America's Strangest Scorpion is an Acid Spraying Nightmare

If I told you there was a creature even scarier than spiders or scorpions, would you believe me? When darkness falls in the desert, there is an arachnid clad in black armor, armed with terrifying spiked claws that can spray a potent acid from its tail. Seems too crazy to be true, right? Well, I'm Spencer Hoffman, and I'm headed to southern Arizona to find out the truth about the incredibly strange whip scorpion. The Sonoran Desert is home to some of the strangest wildlife in North America. Life adapted to the arid conditions, resulting in some of the most unique survival strategies in the world. The most venomous reptiles and arthropods are right at home in the gravelly slopes. Alien insects make their homes under the rocks and boulders that tumble down from the And when the sun goes down, nightmarish predators slink from the shadows to begin their hunt. Huge camel spider. You got a container? Okay, okay. Somebody hold my camera. Oh, he jumped! A really mad one. You guys are crazy, man. All right, so this is actually your first ever camel spider, right? Well, one this size for sure. I've had a couple spawn in my bathroom, but none of them looked like that. This has got to be the angriest one I've ever seen. Well, he definitely took it out on me. That was my first time getting bit by one. They actually use those front terrifying looking chelicerae, claw-like mouth parts, to tear their prey limb from limb. You know, in my own twisted reality, I think he's kind of cute. I love the way they hold up their front legs, and they're like very rounded on the tips. They're a lot more sensory. They have these very, almost like when you rub your hand on a static thing, and your hair stands straight up. Very bristly hairs that it uses to sense the environment, and so really, it just kind of looks like it wants to give a nice cuddly hug. Painful one at that. I have never seen one. He's like threat posing in the container. That is ridiculous. They are lightning quick, running around your house when they come in, and then when they get cornered, flare those front legs, have those huge choppers just open, gaping, ready to nail you. When they're behaving, I actually think they look kind of funny, because they have that really fuzzy looking appearance. They almost look like a sock puppet or like a muppet or something with those little googly eyes on top. When he's doing that, he ain't happy. See, unlike something like a spider or a scorpion who actually has venom to back up what they're selling, this guy's like the chihuahua in the front yard. He can't actually hurt you, but he's gonna make you think that he is all business. Absolutely crazy out here in the Sonoran Desert. Our first really cool arachnid tonight, so that's a good sign that stuff is moving. I'm joined today by my friend and fellow wildlife filmmaker Donnie Kelly-Currens from The Wild Files on the hunt for strange desert arachnids. We've both been trying to track down vinegaroons for years, but the desert hasn't given us much luck. These elusive, frightening creatures look like space aliens, but they're actually arachnids. We know spiders, and we know scorpions, but the arachnid clade is actually home to a few other groups too, each more bizarre than the last. The harvestmen creep around the forest floor on their long, slender stilts. Schizomydons scuttle around in the darkness of the leaf litter in the subtropics. The whip scorpions of the order Amplopygiae lurk in wait, their long, sweeping legs scanning for prey to snatch with their horrifying claws. The arachnids definitely get scarier than your typical household spiders, and the one we're after today is like a fantasy monster. Covered in armor plating with a black matte finish, the vinegaroons of the order Uropygiae are slow, nocturnal hunters. They prowl the ground of the desert, sniffing out prey with their long, sensory legs, and use their lobster-like claws to tear them to shreds. Somewhere in the darkness of southern Arizona, one of these monstrous arthropods is lurking, and we are gonna find it. All right, so we've made it to our first little pull-off. Oh yeah, logs, rocks. Yeah, I think this is our spot. It's time to get flipping. The vinegaroon is a nocturnal, active hunter. This is useful to us. While at night, these frightening arthropods are roaming the ground of their mountain habitats, the hot sun will bake them alive during the day, and these creatures are too big to shuffle into the cracks and rock surfaces like true scorpions can, so they use those medieval-looking claws to burrow underneath rocks instead. The mountains are full of rocks, logs, and all sorts of cover. Under one of them, we are sure to find an otherworldly arachnid. All right, three, two, do that all yourselves pretty much. Like not even a beetle, this thing. Scam. We weren't seeing much other than scorpions and ants. With the sliver of cellular service I had, I could see that the hotspot for vinegaroons was actually further up the road. Turns out, the hotspot is actually a research station where biologists congregate to study the local reptiles and invertebrates. As we pulled into the parking lot, we got our first sign that the vinegaroons were actually here, and it came in the form of a harvester ant dragging a dismembered claw across the dirt path. So after a long day of hiking, we've found our way to the southwest research station, and one of our volunteers is actually helping us poke around for the vinegaroons and centipedes. Now again, I don't know for sure what we're going to see. The luck we've been having today has not been great, but who knows? Who knows? Maybe further back here, I will remain optimistic until the sun goes down and then we have to work our way back to Tucson. Further back in here, the habitat is entirely different than the entrance to the mountain. Less than a mile up the road, the elevation is high enough that the ecosystem is totally different. Different enough for vinegaroons to go from vanishingly rare to surprisingly easy to find. Yo, look at that thing! Wow! Wow, look at that thing! I'm gonna wait for Donnie to get over here. I can't wait for him to see this. Oh man, I'm so excited to see one of these. Is this your first time seeing one? Yeah, ever. Oh, I thought you'd seen them before. Not these. Look at that thing. That's a monster from like a horror movie. Donnie, I got a present for you. Your eyes. I want to see if I can get it to spray me, honestly. Yeah, that's gonna, it's guaranteed it hits me instead. It won't be too bad, it might burn a little bit. What makes the vinegaroon so special is that incredible spraying ability. The name vinegaroon isn't an accident. When threatened, they actually release a very pungent smell, a lot like vinegar. Where vinegar is usually