Baby Vinegaroons, Anyone?
Baby Vinegaroons, Anyone?
Named after the acid they can fire out of their backsides, vinegaroons look scary but are actually adorable.
Okay, so I’m not going to pretend like the vinegaroon is going to replace sloths or narwhals as everyone’s favorite critter. Frankly, they look like alien spawn. But looks can be deceiving!
Let’s back up. Vinegaroons are a kind of creepy crawly native to dry, desert ecotypes around the world. You might think they only exist in the Sahara or some other far-off place, but in fact these animals can be found from Florida to Arizona and south through Mexico. While they’re sometimes called whip scorpions, they’re not actually scorpions. Nor are they spiders. Instead, vinegaroons belong to their very own branch of arachnids known as the Uropygi (pronounced Yer-oh-pie-jee).
Can I post a picture so you can take a peep? I don’t want to scare you arachnophobes away, so I’m going to start you off with a baby vinegaroon, which looks like it’s wearing pink boxing mitts, says Justin O. Schmidt, entomologist and author of a super cool book called Sting of the Wild.
Okay, are you still here? Awesome!
The thing about vinegaroons is they’ve got a lot going on. Legs everywhere, abdomens juicy like a jelly donut, and straight-up crab claws on the front, with a whip-like organ on the rump. But friends, you have nothing to fear from these creatures!
Unless you happen to be a cricket or beetle. In which case, you should be terrified.
Vinegaroons are sit-and-wait predators, says Schmidt. Which means they barely ever move, but rather bide their time waiting for dinner to wander by. They are also almost exclusively nocturnal. Combine those two facts and you’ll understand why most people will never encounter these animals unless they go looking for them.
Schmidt, of course, is someone who goes looking for vinegaroons. In fact, he just published a few papers about the critters which I’m writing about for National Geographic. (I’ll send you a link in another email or two down the line.)
This is actually the second time I’ve had the pleasure to interview Schmidt. The first was for a Smithsonian story about how he got himself stung by insects more than 1,000 times for science. The book I linked to above? In it, he ranks every sting on a scale of 1 to 4, which is now known throughout the scientific world as the Schmidt Sting Index. But he also includes a description of every sting that reads like a wine list. Here’s a short selection:
Sweat bees (Index 1): “Light and ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.”
Bullet ant (Index 4): “Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch nail embedded in your heel.”
Jack jumper ant (Index 2): “The oven mitt had a hole in it when you pulled the cookies out of the oven.”
Artistic wasp (Index 2): “Pure, then messy, then corrosive. Love and marriage followed by divorce.”
Giant paper wasp (Index 3): “There are gods, and they do throw thunderbolts. Poseidon just rammed his trident into your chest.”
Warrior wasp (Index 4): “Torture. You are chained in the flow of an active volcano. Why did I start this list?”
Of course, when interviewing the King of Sting, you know I had to ask him if he’d ever had the displeasure to be caught in the face with vinegaroon acid, which the arachnids spray from their backsides when threatened. Schmidt said his glasses have protected him from the worst of it, but that when the defensive secretion (which smells like vinegar, and after which the creatures are named) gets into your eyes, “it burns like the devil.”
In other words, the stuff works wonders, and it’s probably why most animals won’t even attempt to tango with a vinegaroon. It’s also likely why those that do almost never choose to do so a second time.
Okay, so now you know North America is home to a wild looking arachnid known as the vinegaroon, that despite the ability to spray a weak acid from its butt-area, is almost totally harmless to humans who do not go poking their faces under rocks in the desert. But lest you leave here not totally in love with these little click-clacks, I want you to know two things.
Vinegaroon courtship, which Schmidt has described for the first time, lasts a whopping 13 hours and is made up of various dances, gentle caresses, tight squeezes, and a degree of teamwork lots of human couples can only hope to aspire to. And now that I’ve read about it, I kinda want to make “Vinegaroons Are For Lovers” bumper stickers.
Unlike lots of wild animals, vinegaroons are really good mommies! First, the females will protect the eggs until they hatch into dozens of rascally ‘roonies (which is a term I just coined). But then, she will also feed them, says Schmidt, who has seen the moms bring back juicy caterpillars and crickets and watched as the babies hang all over mom, chowing down at the same time as she does.
Alright, that’s all from me for this week! I hope you enjoyed learning about a very understudied and seriously misunderstood arachnid. Oh, and buck up, because next week we’re talking about white-tailed deer!