28 March 2010

This is not a scorpion

Something ran out from under a leaf. Tiny, like a springtail, but it didn't hop. Whenever I tried to pick it up with my skinny paintbrush, it raced backwards, as fast as it had been running forward.

Under a magnifying glass, it waved big, angular pincers at me, like a crab would. I captured it, finally, in a drop of water, then photographed it with the camera and the microscope.
To discover what it actually is, read the post at Wanderin' Weeta - an excellent nature blog.

4 comments:

  1. A few summers ago I found one of these attached to the bottom of a housefly I swatted in my apartment. I had a USB microscope at the time, so I took some video:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zK2OhpTido

    I was absolutely petrified of this thing at the time. I couldn't sleep without thinking of flies landing on my face while I slept dropping this nasty things off to eat my flesh.

    It took me a while to find out it was a pseudoscorpion and totally harmless (even beneficial by eating other arthropods).

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  2. Interesting video, especially the way it seems to be trying to gag itself with its pincer. Maybe it's trying to get the taste of fly out of its mouth. :.)

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  3. LOL. Apparently the claws are specially designed to clean their mouth apparatus... so I guess it did have a bad taste. =P

    I thought this thing was some horrible unknown species of louse at the time, so I contacted some scientist who gave me the pseudoscorpion run down.

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