about five percent acetic acid, these guys shoot a potent cocktail of over 85 percent. Enough to really burn your eyes. And let me tell you firsthand, it hurts if it gets in any cuts. You're probably asking, Spencer, that's got to be a pretty gnarly way to kill their prey, right? And the truth is, their spraying ability really isn't for predation. Those front, crazy looking claws are. Their acid spray is entirely for defense. If large lizards or mammals are messing with them in the desert, one spritz to the face and they'll back off. Between the strong smell and the burning sensation, if the crazy appearance of this creature wasn't enough to get things to leave it alone, that chemical defense definitely will. These guys are absolutely insane. Let's see how Donnie reacts to seeing his first one. That's like, this is one I didn't know that I would ever like get to see in Arizona because it's like so hard to get in most of the places you'd normally go to. We drove three hours out. I flipped it right on the board. What? Dude. Did you want one of these as well? Yeah, yeah, a little bit. Ten dollars, we'll let you get a photo with it. We can do a little faux catch. Five to me and five to Ken. Those turkeys were worth it. You never see those. Oh, is that what you were taking pictures of? You have to come here to the Chiricahua to see a turkey. Oh my god, look at that thing. This is one arachnid that I've wanted to see for probably the longest time ever. I've been lots of places where these guys are supposed to be, and I have until now come up empty-handed. But here we are, finally, hands-on with a giant vinegaroon. This is actually a species that is unique to Arizona, the Tohono Vinegaroon. Look at the incredible features on this animal right here. Jet black carapace that fades into that off-red accent. Almost reminds me of some of the whip scorpions in, like, Ecuador. This does not look like something that would either be real, or if it is real, you wouldn't be thinking this lives in the United States. But sure enough, we're in the United States right now. Now, you're probably asking, Spencer, you said this is an arachnid, but I'm only seeing six legs here. You see these little things up in front that look kind of like antennae? Those are actually its fourth pair of legs. A lot of different arachnids, especially the really weird ones, the ones that aren't quite your typical scorpion or spider, they tend to actually sacrifice one of their pairs of legs in favor of sensory organs. They actually call them antennae-form legs. So these legs right here are actually the way that this animal interacts with its world. It has eyes. If you look really closely at the front there, it has these tiny little eyes, but they're nocturnal, and they're subterranean. They're living underneath logs and rocks and stuff. They don't really need those eyes to hunt their prey. You can see the way he's just probing all over with those front two legs. He knows he's on a much bigger animal. He knows he's exposed to the light, and this isn't necessarily a very happy experience for him. He's under a little bit of stress. So we want to kind of keep this as light and as stress-free as possible, because this is a beautiful little creature that we don't want to do any harm to. Just look at the way that it slowly moves around. I'm sure they could probably dart if they wanted to. They are predators. As crazy creepy looking as they are, you might be like, well, maybe it's just a front, right? They're creepy looking to scare predators off. No, they're creepy looking because they're hunting all kinds of little invertebrates after dark. Look at that thing right there. Look at those claws in front. I would imagine these could probably give you a little bit of a pinch with those claws, but I don't actually know anybody who's ever had that happen to them. Then again, I don't know very many people who are actively looking for these things and testing the pinch. I swear this looks like something out of Elder Scrolls or maybe some kind of science fiction movie. Something that Ridley Scott would come up with as one of the creatures in his alien movies. It honestly does not look real. Now, I keep calling this a scorpion. It looks a little different than a lot of the other scorpions you might've seen. What's crazy about these guys is they're actually closest related to those talus whip scorpions. Those really creepy looking crab-like arachnids that you see in the tropics and sometimes in Arizona and stuff, but they're actually more closely related to spiders than they are to scorpions. It has that mechanical appearance that you'll see with some of the more primitive spiders like tarantulas and stuff. The feet look just like the kind of feet you'd see on different insects and things. You can tell, oh yeah, this does have some features of many arthropods we're actually familiar with. It just happens to take them to the extreme in the weird spectrum. Now, the reason that this particular arachnid is so special is this tail right here. The nickname of this animal, while they're also called whip spiders like many other whip scorpions and things, this particular group of whip scorpions are called the vinegaroons. That's a stupid sounding name. Why is it called a vinegaroon? That's because if you mess with it, it'll actually spray a sour smelling liquid that smells just like vinegar. So if you don't like vinegar, it could be pretty gross. If it gets in your eyes, it could burn a little bit. I actually had that little one we were getting b-roll of. I actually got some some of my like I have this like hangnail here. You got in there, that burned a little bit. You know, you've seen some of the strangest arthropods, some of the strangest animals here on this channel and this one probably takes the cake as one of the weirdest arachnids, not just in the United States, but in the entire world. After failing many times to find these creatures in the wild, not only do we see this first vinegaroon, but dozens of them from all different life stages. Huge angry ones that spread their claws and sprayed to try and get us to back off. With how scarce they are in the rest of the country, it's insane to see how well they're doing here and unreal to get to see them in the wild for the first time. They're terrifying to look at, but they're a part of our world and with no venom to speak of, you'll definitely prefer to have these guys around than some of the more dangerous arachnids that Arizona has to offer. Even more than spiders, there are scorpions in the southwestern deserts that are real threats to people. If you want to learn more about the deadly bark scorpions lurking out in the desert, check out this video right here. Hope to see you there, but until next time, don't forget to get outside and find your own adventure.