Exotic Pets - Emperor Scorpion - as part of the series on pets and animals by GeoBeats.

This is an Emperor Scorpion. These guys come from the forests in Africa. They are insect eaters, for the most part. They will catch other small lizards, and little fuzzy creatures like little mice on the ground if they can. This is a baby, still not quite full grown. Full grown, he will reach about 9 inches long. In order to keep these guys as pets, the biggest thing you got to remember is that they are delicate. Their skeletons are on the outside. So dropping him like you drop your pet hamster or gerbil does not work. You drop this thing, and it is very detrimental, and it will kill them. They do have a stinger, just like all scorpions do. That stinger is used for the consumption of their food. They sting their prey to immobilize it. It starts the digestion process inside their prey for them, and then they drink it up. They do not have chewing teeth mouth parts like people and dogs and cats. They have to be able to semi-liquify their food and kind of a slurp it up.

These guys have a really interesting pigment in their skin. It is a natural phosphorescence they have under UV black light. I will show you what that looks like. Right now, it is just a normal black scorpion, and now he is glowing from head to tail. That pigment is in their exoskeleton. So when they shed their skin, that skin that they shed will glow for a little while, until it loses and dries out completely until it loses that chemical. But right after a scorpion sheds, it does not glow until that exoskeleton hardens. So if he was to just have shed, he would not be glowing like this. It takes a little bit for his exoskeleton to dry out, and then he will fluoresce just like this.