Scorpion is known as a dangerous and poisonous creature. They are found at warm places and in forests, and are very close to the groups of spiders, mites and ticks. As you can see in scorpion pictures, they have four pairs of legs, making them eight in total instead of six, as you see in other insects. They are black and brown in color.

Lifespan & Behavior

Not all of the scorpions are poisonous but those, having poison, are dangerous enough for humans as their poison can cause death. Scorpions are carnivores with a lifespan of 3 years at minimum and 8 years at maximum. Whatever the scorpion types may be, all are equally scary and dangerous for humans. The size of a scorpion is almost equal to a cup of tea or less.

Scorpion Habitat and History

Scorpions can be easily found all over the world except some islands, for example, New Zealand, Greenland and Antarctic region. If we explore the historical data, it can be seen that scorpions existed 400 years back as well. The scorpions are scientifically classified in the Kingdom Animalia, Phylum Arthropoda and Class Arachnida.

Interesting Scorpion Facts

• It is one of the scorpion facts that they can differentiate well between the day time and night.
• They are active during the nights and remain hidden in the daylight.
• That's the reason that a scorpion may unintentionally hide in your clothes, shoes or corner of the bed, but it can be dangerous too due to the poison it carries.
• They like to have mites and other insects in their diet.
• They use to capture their prey with the help of stings at their backs.
• The sting is also used as defense against various attackers and larger animals.
• Scorpions have very strong senses in terms of sensing their prey.
• They find their prey with the movements, smell and vibrations of the feet.
• Once they catch their prey, they try to grab it with their talons but if it becomes uncontrollable, they inject the poison to finally make the prey powerless.
• One large prey is enough for scorpions for a couple of days.
• Another interesting fact about scorpions is that they are capable to limit their hunger to a certain extent.
• This ability of minimizing their hunger gives them a real benefit at the places where they cannot come outside at nights on daily basis.
• The female scorpion gives birth to a baby scorpion(s); one or two at a time.
• These young scorpions use their mothers’ back to ride on till they become strong enough to protect themselves.

Types of Scorpions

There are more than a thousand extant species of scorpions. These species are further categorized in the families of Buthidae, Hemiscorpiidae and Scorpionidae. The Buthidae family has more than 800 scorpion species that are found in tropical and subtropical lands except New Zealand and Antarctica. The Hemiscorpiidae family has seventy-two scorpion species that can be seen in tropical and subtropical areas except North America. The Scorpionidae family has 240 scorpion species. One of the scorpions, with a flat tail, is known as African Androctonus australis that is highly dangerous to humans because it is capable of injecting very large amount of poison into its prey's body that can lead to its death.

Coming to the other side of the picture, it is said that not all scorpions are dangerous. You can keep some of them as your pets as well, such as Hadrurus hirsutus. It is a desert scorpion and can prove to be a good pet, but its sting can be very painful if injected. The only thing you have to keep in mind about this scorpion pet is its aggressive nature. Therefore, do keep them but don't make them aggressive, so that you don't have the taste of a painful sting. Some more types of scorpions can be categorized as albino scorpions, black scorpions, blue scorpions, emperor scorpions, death stalker scorpions, lesser brown scorpions, pseudo scorpions, red claw scorpions, red scorpions, sand scorpions, tailless whip scorpions and whip scorpions. It is quite obvious that all of these scorpions are classified either according to the difference of their colors or other features they possess.

Scorpion Pictures

Once you log on to the internet, you can get a long series of scorpions' pictures. You can download as many pictures as required and keep them with you forever. Make sure to download the pictures from reliable sources, so that you do not download any Trojan into your system.