Read Online The Flight of the Iguana by David Quammen - Free Book Online

trip, five minutes after having warned the other family members to be careful of scorpions. He reached for a boat cushion that had been drying on top of a bush. Whammo. That pattern seems to be typical. But considering both the number of scorpions and the number of people at large in the state of Arizona, sting incidents don’t happen nearly so often as they might. What makes scorpions a threat to humanity is no special bellicosity on the part of the scorpions but the fact that, because of their shy inconspicuousness, you don’t see them until it’s too late.
    They hide during the day, under bark or in rocky crevices or burrowed down into the sand, emerging nocturnally to hunt. They are discreet. If you have ever lain down in a sleeping bag on the warm Arizona earth, you have probably had a closer encounter with these creatures than you realized. Still, on visual evidence you might well conclude that they aren’t really there. Vivid remedy for any such happy illusion can be derived, it turns out, from another strange scorpion attribute: Under ultraviolet illumination, they glow in the dark. They fluoresce. Shine a black-light beam on them and (due to photochemical properties of the scorpion integument about which little seems to be known) they reflect back an eerie greenish-blue radiance. Like a zodiac image in garish neon except that the animal, and the sting, are quite real.
    Steve Prchal designed the live-scorpion exhibits at the Desert Museum. He tells of going out on collecting trips, sometimes to a hilly area cut by a certain gorgeous little hidden canyon, downnear the Mexican border west of Nogales. Like many collectors, he went at night and used an ultraviolet flashlight, shining his invisible beam along the steep walls of a wash. “It was like stars,” Prchal says. “It would scare the hell out of you to see how many you’d be sleeping with if you camped there.” He didn’t camp there, because he was too smart. I wasn’t, when I lived in those parts, so I did. Saw not a single scorpion. Carried no ultraviolet flashlight. Padded around on the gravel after dark in my stocking feet. Got an excellent night’s sleep. I believe that the phrase Thurber used, in a similar application, was “living in a fool’s paradise.”
    Curious about how others have fared among those great scorpion multitudes of the Arizona outback, I decided to consult a couple of postdoctoral desert rats. First I called one Doug Peacock, an eminent monkey-wrench environmentalist and authority on the wild behavior of grizzly bears and humans. Peacock, in his many years of crashing around the desert outback, has collected three scorpion stings, and he remembers them all rather vividly. The first time was the worst. He was tucked into his sleeping bag, somewhere out on the Cabeza Prieta wildlife refuge, and in the middle of the night he chanced to roll over, flopping his arm out blindly onto the sand. Whammo. This one may or may not have been C. sculpturatus —he didn’t get a look at the perpetrator—but the localized pain was ferocious and he went through a few hours of bad headache, nausea, and fever. The third time, out scouting for billboards to chain-saw or bridges to dynamite, he sat down in a clearing and laid his hand back for support—right on a scorpion, which went off like a mousetrap. Either because it was a less toxic species, or because by now Doug was growing immunized, or for some other unplumbable reason, in this case the effects were no worse than those from a bee sting. The second time was perhaps the most interesting. Again on a solo ramble across the Cabeza Prieta, he was sitting up late to read Moby Dick by the light of his campfire. He set the book down, tossed afew sticks on the fire, watched the sparks rise into black eternity, picked the book up, leaned back comfortably on an elbow, and whammo. In his annoyance he pummeled this one to death—in fact,