I love my gardening friends. They find the neatest things. Today the boys and I walked over to my friend Chris’ place to take her a plant, and she was excited to show us something she’d never seen before. As the boys fished snails out of her water feature (which makes them very happy), she showed me a horrific looking creature in an ice cream container. She told me it was a wind scorpion.

What is a Wind Scorpion?

I’d never even heard of one before, let alone seen one. Chris said a friend of hers in town had a practical invasion of them years ago. This is a scary thought, given that they are the epitome of creepy, but from what I read they will do that sometimes depending on the food source. Chris found this one when she was hoeing in her garden. (I told her if she hears me scream sometime, I probably found one, too.) They’re called wind scorpions because they scurry along quickly (running like the wind), although another name for them is the sunspider.

The wind scorpion is really not either a scorpion or a spider. It’s an arachnid, in the Solifugae order. It’s truly a unique little creature. This one is about an inch long, although they can range from a half inch to three inches long. It has 8 legs and 2 pedipalps that are used for feeling and grasping its prey, which is mainly insects that it can run down because of their quickness. (Some species can even capture small lizards.)

Cont.

Wind scorpions also have very strong jaws to crunch up their meal, and I truly hope earwigs are on their menu as we have plenty of them around here. The good news is, despite their frightening appearance, they are relatively harmless. That said, those jaws can inflict a nasty bite if you try to the handle the wind scorpion. But at least there’s no venom to cause more serious problems.

Wind scorpions don’t live very long. The females lay eggs (up to 50) in a protected burrow lined with a type of silk, and she hangs around to protect them. You wouldn’t want to get between this mama and her eggs. Once hatched, they only live a year, and they typically only have one generation per year. I’m sure this is one reason I haven’t seen one before. There just aren’t that many of them.

With what I found out about the wind scorpion, I decided to let it go in the backyard. Even though it looks like something out of a bad dream, the windscorpion is one of the good guys in the pest battle. And with baby grasshoppers on the way, I need all of the help I can get.