THE LANGUEDOCIAN SCORPION: THE DWELLING

The Life of the Scorpion by Jean-Henri Fabre, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here . THE LANGUEDOCIAN SCORPION: THE DWELLING CHAPTER I. THE LANGUEDOCIAN SCORPION: THE DWELLING The Scorpion is an uncommunicative creature, secret in his practices and disagreeable to deal with, so that his history, apart from anatomical detail, amounts to little or nothing. The scalpel of the experts has made us acquainted with his organic structure; but no observer, as far as I know, has thought of interviewing him, with any sort of persistence, on the subject of his private habits. Ripped up, after being steeped in spirits of wine, he is very well-known; acting within the domain of his instincts, he is hardly known at all. And yet none of the segmented animals is more deserving of a detailed biography. He has at all times appealed to the popular imagination, even to the point of figuring among the signs of the zodiac. Fear made the gods, said Lucretius. Deified by terror, the Scorpion is immortalized in the sky by a constellation and in the almanac by the symbol for the month of October. I made the acquaintance of the Languedocian Scorpion (Scorpio occitanus, lat) half a century ago, in the Villeneuve hills, on the far side of the Rhone, opposite Avignon. When the thrice-blessed Thursday came, from morning till night I used to turn over the stones in quest of the Scolopendra, the chief subject of the thesis which I was preparing for my doctor’s degree. Sometimes, instead of that magnificent horror, the mighty Myriapod, I would find, under the raised stone, another and no less unpleasant recluse. It was he. With his tail turned over his back and a drop of poison gleaming at the end of the sting, he lay displaying his pincers at the entrance to a burrow. Br-r-r-r! Have done with the formidable creature! The stone fell back into its place. 1 Utterly tired out, I used to return from my excursions rich in Scolopendræ and richer still in those illusions which paint the future rose-colour when we first begin to bite freely into the bread of knowledge. Science! The witch! I used to come home with joy in my heart: I had found some Centipedes. What more was needed to complete my ingenuous happiness? I carried off the Scolopendræ and left the Scorpions behind, not without a secret feeling that a day would come when I should have to concern myself with them. Fifty years have elapsed; and that day has come. It behoves me, after the Spiders, his near neighbours in organization, to cross-examine my old acquaintance, chief of the Arachnids in our district. It so happens that the Languedocian Scorpion abounds in my neighbourhood; nowhere have I seen him so plentiful as on the Sérignan hills, with their sunny, rocky slopes beloved by the arbutus and the arborescent heath. There the chilly creature finds a sub-tropical temperature and also a sandy soil, easy to dig. This is, I think, as far as he goes towards the north. His favourite spots are the bare expanses poor in vegetation, where the rock, outcropping in vertical strata, is baked by the sun and worn by the wind and rain until it ends by crumbling into flakes. He is usually found in colonies at quite a distance from one another, as though the members of a single family, migrating in all directions, were becoming a tribe. It is not sociability, it is anything but that. Excessively intolerant and passionately devoted to solitude, they continually occupy their shelters alone. In vain do I seek them out: I never find two of them under the same stone; or, to be more accurate, when there are two, one is engaged in eating the other. We shall have occasion to see the savage hermit ending the nuptial festivities in this fashion. The lodging is very rough and ready. Let us turn over the stones, which are generally flat and fairly large. The Scorpion’s presence is indicated by a cavity as wide as the neck of a quart bottle and a few inches deep. In stooping, we commonly see the master of the house on the threshold of his dwelling, with his pincers outspread and his tail in the posture of defence. At other times, when he owns a deeper cell, the hermit is invisible. We have to use a small pocket-trowel to bring him out into the light of day. Here he is, lifting or brandishing his weapon. ’Ware fingers! I take him by the tail with a pair of tweezers and slip him, head foremost, into a stout paper bag, which will isolate him from the other prisoners. The whole of my formidable harvest goes into a tin box. In this way both the collecting and the transport are carried out with perfect safety. Before housing my animals, let me briefly describe them. The common Black Scorpion (Scorpio europæus, linn.) is known to all. He frequents the dark holes and corners near our dwelling-places; on rainy days in autumn he makes his way indoors, sometimes even under our bed-clothes. The odious animal causes us more fright than damage. Although not rare in my present abode, the results of its visits are never in the least serious. The weird beast, overrated in reputation, is repulsive rather than dangerous. Much more to be feared and much less well-known generally is the Languedocian Scorpion, resident in the Mediterranean provinces. Far from seeking our habitations, he lives apart, in the untilled solitudes. Beside the Black Scorpion he is a giant who, when full-grown, measures three to three and a half inches in length. His colouring is the yellow of faded straw. The tail, which is really the animal’s abdomen, is a series of five prismatic segments, shaped like little kegs whose staves meet in undulating ridges resembling strings of beads. Similar cords cover the arms and fore-arms of the nippers and divide them into long facets. Others meander along the back like the joints of a cuirass whose seams are adorned with a freakish milled edging. These bead-like protuberances give the Scorpion’s armour a fierce and robustious appearance which is characteristic of the Languedocian Scorpion. It is as though the animal were fashioned out of chips hewn with an adze. The tail ends in a sixth joint, which is smooth and vesicular. This is the gourd in which the poison, a formidable fluid resembling water in appearance, is elaborated and held in reserve. A dark, curved and very sharp sting completes the apparatus. A pore, visible only under the lens, opens at some distance from the point. Through this the venomous liquid is injected into the puncture. The sting is very hard and very sharp. Holding it between my finger-tips, I can push it through a sheet of cardboard as easily as if I were using a needle. Owing to its bold curve, the sting points downwards when the tail is extended in a straight line. To make use of his weapon, therefore, the Scorpion must raise it, turn it over and strike upwards. This, in fact, is his invariable practice. In order to pink the adversary subdued by the nippers, the tail is arched over the animal’s back and brought forward. The Scorpion, for that matter, is almost always in this position: whether in motion or at rest, he arches his tail over his back. He very rarely drags it behind him, relaxed into a straight line. The pincers, those buccal hands recalling the claws of the Crayfish, are organs of battle and of information. When moving forwards, the Scorpion holds them in front of him, with the two fingers opened, to take stock of objects encountered on the way. When he wants to stab an enemy, the pincers seize the foe and hold him motionless, while the sting is brought into play over the assailant’s back. Lastly, when he wishes to nibble a tit-bit at leisure, they serve as hands and hold the prey within the reach of the mouth. They are never used for walking, for stability or for excavation. That is the function of the real legs. These are suddenly truncated and end in a group of short, movable claws, faced by a short, fine point, which, to some extent, serves as a thumb. The stump is finished off with rough bristles. The whole constitutes an excellent grapnel, which explains the Scorpion’s aptitude for roaming over the trellis-work of my wire-gauze covers, for making long halts there, motionless and upside down, and, lastly, for scrambling along a vertical wall, notwithstanding his clumsiness and weight. Underneath, just behind the legs, are the combs, those strange organs, an exclusive attribute of the Scorpions. They owe their name to their structure, consisting of a long row of plates, set close together like the teeth of a hair-comb. The anatomists are inclined to ascribe to them the functions of a clutch intended to hold the couple bound together at the moment of pairing. We will leave it at that until we are better informed, provided that the specimens which I propose to rear tell me their secret. On the other hand, I know of another function, which is very easily observed when the Scorpion meanders, belly uppermost, over the wire trellis of my dish-covers. When he is at rest, the two combs are laid flat on the abdomen, behind the legs. The moment he begins to walk, they stick out on either side, at right angles to the body, like the naked wings of an unfledged nestling. They sway gently up and down, reminding us of the balancing-pole of an inexperienced rope-dancer. If the Scorpion stops, they are at once retracted, fall back upon the belly and cease to move: if he resumes his walk, they are at once extended and again begin their gentle oscillation. The animal therefore seems to use them at least as a balancing mechanism. The eyes, eight in number, are divided into three groups. In the middle of that weird segment which is at once head and thorax, two large and very convex eyes gleam side by side, reminding us of the Lycosa’s superb lenses; they are apparently in both instances for use at close range, because of their great convexity. A ridge of protuberances arranged in a wavy line serves as an eyebrow and gives them a fierce appearance. Their axis, which is almost horizontal, can hardly allow them more than lateral vision. The same remark applies to two other groups, each composed of three eyes, which are very small and placed much farther forward, nearly on the edge of the sudden truncation that forms an arch above the mouth. On both right and left the three tiny lenses are set in a short straight line, their axis pointing laterally. On the whole, both the small and the large eyes are so arranged that it can by no means be easy for the animal to obtain a clear view ahead. Extremely short-sighted and squinting outrageously, how does the Scorpion manage to steer himself? Like a blind man, he gropes his way: he guides himself with his hands, that is to say, his pincers, which he carries outstretched, with the fingers open, to sound the space before him. Watch two Scorpions wandering in the open air in my rearing-cages. A meeting would be disagreeable, sometimes even dangerous for them. Nevertheless, the one behind always goes ahead as though he did not perceive his neighbour; but, as soon as he touches the other ever so little with his pincers, he at once gives a sudden start, a sign of surprise and uneasiness, followed at once by a retreat and a change of direction. To recognize the irascible one thus overhauled, he had to touch him. Let us now instal our prisoners. I shall never learn all I want to know by turning over stones and making chance observations on the adjacent hills: I must resort to keeping the animals in captivity, the only manner of inducing them to reveal their domestic habits. What rearing-method shall I employ? One in particular appeals to me, one which will leave the creature its full liberty, which will relieve me of the cares of catering and which will enable me to inspect my captives at any hour of the day, from year’s end to year’s end. This seems to me an excellent means, far superior to the others, so much so that I reckon on a magnificent success. It is a question of establishing within my own grounds, in the open air, a hamlet of Scorpions, by cunning securing for them the same conditions of well-being which they enjoyed at home. In the first days of January, I found my colony right at the end of the harmas, in the quiet corner exposed to the sun and sheltered from the north wind by a thick rosemary-hedge. The ground, a mixture of pebbles and red clayey soil, is unsuitable. Considering the temperament of my charges, great stay-at-homes from what I can see, this is easily remedied. For each of my colonists I dig a hole, of a gallon or two in capacity, and fill it with sandy earth similar to that of the original site. I pack this earth lightly, which will give it the consistence needed for digging without land-slips, and in it I contrived a short entrance-passage, the beginning of the excavation which the Scorpion will not fail to make in order to obtain a cell in conformity with his tastes. A wide flat stone covers and overlaps the whole. Opposite the passage of my own making, I scoop out a hollow: this is the entrance-door. In front of the hollow I place a Scorpion, taken that moment from the paper bag in which he has just been conveyed from the mountain. Seeing a retreat similar to those with which he is familiar, he goes in of his own accord and does not show himself again. In this way I establish the hamlet, consisting of some twenty inhabitants, all adults. The dwellings, placed at a suitable distance from one another, to avoid the quarrels liable to occur among neighbours, are arranged in a row on a stretch of ground cleared with the rake. It will be easy for me to observe events at a glance, even at night, by the light of a lantern. As to food, I need not trouble about that. My guests will find their own provisions, for the spot is quite as well-stocked with game as that from which I brought them. The colonies in the paddock are not enough. Certain observations call for minute attention which is incompatible with the disturbances out of doors. A second menagerie is set up, this time on the large table in my study, a table around which I have already covered and am still covering so many miles in pursuit of stubborn knowledge. Bring up the big earthenware pans, my usual apparatus! Filled with sifted sandy earth, each receives two broad potsherds, which, half buried, form a ceiling and represent the refuge under the stones. The establishment is surrounded by the dome of a wire-gauze cover. Here I house the Scorpions, two by two and of different sexes, as far as I am able to judge. No outward characteristic that I know of distinguishes the males from the females. I take the big bellied specimens for females and the less obese for males. As age intervenes with its variations of stoutness, mistakes are inevitable, unless I first open the subject’s paunch, a procedure which would cut short any attempt at rearing. We will allow ourselves to be guided by size, since we have no other means of judging, and house the Scorpions two by two, one corpulent and brown, the other less obese and of a lighter colour. There are certain to be some actual couples among the number. Here are a few details for the benefit of whoso may care one day to take up similar studies. An animal-breeder’s trade calls for apprenticeship; the experience of others is not unhelpful, especially when the animals in question are dangerous to deal with. It would never do inadvertently to lay a hand on one of my present prisoners who had escaped from his cage and lay skulking among the utensils littering the table. Serious precautions must be taken by those who propose to spend whole years in the company of such neighbours. They are as follows: The trellis-work dome is fitted deep into the pan and touches the earthenware bottom. Between the two there is a circular space which I fill with clay soil, packed while wet. So fitted, the wire cover is quite immovable; the apparatus runs no risk of coming to pieces and yielding a way of escape. On the other hand, if the Scorpions dig deeply on the edges of the earthy space at their disposal, they come upon either the wire-gauze or the pottery, both of which are insuperable obstacles. So we need have no fear of escape. 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 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, 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 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. 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. 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. Great ill calls for great remedies. I need an insuperable precinct, much more extensive than that of the cages, which establishments do not give scope to the pastimes of my specimens. I have a forcing-frame in which some fleshy plants are stored during the winter. It goes to a depth of three feet into the ground. The brick work is plastered and smoothed with all the care that the mason’s trowel and wet rag can give it. I cover the bottom with fine sand and large flat stones distributed here and there. Having made these preparations, I instal inside the frame, each under his own stone, the remaining Scorpions, and those which I have captured this very morning complete my collection. With the aid of this vertical barrier shall I this time retain my specimens and see what interests me so greatly? I shall see nothing at all. Next morning, all of them, old and new, have disappeared. There were twenty of