Paratemnoides nidificator adults and nymphs interacting in and around a cooperatively constructed silken brood chamber. © José Roberto Peruca, 2015 (CC-BY-2.0)
THE CURIOUS LIFE OF A SOCIAL PSEUDOSCORPION
Travelling through Brazil you find yourself in the Cerrado, a vast tropical savannah just southeast of the Amazon rainforest. Stopping under one of the trees, you sit down for a quick rest and to take in the natural beauty around you. Your eye then caches the movement of a fly landing on the rough bark of the tree and, ever ready as you are, you reach for your camera and inch closer to try and take a good macro photo. While getting the insect into focus you notice the fly begins to struggle, though at first you fail to see why. It is then that you notice a myriad of small, scorpion-like pincers emerging from the crevices in the bark around the fly, grasping at it and keeping it from flying away. Then you see the owners of the pincers emerge, one or two at first then more and more as they grow bolder. Before you are tiny creatures that look like a scorpion without its tail, furiously working together trying to subdue the fly before dragging it under the bark where they emerged from. What you have just witnessed is an extremely rare event… cooperative hunting in pseudoscorpions.
