These amazing animals are EMPEROR (or IMPERIAL) SCORPIONS from west African countries including Togo and Ghana. Despite their fearsome appearance and reputation some scorpions are actually quite docile, and this species certainly is. They are only active at night and usually spend the day resting in deep burrows which they have dug for themselves.

One amazing fact about Emperor scorpions (and in fact almost all scorpion species) is that they glow or fluoresce under ultraviolet (UV) light. I demonstrate this whenever I take scorpions out with me on visits and it never ceases to amaze both children and adults alike. Nobody knows exactly why this occurs, but the fact that it does provides me with a superb opportunity to demonstrate a weird and wonderful feature of the natural world!

It is really hard to capture the true colours on camera but the pictures above and below at least demonstrate that the UV light does indeed make the scorpion glow. The actual colour is a vivid bright green which, when viewed in a darkened room, is truly astonishing to see!

Scorpions give birth to live babies rather than laying eggs and I am fortunate to have had great breeding success with my scorpions over the years. Over a period of many months a pregnant female scorpion's abdomen swells to a huge size causing the dark coloured abdominal 'plates' to separate, revealing the soft membranous tissue which connects them, as seen below:

Scorpions are viviparous, meaning that they give birth to live baby scorpions, rather than laying eggs like most other arachnids. When they are born the mother scorpion carries her babies (which are known as scorplings) on her back for the first couple of weeks of their lives to protect them from danger. Scorplings are soft and very vulnerable to predation at this time, so carrying them for two weeks or more demonstrates fantastic parenting skills and devotion !

Up close the scorplings are SO cute, like little tiny cartoon characters or something!

A couple of weeks or so after being born, scorplings moult their exoskeleton for the first time and take on more of a typical scorpion shape as seen below:

At this stage they become independent of their mother and one by one they leave her abdomen for good:

I would never try to remove newly-born babies from their mother's back as she can be very defensive of her little ones at this stage and may sting or pinch anything (or anyone) that comes near to them. However once they have moulted and left her for good it is easy to show off how adorable scorplings can be, as you can see here: