By Laura Hunt Miller
It was the summer of 1962. Means Lake was frequented by happy families and fishermen year-round, but my dad spent each visit in fear of reaching out to put his shoes on, and finding something lurking inside the shadow of its soles…a terror that to this day sends shivers down many a grown man’s spine: a scorpion.
The striped bark scorpion, Centruroides vittatus, is the only scorpion species native to Louisiana. As the most widespread scorpion species in the United States, it ranges from the Rio Grande to the Mississippi, and as far north as Nebraska. It is a crevice dweller, living under rocks, surface debris, woodpiles, and the porches of old rural structures.
In my dad’s childhood, the scorpion was ubiquitous, unrelenting in its sting, even to the small hands that might make the mistake of getting too close. In my childhood, it was nonexistent.
I spent a great deal of my younger years outside around north Louisiana. I flipped over rocks looking for worms and roly-polies. I played with snakes in the woods, crawfish in the ditches, turtles in the creek, mice in the pasture, centipedes and millipedes under every piece of debris, lizards around the house, and spiders in every corner. I explored falling-down barns, built dollhouses inside blackberry bushes, played hide-and-seek in the dark, and spent my college years living in old houses that would have been perfect scorpion habitats. I came across dozens of species of insects, arachnids, nematodes, fish, reptiles, amphibians and mammals, but not one of them was a scorpion.
The official record says I should have found one. LSU AgCenter entomologist Christopher Carlton has described striped bark scorpions as “common in upland central and northwest Louisiana.” But the “common” designation comes without published density data, recent survey dates, or any indication the looking happened north of Alexandria.
Now it may just be a satirical local belief that South Louisiana institutions have a habit of doing little research above I-10 and calling it thorough, but until somebody walks around Lincoln Parish at night with a blacklight and publishes concrete proof they found scores of scorpions here, I will remain skeptical of the claims.
So I am left with the mystery; one generation of a family that lived in fear of scorpions, the next cannot find one to save our lives.
My working theory is that scorpions were driven out, or down, by a devious and even worse foreign invader, that scourge we all know and beware of, Solenopsis invicta.
The fire ant arrived through the port of Mobile, Alabama, in the late 1930s, in soil used as ballast on cargo ships from South America. Its spread began slowly, but when the Second World War ended and the suburban housing boom began, sod, sod, sod galore was in demand for manicured lawns across southern Americana.
Fire ants gleefully hitched a free ride in every shipment of St. Augustine out of Gulf Coast nurseries to new subdivisions. In one generation, children went from being able to run blissfully through their grassy yards, to being laid siege to by armies of biting fire that decimated any exposed legs and feet that crossed their paths.
They were a blow to local wildlife as well. Research on fire ant impacts across the South has documented declines in ground-nesting birds, small mammals, reptiles, and amphibians. Studies on the eastern fence lizard, Sceloporus undulatus, have been particularly damning: when researchers experimentally removed fire ants from enclosures, the number of juvenile lizards surviving to join the adult population went up by roughly 60 percent. The research continually reveals: where fire ants take over, juvenile ground-dwelling animal populations suffer.
So how could fire ants do this to a stinging predator like a scorpion? If we learned anything from Honey I Shrunk the Kids, it’s that scorpions and ants do not get along. But surely it would take more than a resource rivalry to reduce a species to a field note. The likeliest mechanism is more disturbing than a battle to the death.
Scorpions molt, shedding their exoskeleton five to seven times before reaching adulthood. After each shedding, a scorpion is left soft-bodied and immobile for hours. A molting juvenile scorpion within foraging distance of a fire ant colony functionally becomes a funeral. In this case, a feast of funerals.
Centipedes can outrun a colony. Millipedes secrete cyanide compounds from their armored sides to protect themselves. Roaches outbreed everything. Yellow jackets live inside defended colonies and sting back. But a soft, slow scorpion halfway out of its old exoskeleton is just a grounded buffet open to any takers.
The scorpion wouldn’t be outcompeted. It would be executed mid-molt, an arachnid genocide of generations of young scorpions. Dang Mother Nature.
Whatever happened, the replacement in our region was so aggressively complete that the scorpions of my dad’s childhood became nothing more than a rumor in mine. Nobody filed a missing-arachnid report. Nobody cried out justice for the scorpions. They were just gone, and most of the world carried on oblivious to their absence.
Now I flip over rocks to help my kids find roly-polies and the like. I warn them about black widows, stinging bugs, and fire ants, but never scorpions. I would prefer to be wary of rock-flipping and shoe-donning rather than having to diligently distribute poison while carefully navigating every step across the backyard. But here we are, living with this species firmly ingrained in our lawns.
If you have seen a striped bark scorpion in north Louisiana, recently or otherwise, I would love to know! Where, when, what kind of structure, what time of year. It would be wonderful to find some scorpions that evaded the fire ant volley, or to find that they have been hiding marvelously in plain sight, mysterious only in that they have stopped occupying abandoned shoes.
And if the scorpions really are mostly gone from our area, then I wonder, what else have we lost that we haven’t realized we are missing yet?
