivenin, she injects the goats with small doses of the venom and then extracts serum from the goats' blood that contains antibodies to the scorpion toxin.

The relative ease with which Lorin Honetschlager finds scorpions should be a lesson to us all. Scorpions dwell among us.

What we need to do, says Honetschlager, is caulk cracks and crevices, clean up carports, deal gingerly with woodpiles (one family he knows got rid of its firewood because of scorpions and put in a gas fireplace). And if you're camping, check your shoes in the morning before you put them on.

Based on their hardiness and sheer numbers, the future seems clear. If we don't want to share this warm and wonderful Arizona desert with scorpions, we'd better get out, because they're not going to. As Marilyn Bloom puts it: "They were here first, and they're probably going to be here when we're gone."