Unbeknownst to many folks, we’ve got scorpions in the Deep South.  We’ve got 5 or so species, all of them small (usually just over an inch when stretched out).  Yes, they can sting, and based on personal experience, it feels about like a bad wasp sting.

The places I most commonly see them are under loose pine bark.  Sometimes that pine bark is on older, living pines (I’ve even got an image of a federally endangered red-cockaded woodpecker holding a scorpion just prior to chowing down on it!).  Sometimes that pine bark is on pines that have been killed by southern pine beetles.  The next most common place that I’ve seen them is in the bathtub!  It seems that they don’t mind coming into houses; they can walk up a wall with little difficulty, but they have a problem walking up the sides of a tub.  This particular one was found in a light fixture where it had fallen down from the attic.  Two other places that I’ve found them frequently were in folds of canvas tents at a summer camp and in folds of burlap in a ground blind at a hunting club.

One of the neat things about scorpions is that they fluoresce (or glow) under ultraviolet light.  There are also many minerals that fluoresce under ultraviolet light.  Knowing these two things, I’ve managed in the past to get these two fluorescent subjects together, and did so again the other evening.  Both the scorpion and the minerals fluoresce a little differently depending upon the ultraviolet source (UVA vs UVB vs UVC).  Unfortunately, I don’t have ready access to a UVB bulb in south Mississippi (yet), so the fluorescent part of this shot was taken with a low wattage UVA bulb.