Scorpions

I don't know whether it is just the time of year, or if the place is always like this, but there seems to be a lot of scorpions around. Many are tiny, but there are some big ones that look like they could give a very nasty sting. We are three weeks into the five week course here at Playa Kamala, and about half of the residents have found them in their cabinas. They have been found, ominously, in the cabanas on either side of me, but I’ve yet to find one in mine. However, if we assume that most go unnoticed, then logically there are likely to be several in each cabana right now. I checked the internet as I thought I should know what to do if anybody gets bitten, but that just put the fear of god in me. We have to check inside shoes before we put them on, and there is always an air of trepidation when we need to root around inside a rucksack for clean clothes etc. Apparently they like to hide in dark places.

This bitch here just walked into the communal work room this evening, before we caught it in a plastic tub and removed it to a less dangerous place (for us). The coin in the box is a US dollar quarter that we put in to give an idea of scale, ditto for the mobile phone. Even when these things are potentially lethal, people don’t like the idea of just squashing them, and prefer to humanely remove them to places that we don’t congregate. However, when the one below turned up while we were eating dinner, the owner of the site caught it and removed the stinger from its tale. Without that it was harmless, but still pretty creepy to have it walk up your arm.

Scorpions are members of the arachnid family, of the genus: nasty bastards