Common Emperor Scorpion

• It has been listed in CITES Appendix II since 1995, because demand from the pet trade once meant hundreds of thousands of animals were exported a year.
• It is one of the few scorpions with any social life: mothers and young may share a burrow, and family groups have been seen hunting together.
• The females give birth to live white young that climb onto their back, where they stay until the first moult.
• It is one of the largest scorpions in the world, at up to 20 cm and more than 30 grams, and at the same time one of the least dangerous: its venom is weak and it prefers to crush prey with its enormous pincers rather than use its sting.
• That contrast illustrates the general rule of scorpions: large pincers and a thin tail indicate little venom, and small pincers with a thick tail indicate the opposite.
• It is social, which is exceptional: it lives in family groups in which the mother and her young cohabit long after birth and sometimes hunt cooperatively.
• Its docility and its size have made it the most popular scorpion in the pet trade, and that demand took it onto Appendix II of CITES in 1995.
• It lives up to eight years, a long time for a terrestrial invertebrate.
• It detects its prey with the pectines, comb-shaped sensory organs on the underside of the abdomen, which it drags along the ground picking up chemicals and textures.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - chitin exoskeleton (arachnid)

Habitat and environment

Rainforest and savannah of West Africa; burrows and leaf litter

Sources consulted: Wikipedia (es): Pandinus imperator