it looked more like a brown giant vigaroon, but i only saw it from the side view. it crossed in front of me at a distance of about 10 feet, and it clicked loudly when it walked. i couldn't see if it had a long tail in the back because the dirt on the path is dark brown. if it is not that exact specimen, then it must be a scorpion. tennessee has scorpions, but i have never looked any of them up. i am almost sure it was. if you look at the vigaroon, it has 3 body sections that are shiny and dark which could resemble a giant ant when viewed from the side, and if they carry a bag or sac on their back, then it would look just like what i saw. that is scarry. thank you. now i know what kind of pesticide to use to keep that thing out of my yard! lol. what ever that thing was, was too scary for words. thanks again.
Tamara P Duvall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Hi Suz, I've forwarded your inquiry about the creepie-crawlie you'd seen to a couple of friends who are biologists by training, and here are the responses (I'm not forwarding to the chat, since one of the messages contains a lot of photos and we can't post those on chat) I hope you'll be able to see them; I often have problems sending and receiving photos, since I'm using an Apple computer, not Windows. > From: P.B. Hmmm, Maybe a sun scorpion? With an egg case on the back? Or a related whip scorpion (more usually called amblyopygid and we have zillions of them in our Mexican sulfuric acid cave. Or a vinegaroon, also relatively closely related to the above. See attached photos. There are many different kinds of each and many different sizes. Some species of each group can grow very large. Below several pix of sun scorpions A couple of giant vinegaroons below Below, an amblyopygid or whip scorpion. =========================== > From: R.P. I can't come up with any ideas. P's pictures are of critters that are generally considerably smaller than 3" or are found in desert-like climates. I'll keep thinking on it. ========== > From: P.B. (again) Yeah this is a puzzle, however, there are many whip scorpions in moist areas and I have seen some very large solpugids but don't know their distribution in somewhere like Tennessee (was it?). The description of it as a giant brown ant made me think of solpugids. However, people are notoriously lousy at giving meaningful descriptions. R, you must have had people ask you about birds by saying, "it was a brown bird, sort of robin-sized, and it had yellow on it, and ..." I was also thinking of velvet ants, really wasps, but I don't think any of them even approach 3 inches long. ====== That's the best I could find out so far, T -- Tamara P Duvall http://t-n-lace.net/ Lexington, Virginia, USA (Formerly of Warsaw, Poland) from susan in tennessee,u.s.a. --------------------------------- Start your day with Yahoo! - make it your home page To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
