The Life of the Scorpion

by Jean-Henri Fabre

But this is not enough. While we have to see to our own safety, we must also think of the captives’ welfare. The dwelling is hygienic and easy to carry into the sun or the shade, as the observation of the moment may demand; but it does not contain the victuals with which the Scorpions, frugal though they be, cannot dispense indefinitely. With a view to feeding them without moving the cover, the trellis-work is pierced at the top with a small opening through which I slip the live game, caught from day to day as needed. After this has been served, a plug of cotton-wool closes the buttery hatch.

My caged specimens, soon after their installation, enable me to watch their work as excavators even better than the occupants of the open-air community, for whom my trowel has prepared an entrance-passage beneath the stones. The Languedocian [[19]]Scorpion is master of craft; he knows how to house himself in a cell of his own making. In order to establish themselves, each of my interned prisoners has at his disposal a wide, curved potsherd, which, set firmly in the sand, provides the foundation of a grotto, a simple arched fissure. The Scorpion has only to dig beneath this and lodge himself as comfortably as he can.

The excavator does not dally long, especially in the sun, whose glare annoys him. Steadying himself on his fourth pair of legs, the Scorpion rakes the ground with the three other pairs: he turns it over, reducing it to a loose dust with a graceful agility that reminds us of a Dog scratching a hole in which to bury a bone. After the brisk twirling of the legs comes the touch of the broom. With his tail laid flat and relaxed to the utmost, he pushes back the earthy mass, making the same movement as does our elbow when thrusting an obstacle aside. If the rubbish thus shot back be not sufficiently out of the way, the sweeper returns, repeats the process and finishes the job.

Observe that the pincers, notwithstanding their strength, never take part in the digging, [[20]]even to the extent of extracting a grain of sand. They are reserved for feeding, fighting, and, above all, enquiry, and would lose the exquisite sensitiveness of their fingers if used for that heavy task. In this way the legs and tail, in repeated alternations, scratch the soil and thrust the rubbish outside. At last the worker disappears beneath the potsherd. A mound of sand obstructs the entrance to the vault. At moments we see it shaking and partly slipping, signs that the work is still going on with a further shooting of rubbish, until the cell attains a suitable size. When the hermit wants to go out, he will, without difficulty push back the crumbling barricade.

The Black Scorpion of our houses has not this capacity for making himself a crypt. He is found in the mortar collected at the bottom of walls, the woodwork disjointed by the damp, the rubbish-heaps in dark places, but he restricts himself to using these refuges as he finds them, being unable to improve the hiding-place by his own industry. He does not know how to dig. This ignorance is apparently due to his feeble broom, his smooth, slender tail, very different from [[21]]the Languedocian’s, which is powerful and armed with knotty protuberances.

In the open air, the colony in the enclosure finds a lodging modelled by my care. Under the flat stones where I have contrived to outline a cell in the sandy earth, each of them at once disappears and labours to complete the work, as I perceived by the mound heaped upon the threshold. Wait a few more days and lift the stone: at a depth of three or four inches we see the lair, the burrow, occupied at night and open also by day, when the weather is bad. Sometimes a sudden bend widens the recess into a spacious chamber. In front of the mansion, immediately under the stone, is the entrance-hall.

This, by day, in the hours of blazing sunshine, is where the solitary prefers to be, in the blessed heat gently shaded by the stone. When turned out of this hot bath, his supreme felicity, he brandishes his knotty tail and swiftly retreats indoors, out of reach of the light and of our eyes. Replace the stone and come back fifteen minutes later: we shall find him once more on the threshold of the cavern, where it is so pleasant when a generous sun warms the roof. [[22]]

The cold season is thus passed in a very monotonous fashion. Both in the hamlet of the enclosure and the menagerie of the cages, the Scorpions go out neither by day nor at night, as I observe by the barricade of sand which remains untouched at the entrance to the home. Are they torpid? Not a bit of it! My frequent visits show them always ready for action, with curved and threatening tails. If the weather grows cooler, they retreat to the bottom of their burrows; if it is fine, they return to the threshold to warm their backs by the touch of the sunny stone. Nothing more for the moment: the anchorite’s life is spent in long spells of meditation, either in the cool moist crypt or under the porch of the house, behind the sandy barricade.

In the course of April a sudden change takes place. In the cages, the shelter of the potsherds is abandoned. Gravely the occupants roam around the arena, clamber up the trellis and stand there, even by day. Several of them sleep out and do not go home again, preferring the out-of-door distractions to soft slumbers in the alcove under ground. [[23]]

In the hamlet in the enclosure, events are more serious. Some of the inhabitants, selected from the smaller, leave the house at night and go wandering without my knowing what becomes of them. I expect to see them return at the end of their stroll, for no other part of the paddock has stones to suit them. Well, not one comes home; all that have gone have disappeared for good. Soon the big ones also display the same vagabond mood; and at last the emigration becomes so active that a moment is at hand when I shall have nothing left of my free colony. Farewell to my lovingly cherished plans! The open-air community, on which I based my fondest hopes, becomes rapidly depopulated; its inhabitants make off, vanish I know not whither. All my seeking fails to recover a single one of the runaways.