As a lifelong Arizonan, my baptism by fire came when I was a kid. My parents bought a house that had been foreclosed on during the recession and to introduce us to scorpions, my dad sent my brother and me into the backyard with a hammer, Raid bug spray and a black light.
That first night, we came across 44 of the tiny arachnids. Only a few got away from us. We were merciless under that feverish desert moon, adopting a tag-and-smash tactical strategy. My brother would bathe them in poison that would kill them even if they got away, and I would grind them up as best I could, each cudgel coming down to send a fluorescent limb or tail flying through the violet air.
That may be a bit of a violent image, but you can’t mess around with Arizona bark scorpions. Barks — which are small, brutish and sand-colored — are the most venomous of the three types of scorpions found in the Sonoran Desert. They can climb walls and even hang from ceilings and can be found in high-up places like trees or beneath objects in small spaces.
Discovering one for the first time can be a harrowing ordeal, as one "newish" Phoenix resident recently found out. On Sunday, that person took to Reddit to solicit advice about neutralizing one of the crawlers found in a laundry room.
“It is still very much alive, and FAST!” the user wrote in despair. “How do I kill it? It's in a tight space, and I don't want it to escape under the dryer.”
Yes, the wicked appearance of an intruding scorpion is enough to paralyze the average new Arizonan, who isn’t always cut out for that sort of violence. The startled Redditor placed a paint can over it and wondered out loud how long it would take to die.
The answer: years.
“We caught one a few years ago, put it in a jar and put it in the freezer. Took it out a year later, and as soon as it warmed up a bit it started moving,” someone replied.
An Arizona bark scorpion flag displayed at Saguaro National Park BioBlitz Biodiversity Festival at in Tucson in October 2011.
Katja Schulz
Gotta smash 'em all
As one would imagine, there are plenty of ways to kill a scorpion, according to "The Internet." Replies to the Reddit post varied in level of detail from extensive to folksy.“I get combative with those things. Golf club’s make good scorpion smasher’s,” wrote one apostrophe-happy person.
“I slap em with my crocs,” said another.
But someone else noted the fault in the slap-a-doo tactic. Scorpion mothers carry their young on their backs, so resorting solely to physical force can be a mistake.
“My son did that," the anti-Croc-slap person wrote, "and hundreds of babies scattered out.”
Other Redditors offered solutions that were less gotta-smash-em-all violent and more extensive.
“If you have one scorpion, you may have more. The first step is to kill any potential food sources for scorpions like crickets or cockroaches,” wrote someone who goes by PrinzII. “If you have a Bug and Weed Mart by you, I would recommend hitting them up to get some good stuff to kill and ultimately repel them. Once you get rid of them, you may want to seal off any areas they may come through.”
Common tips for scorpion prevention include regular pest control treatments and sprinkling diatomaceous earth around the house to create a barrier scorpions dislike. But the playbook may be different when you actually find one.
One user waged an all-out war, employing a variety of Kevin McCallister-esque home protection tactics.
“How I handled an infestation of scorpions. Black light and a small hand shovel. Put down DTE around my property. Hunted them every night for about 2 weeks. Put down home barrier after not seeing any for a few days of hunt attempts. I reapply DTE every few months. Scorpions haven't shown themselves in quite some time,” wrote TheConboy22.
In a reply, someone noted philosophically, “Sometimes violence is the only solution.”
