Scorpions

17 Responses

1. “Telson small like a mouse, it’s harmless in your house;
   Telson big like a whale, your vital organs will fail” 🙂

   4-30 years: Many arachnids can live for a long time, depending on gender. Males tend to die quickly after (or during) mating, but females can live for decades. Female Sydney Funnel-Web Spiders (Atrax robustus) live for 25-30 years…

   Pesticides: Again, all arachnids are resistant- they can essentially shut down their book-lungs for many hours, until the spray wears off. This also enables them to survive immersion in a swimming pool for hours after falling in.

   Androctonus: The world’s deadliest scorpion is the African Fat-Tail (Androctonus australis- “Southern Man Killer”). A sting can kill in less than an hour…

2. btw- Pseudoscorpions are arachnids, but not scorpions (much like Sea Spiders are not spiders). They’re also all only around the size of a pinhead, and harmless to humans…

   1. btw again!

      in regard to scorpion stings vs bee stings I’ve been stung by both 🙂 Scorpion sting was when I was ten- I was stung by a local, West Australian species of scorpion- looking back on it, it was almost certainly a Sand Scorpion (Urodecus planimanus). I’m not allergic to hymenoptera (bees,ants, wasps). The pain from the scorpion sting was slightly more intense than a bee sting- around the same as a large wasp sting in intensity. Local pain, swelling and redness which receeded over about an hour. I’d say I got pre-venomed, rather than getting the actual venom. Amazingly, given the rest of our wildlife, Australian scorpions are not life-threatening in any way 🙂

3. tail is thin, let them in. tail is fat, don’t tap that.

4. Some other interesting facts about scorpions…

   How does something so pointy mate? Males deposits a packet of sperm on the ground, and guides the female by holding her pincers with his pincers to move over the ground and the sperm package is picked up by the female genital opening during this ‘dance’.

   Also, there is a common myth that scorpions will sting themselves to death if you expose them to fire or put a drop of alcohol on their back. This is a myth and is not common behaviour for a scorpion.

   As for the Mnemonic, how about…

   “Tiny telsons tickle. Titanic telsons terrify!”

   Kudos on correctly identifying Bill Duke. However, a painful pox on you for liking Transformers. Your punishment is this…

   1. a painful box? how about… the Boo Box?! (it also has scorpions!)

5. http://images.wikia.com/mk/images/e/ee/MK2011_Scorpion.png

   As you can see in the image above, as of the latest game Scorpion’s been paying homage to his namesake in the design of his armor.

   Also, (in the canon, at least) he got the name Scorpion from his fighting stance, in which his right arm is curled behind his head like the tail of a scorpion. As seen in the image below.

   http://images.wikia.com/mk/images/0/0c/SCORPION.gif

   1. I’d forgotten his stance — I’ve barely played any of the Mortal Kombat games since MK2. That’s the same arm that throws the spear attack too, so I wasn’t completely wrong.

      For the record, he and Kitana were my two main characters in the old MK2 arcade days.

6. I lived in Phoenix, AZ a few years back and hardly ever saw these bastards. One night, I was heading up to a friend’s apartment when we spotted a scorpion in the bushes (as much as one gets bushes in the desert.) The bastard was at least 8 inches long without the tail. His size may be exaggerated in my memory. I stayed outside and kept my eye on it while he went up and got a jar so we could capture it and put it under the black light. When he came back out, I founds something faintly stick-like and attempted to wrest him from his hidey hole. He came running out of the bushes, onto the sidewalk and headed straight for me! I was backing my way up and keeping an eye on his while I yelled at my friend to capture him before I got hit. I rounded a corner to head up on the steps, and the little fucker followed after me. My friend finally got him just as I started climbing up on the stairs. We took him upstairs and stared at him for an hour under the black light. He was so damn neat looking. My friend’s girlfriend was not too pleased about our new pet when she got home and we had to throw him back outside 🙁

   1. Okay, this story alone freaks me out, being chased by a scorpion (especially if it was 8 inches long) would be INTENSE. I would totally be sympathetic about you being chased by a scorpion, if you hadn’t just poked him with a stick…..

7. Hey, awesome episode, I actually learned a lot. And I’m not saying because y’all mentioned me. Especially since I actually didn’t say the snake thing. 🙂

8. Tail not fat: like a gnat. Tail not thin: next of kin.

9. One variety you neglected to mention was the dreaded “Office Scorpion”!!!

   http://themetapicture.com/office-scorpion/

10. Great episode! I was shocked by the anti venom thing in the U.S. and such a horrible event to me warranted investigation further. I found an article by Monica Ortiz Uribe that matched what was mentioned on the podcast. It sounded fine until I looked a little further.

    1.The “venom belt” in the U.S. as well as every other area in the U.S. has a combined total of 4 deaths from Scorpion stings in the past 11 years. Less than one person a year dying isn’t great, but I can see why it wouldn’t be profitable for even a scocial based medical program like we have here in Canada. The local hospital couldn’t afford to keep a drug that expensive on a constant rotating basis as the drug does expire and live scorpions are needed for the drug replacement. (source: according to Chippaux JP, Goyffon M. Epidemiology of scorpionism: a global apprasial. Acta Trop. 2010/08;107:71-9.)

    2. They didn’t run out of their own supplies so much as they simply quit producing it because a superior version was available from a country who in a total of the same time span of 11 years suffers 11,000. (same source). As a bit of example of how easy a poor science journalist can spin this I could imagine someone concluding (quite ridiculously of course) that in the dreaded ‘venom belt’ less than 1 person dies a year on average compared to a 1000 in Mexico. he might ridiculously proclaim ” boy that American made anti-venom is clearly superior!!”. In the article To say they ran out of supplies 10 years ago giving the impression of thousands of Americans dying in a venom belt is simply poor journalism in my opinion.

    3. yada, yada, yada, who cares, you can’t always be skeptical with news, this was comic gold. Now that I figured out people aren’t dying in mass numbers because big pharma can’t turn a profit I was able to listen with less steam coming out of my ears. freakin hilarious!

    1. That’s some good sleuthing right there!

11. when i heard you mention the Black Scorpion, i thought at first you meant Black Scorpion, the Roger Coreman movie and tv series, if you think a movie about giant scorpions was painfull…

12. I’m listening to this podcast again and I noticed that of all the TM’ing going on Kevin forgot to TM the Anti-Venom Price Ticker!

    TM!