Scorpions emerge to swarm Ariz. homes
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — The scorpions that scurry around this desert region emerged from their winter slumber early this year.
Usually dormant until late March, the creatures came out in February as temperatures soared, making a month that is generally pretty pleasant the second-warmest February on record.
That got Ben Holland’s phone ringing: callers were finding scorpions on their beds, in their showers, on walls in and outside their homes and all over their yards. Holland — a vice president for digital marketing by day, a scorpion exterminator by night — assembled his band of hunters, young men in or just out of college, and put them to work.
“Our approach is population control,” said Holland, 32, who started Scorpion Sweepers in 2006, putting to use his experience collecting scorpions for a laboratory while in college and his once-ignored biology degree. “We don’t poison the scorpions. We don’t smash them. We pick them up one by one.”
They use a tool called a forceps, which looks like the tweezers one might use to pluck eyebrows, only bigger. Success requires speed and dexterity, skills that are learned on the job. On his second season, Toby Riley, 24, whose other career is in graphic design, demonstrated it as best as he could to Zach Wilson, a scorpion-hunting rookie three weeks shy of graduation from Arizona State University.
“Pinch the scorpion’s tail and turn your wrist, like this,” Riley said, moving his lower arm as if hurriedly scooping beans from a pot.
Pest extermination is big business in these parts and specialties vary — from African bee catchers to termite killers and roof-rat snatchers. Holland and his sweepers go after scorpions only, and they work only after dark.
Scorpions glow under black lights. The glow comes from a substance found inside a hard-and-thin coating on the scorpion’s exoskeleton. Scientists are not sure what purpose it serves.
There are 1,800 types of scorpions in every place on the planet except for the Arctic, and more than 50 species in the Sonoran Desert, which covers much of the state. At no more than 3 inches long, bark scorpions are the smallest, most common and most dangerous — “the only one of them considered to be life-threatening,” said Keith Boesen, director of the Arizona Poison and Drug Information Center, housed at the University of Arizona College of Pharmacy in Tucson.
On average, the center and its counterpart in Phoenix log 12,000 reports of scorpion stings each year, though many more go unreported. Children, older adults and those who are infirm are particularly vulnerable and should seek immediate help if they get stung, Boesen said.
Deaths are rare — there was one in 2013 and another some 10 years earlier, he said.