Scorpions in California?

We thought scorpions lived in the desert and the only time you need to be concerned about them was when you camped out, cowboy style.  You would have to empty out your boots in the morning before putting them on to make there wasn't a scorpion hiding out inside.  Just like in the old westerns.  I've lived in California my whole life and had never seen a scorpion until we moved to the East Bay hills, far from the desert landscapes of the southwest. So much for critter stereotypes!

One night, lying in bed, I saw a strange bug on the wall almost at the ceiling. I got up to take a closer look and knew immediately it was a scorpion.  I almost freaked out.  How did it get  there?  I went on-line and found out they are actually quite common in the Bay Area.  They live under rocks, and since the hillsides around our house are quite rocky, they are among the neighborhood's indigenous critters.  Since that first encounter, we have found a few others in the house, and a couple more while working in the yard.  This morning we found this little critter in our bedroom.  We think this guy is a California Forest Scorpion Uroctonus mordax after looking at these photos on bugguide.net.

We don't worry about them as much anymore after reading that this species is not all that poisonous--no worse than a bee sting.  And the coolest thing about them is that they glow under a UV light, like the millipedes we blogged about in February.

Glowing bugs

We did not know that scorpions lived in California. We thought they only lived in the southwestern U.S. desert, like Arizona or the Mojave, but one evening we found one on the wall of our bedroom!  We looked up information on them on the internet, and sure enough, they do thrive in the Bay Area, They live under rocks and come out to hunt on warm nights and evenings.  And they are not as dangerous as we thought, either.  The sting of the species that live near us is no more dangerous than a bee sting, accoring to most authorities on the subject, and we hope we don't find out ourselves.  But the most interesting thing we read about these creatures is that they glow a greenish color if you shine an ultraviolent (UV) light on them.  Remember those 'black lights' from 1970's dance parties?  Those are more correctly known as 'UV' lights.  And now they are available as 'UV' flashlights on Ebay, and they are cheap.


So I bought one and went searching around my yard and neighborhood, looking for these critters on a warm evening.  I didn't find any.  But I did find something even more interesting, a glowing millipede!  And then a bunch of them.  They are about 1-1/2 to 2 inches long, and were crawling through the detritus under live oak and pine trees.


We searched the internet for information on these and found almost nothing, until we came across the website of a millipede expert from the University of Arizona, Paul Marek (see http://cis.arl.arizona.edu/PERT/people/Marek/research.htm).   He told us they are known scientifically as 'Xystocheir Dissecta' (Don't ask me how to pronounce that first word!) and they are quite common under live oak trees in the San Francisco and Monterey Bay areas of California.  They fluoresce, the UV light is reflected back as visible light.

I took a video of one of these guys while shining the UV flashlight on it.  The blinking red light is from the 'Recording' indicator on my camera.  


These millipedes glow only if you shine a UV light on them, but according to Dr. Marek, there is another species that glows like a firefly.  These are bioluminexcent, they produce the light themselves, without the need of a UV light shining on them.  These live in the southern Sierra Nevada Mountains.  We hope to see one someday.


We will search again for scorpions and let you know if we find any.