Earl the Scorpion

Spider killing Arachnid

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Earl Sleeps

A Brief History of Earl

On the First night of Spring Break of 2004, I was sleeping just outside of San Angelo when I woke up at 3 AM with symptoms that my legs had gone to sleep. After repositioning in an attempt to get the blood flowing again, with no results, my mind began to grind, and then I thought "Neurotoxins!" With that noted, I began looking at the sheets, and sure enough, there was a scorpion in my bed. She managed to sting both of my legs in 3 strikes before I woke up. I quickly found a plastic cup and captured her to think about what fate she shall have.

The previous year, when I had encounters with several scorpions, JP suggested that I should capture them, and then make a colony, instead of smashing them with my boot. As Spring Break continued to roll on, I began to notice how amusing it was to watch the scorpion, even if she didn't move much during the day. This led me to give up the painful methods of execution I had been contemplating, and think more about keeping her. Chelsea finally mentioned near the end of the week that I should keep her and name her Earl. Agreeing that English Nobility could use a scorpion, the name was set. Soon thereafter she was in my car on the way home to begin life as a housepet.

After many months of great amusement, Earl died sometime in early January leaving behind the still unnamed male scorpion to be called Earl Mark II.

Photogenic Earl

Earl as a Backpack - What good are army soldiers if you can't play with them?
Standoff with a Black Spider - This spider has escaped death several times when this was taken, and I'm sure several more are still in order. His legs are being removed one by one.
Earl's First Spider at House Harkonnen - The play by play story about what happened when I found her favorite food.
Earl walking - From the Cool Whip container days.
Earl under the Black Light - This is what she looks like when exposed to UV light.
Earl next to a mirror - More experiments with UV lights.
Earl eating a spider - Meal time!
A cricket tries to commit seppuku - this cricket tried to get eaten too but he was just pushed off and had to wait until the spider was finished.
Spider killed on the Rock - It's not often things get killed out in the open such as pictured here.

More Generic Info About Scorpions

Earl is a Striped Bark Scorpion, Centruoides vittatus. This is the most common type of Scorpion found in Texas and many other states. Most of the time he will hide under the rocks because he is nocturnal. This probably leads to him sleeping excessively since my current schedule involves me leaving on the lights most of the night. He normally returns to hiding about 5 minutes after turning on the lights.

Feeding Earl

After many attempts and a month or two, I finally discovered she loves to eat spiders. Her first attempt at feeding was a little black beetle, which is still alive and in his tank to this day. (Scratch that, the beetle drowned in Earl's water dish) After watching the beetle get stung two or three times with no effect, I began to suspect she would need another sort of meal. Around this time I decided putting the other tiny scorpion I found over spring break was a good idea. The next experiment for food was decided to be a grasshopper, since crickets are noisy. No real action was observed outside of the grasshopper jumping and hitting the roof of the tank. This grasshopper was killed outside of observation, and was not being visibly eaten. The next grasshopper was stung a few evenings later when I came home to see it on its side kicking rocks. This was definitely a Scorpion sting, but Earl was not feasting like I thought she would. This all changed when I gave her the spider. You can read that story when I wrote about it in the heap of excitement that was induced from the quick battle. The rest has been spiders since, so I'll leave the rest of the stories for you to guess, but it is still a blast every time I've got something for her to eat.

Earl's Record at House Harkonnen

Bug type	Kills
Spiders	9
Grasshoppers	3
Scorpions	1
Crickets	9
Other Events	Occurrences
Times stuck on roof in spiderwebs	2

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Duck you Sucker!
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Last Modified: Wednesday, 29-Aug-2007 21:37:30 CDT
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