While on an evening jungle walk in Monteverde — the first I’ve ever done — I became aware how useful ultraviolet is in spotting creatures in the dark. Look at how this scorpion “glows” under UV!
Once spotted, we turned our flashlights on the little guy, who was quite well camouflaged. He sat there quietly and let us take his photo and study him.
You can judge how venimous a scorpion by the size of its pincers. The smaller they are, the more poisonous the scorpion. Scorpions with larger pincers need them for defense and killing their prey because their venom alone doesn’t do it. Scorpions with large pincers have highly toxic venom and don’t need their pincers for killing — just eating. This guy has fairly small pincers so we kept our distance from him.