them: and not one remains. Had I reflected ever so little, I should have expected this. At the season of persistent rain, in the autumn, how often have I not found the Black Scorpion hiding in the crevices of the windows? Fleeing the dampness of his usual retreats, the dark corners of the yards, he has clambered up to me by scaling the front wall to the height of the first storey. The slight roughness of the plaster was enough to enable his grapnels to make the perpendicular ascent. Despite his corpulence, the Languedocian is as good a climber as the Black Scorpion. I have a proof of it before my eyes. A barrier three feet high, as smooth as a wash of common mortar can make it, has not stopped one of my captives. In a single night, the whole band has decamped from the frame. Rearing in the open air, even within walls, is recognized as being impracticable: the lack of discipline in the flock nullifies the shepherd’s devices. One resource alone remains, that of internment under cover. Thus the year ends, with some ten pans standing on the large table in my study. Out of doors is prohibited: those night prowlers, the cats, seeing something move about in my appliances, would upset everything. On the other hand, the population is restricted under each cover and amounts to two or three inhabitants at most. There is no space. In the absence of a sufficiency of neighbours and also of the violent exposure to the sun which they enjoyed on their native hills, the prisoners on my table seem smitten with home-sickness and hardly respond to my expectations. Cowering under their potsherds or hanging to the trellis, most of them slumber, dreaming of liberty. The small results which I obtain from my bored specimens is far from satisfying me. I want something more than this. The close of the year is spent in gleaning petty facts and making plans for a better establishment. The outcome of these plans is a glazed prison whose panes will give no hold to the grapnels and will make climbing impossible. The joiner builds me a frame, the glazier completes the work. I myself varnish the woodwork, so as to make the uprights very slippery. The structure looks like four window-frames placed side by side and put together to form a rectangle. The bottom is a flooring with a layer of sand. A lid covers it altogether when the weather is cold and especially when the rain threatens a flood, which would have disastrous effects on this undrained ground. It is raised more or less high according to the state of the day. The enclosure has ample room for two dozen chambers, each with its potsherd and its occupant. Moreover, wide alleys and spacious cross-roads allow long walks to be taken without hindrance. Well, at the very moment when I believe myself to have solved the housing-question satisfactorily, I perceive that the glazed park will not retain its population long, if I do not invent a remedy. The glass stops short any attempt at scaling: for lack of adhesive sandals, the Scorpions cannot grip a surface of this kind. They flounder against the panes, it is true, and raise themselves to their full length on the support of their tail: an excellent buttress, but they have hardly left the ground before they fall back again, heavily. Things go wrong in respect of the wooden uprights, though these are made as narrow as possible and varnished with particular care. The stubborn climbers clamber little by little along these smooth tracks; they halt from time to time, clinging to the greasy pole, and then resume the difficult ascent. I surprise some who have reached the top and are on the point of escaping. My tweezers replace them in the fold. As the ventilation of the home demands that the lid should remain raised during the greater part of the day, the place would soon be wholly deserted if I did not see to it. I think of greasing the uprights with a mixture of oil and soap. This restrains the fugitives slightly, without succeeding in stopping them. Their delicate little claws manage to sink into the pores of the wood through the substance coating it and the ascent begins anew. Let us try a non-porous obstacle. I hang the walls with glazed paper. This time the difficulty is insurmountable for the big, pot-bellied ones; it is not quite so effective with regard to the others, who, being nimbler in their gait, try to hoist themselves up and often succeed in doing so. I get the better of them only by glossing the glazed paper with soot. Henceforth there are no more escapes, though attempts at flight continue. Coming after the experiment with the forcing-frames, these feats of prowess on slippery surfaces tell us all there is to learn about an aptitude which the animal’s corpulence was far from leading us to suspect. Like his black colleague who enters our houses, the Languedocian Scorpion is a skilled climber. Behold me then the owner of three establishments, each possessing its advantages and its defects: the free colony at the end of the paddock; the wire-gauze cages in my study; and lastly the glazed rock-garden. I shall consult them turn and turn about, especially the last. To the evidence supplied in this manner we will add the rare data gathered from stones turned over on the original sites. The Scorpions’ luxurious Crystal Palace, now the leading curiosity of my home, stands all the year round in the open air, on a bench at a few steps from my door. Not a member of the family passes it without a glance. Taciturn creatures, shall I succeed in making you speak? About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Jean-Henri Fabre (2021). The Life of the Scorpion. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/66744/pg66744-images.html This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. 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