ISSUE #13: The One Bug I Want to Hold in My Hand So Bad Please Let Me Do It

My least relatable content yet!

It’s the last Bugstack before Halloween, so I felt like finishing up this monthlong spooky series with something everyone but me will hate. And, you know, that’s fine. Even I will admit that sometimes the natural world is pretty horrifying. This (and the image above) is your final warning. In this week’s installment, we will meet a bug I have been darkly enamored with and disgusted by ever since I figured out that it existed. A bug that will have my friends saying, “You’re crazy for this one.” A bug that is so cursed looking Satan himself won’t let them into Hell. 

It’s the underworld’s number one sweetie, the tailless whip scorpion!

I love these things. I love them so much. I think I love them because they look so unlovable, like some accidental product of a cosmic joke (or nightmare) that was never supposed to exist. The truth is that they and their ancestors have existed since the Carboniferous Period, more than 300 million years ago—long before the appearance of most other forms of life we’d recognize. 

Tailless whip scorpions, also called whip spiders or cave spiders, are Arachnids that make up the order Amblypygi, and are neither scorpions nor spiders, but some other, third thing. They also have no whip appendage attached to their abdomen that actual whip scorpions have, so we’re batting zero here. They have no silk glands or fangs, preferring to hunt prey using a pair of oversized arms attached to their mouths called pedipalps, which have little barbed hands on each end that reach out and grab stuff running by. They walk on three pairs of legs, their fourth pair having basically adapted into a pair of antennae that delicately taptaptap all around them as they move through their environment—the “whips” that give them their name and are replacements for their eyes, which are very weak. They live in the jungled tropical and subtropical regions of the world, under leaf litter and on tree bark and inside caves, active only by night. 

I also love them because, despite looking so absolutely horrible, they’re completely harmless. Their bite isn’t venomous and their pedipalps, which they do use for defense, are akin to getting stuck by a thorn or a burr. They’re docile and easy to manage, which is why they’ve apparently become popular pets among bug collectors. Here is an extremely detailed and comprehensive overview of whip scorpion care, if you’re interested. Some species of Amblypygid have been found to exhibit social behavior (not really an Arachnid thing), able to recognize and communicate with their young during the time that juveniles will live near their mothers before venturing out on their own. Please scroll down to page 414 in this study for the image caption “Investigation of a lizard.”

Here’s something fun: Most of you have likely seen these before. Digital versions were used in the Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire movie during the scene where Barty Crouch/Mad-Eye Moody demonstrates the Unforgivable Curses (a scene I genuinely can’t watch). It’s sort of funny to me that whoever was in charge of creature design for this movie, instead of animating a “magical world spider” from scratch, decided to just use an animal that already exists. No one will ever know!

There are about 260 individual species of Amplypygid that have been described, a number that has more than doubled since the 1990s. This piece from Undark mentions a species found far from their normal range in northeast Italy, as well as another that has only been seen in the pipes of a museum in Rio de Janeiro—a taxonomic population boom that comes around not because these bugs are suddenly popping up everywhere, but because scientists are finally paying more attention to them. It’s like the old adage: If you go looking for tailless whip scorpions, you’ll find them. I am desperate to hold one in my hand, to feel its antennae-legs questing over my skin, forming a touch-picture of me inside a mind we are only just starting to understand. 

Happy Halloween!