Your home is probably a luxury resort for scorpions

Today’s question:

Are scorpions territorial?

This is a much-abridged version of a note from a guy who said he goes out every night to hunt scorpions around his yard.

It’s nice to have a hobby. (It’s easy for me to be snarky about this because I have never been particularly infested by scorpions.)

Anyway, this guy noticed that he never finds his prey closer to each other than 8 feet or so, an observa- tion that led to his question.

Yes, scorpions are territorial. They are solitary creatures and aside from mating, they don’t care to have other scorpions around. You can’t really blame them.

Next, another scorpion question:

We keep hearing that this weather drives scorpions indoors. Why would heat and/or rain do that? Are they not adapted to this weather after millions of years of living here in the Sonoran Desert?

First of all, I don’t think the Sonoran Desert has been here millions of years. Bear in mind that off and on over time, much of the Southwest has been covered by a shallow sea.

But scorpions have been around in pretty close to their present shape for about 430 million years, so your point is well-taken.

Look at it this way: If you had been fighting for survival in a hardscrabble world and someone came along and built a house with lights that attract tasty bugs and pools and sprinklers that result in cool places to hide out — for example, wet towels on the lawn — and all the other benefits of scorpion civilization, what would you do?

Tough it out in the desert or move into a scorpion luxury resort?