Little Pet Shop of Horrors Trivia Quiz

Answer: The jungles of West Africa

Scorpions are arachnids, like spiders, and arachnids belong to the group called chelicerates, which also includes horseshoe crabs and sea spiders. "Chela" is the Latin word for "claw," and all chelicerates have claw-like mouthparts. Some, like ticks and mites, use these to dig into the skin of their hosts; predator chelicerates use them to tear through their victim's exoskeletons.

Of course, on a scorpion, those are the less obvious pair of claws! A scorpion's claws are the part of its body called pedipalps. All chelicerates have pedipalps of some form that attach to their heads. Pedipalps function, very broadly speaking, in a way analogous to the antennae of insects. Unlike antennae, however, most chelicerates have evolved their pedipalps to do something besides feel around. And that's what the scorpion's claws are: monstrous pedipalps evolved to grapple their prey while they stab it with their stingers, formally called "telsons". Emperor scorpions are unique: because they're so big, adults will often tear their prey to shreds without even using venom.

Despite their ironclad look and heavy-metal body plan, emperor scorpions really are gentle. With proper care, they can live for up to eight years. That said, with most invertebrates, the real danger in holding them isn't to you, it's to them.

Answer: They are less than an inch long.

Pseudoscorpions are tiny! The largest pseudoscorpion lives off the coast of Ascension Island and grows, at most, to half an inch. The photo is of a house pseudoscorpion, the most widely distributed pseudoscorpion, which live in homes eating book lice, mites, and other very tiny creatures. Pseudoscorpions are like scorpions in that their pedipalps have evolved into giant pincers (giant for them, I mean). However, they are the only group of chelicerates who've gone the extra mile of envenomating their palps. You don't have to worry though! They'd have a hard time cutting through a hair on your head, let alone your skin.

Did I hear you just ask about aridity? My friend - they love dampness, and as long as it rains year-round, you can probably find them in your backyard! (But don't let that stop you from buying off me!) A colony of pseudoscorpions will do wonderfully in a deli cup, like lots of other great and tiny pets (including jumping spiders, black widow spiders, and mantises of both the praying and secular varieties). The same cups will also keep the flightless fruit flies - no they aren't called "walks" - with which to feed your small friends. Specially made deli cups with paper lids can be bought by the dozen from a few online retailers. I'd love to tell you more about jumping spiders, but they are downright cute, and totally out of place in my store!

Answer: They nest in groups

Believe it or not, many spiders do live in colonies; one paper proposes that gregariousness has evolved in spiders no less than eighteen times. However, wolf spiders are cold-hearted, solitary killers. Unusually for spiders, they don't use webs, burrows, or traps for hunting at all. They really do chase down their prey in the dead of night. A little girl who came in the shop once exclaimed: what big eyes they have! They're so good at hunting that cranberry bogs purposely release wolf spiders to naturally catch pest insects (apparently, "how are you with spiders" is one of the first interview questions cranberry pickers get asked).

"Eye shine," as you'll find on many *conventional* pets (like dogs and cats), is caused by a part of the eye called a tapetum lucidum, a crystalline membrane that bounces light from the back to the front of the eye. You can use a flashlight to find wolf spiders at night in most parts of the world. But again, don't be doing that. Buy from me!

These are large, active, and FAST spiders, so the main difference with caring for a wolf spider as opposed to a tarantula is that you'll want to give it a much larger area to run around relative to its body size. Lots of tarantulas will be more than happy with a heap of coco fiber; a Hogna will appreciate variety. You'll want to avoid giving them too much vertical space, as falls are one of the biggest killers of spiders, and wolf spiders are especially fragile in this way. This will also be rewarding for a keeper. As I'm *sure* someone of your rarefied tastes will be aware, tarantulas tend to be slow creatures, not moving for hours at a time.

Answer: Jerusalem cricket

Jerusalem crickets are native to the southwest U.S. and Mexico, and in the wild prefer to snack on tubers, hence the nickname "potato bug." "Jerusalem" in their name refers not to their origin but, apparently, an exclamation: seeing one would make you shout "Jerusalem!" or "heavens to Betsy!" or "what in Sam Hill!" Unlike most other crickets (and cricket-allies), which make noises by rubbing together their wings, both the male and female Jerusalem crickets drum to make noise, literally whacking their bulbous abdomens against the ground for others of their species to hear.

In all fairness, it's not the wrongest thing to call these a cricket - they just don't belong to the exclusive order of "true crickets." But lots of crickety things (by which I mean stout, burrowing creatures with large hind legs) belong to the broader cricket clade, Ensifera. The so-called king crickets, the heaviest insects in the world, also belong to Ensifera. The "Parktown prawn" of South Africa and the giant weta of New Zealand can both grow between three and eight inches. Mole crickets are also similar to the potato bugs in both look and lifestyle, but while mole crickets have savage-looking forelegs, Jerusalem crickets have scissor jaws the size of your pinky fingernail. And yes, they bite. Hard.

They are deep burrowers and will benefit from a thick layer of bioactive substrate (one which contains a clean-up crew - either springtails or isopods). Use something similar to what you'd use for a reptile. What can you feed them? Basically anything you can imagine - fruit flies, live bugs, dead bugs, leftovers, dog food, fish food. You'll also want to give the cricket a very tiny water dish - they appreciate the drink, but they're at risk of drowning themselves.

Answer: False

It is true that harvestmen are not spiders, but harvestmen have venom at all, because they do not have fangs. That vividly colored monster in the photo really is the same kind of animal as those little orange balls that creep around your garden. Harvestmen are widely distributed across the globe, and tropical species can have extremely striking body plans (as is the usual rule for the tropics).They are chelicerate arachnids, but have not modified their claw-like mouthparts into anything that can hurt you. They are utterly harmless to human beings, unless they crawl in an ear canal or frighten you into running off a cliff, or something.

Like all arachnids, Opiliones have two body segments (or "tagmata"), but theirs are joined in such a way that it's difficult to distinguish where the connection is. All harvestment have two front legs that they will use as "antenniform" legs, meaning that they are adapted to move and sense touch similar to an insect's antennae. Some species of Opiliones will cluster together, legs out, in large patches several feet across to share their body warmth and hid from predators. This gives them the appearance of a patch of grey moss... just don't step on this moss.

If you're looking for a colony of pets, Opiliones are a good choice, and if you take proper care of them, your colony will reproduce in captivity. You'll want to give them an environment of moist wood, leaf litter, and thick substrate. As is true of more of these animals than not, they will happily subsist on flightless fruit flies.

Answer: Millipede

This is one of several species of pink dragon millipede, which all hail from Thailand. While some commonly kept millipedes can grow to several feet in length, these pink dragons only grow to a few inches. Unusually for millipedes, they do not keep their legs underneath their armored bodies. Instead their legs are spread out, defended by extremely vivid warning coloration (called "aposematic" coloration) - the spines, in fact, are harmless to you. Centipedes and millipedes both produce toxins. In the case of millipedes, they are mildly poisonous - more unpleasant than deadly to eat. Many of them can spew a mild acid or "repugnatorial fluid" to deter predators as well, but the worst this'll do to you is discolor your skin. Unfortunately for the poor millipede, its toxin is in the Goldilocks zone for poisons: it's weak enough for primates not to care about it, but strong enough that they'll take advantage of it, and monkeys will rub millipede guts on themselves as a natural mosquito repellant.

Centipedes and millipedes both belong to the Myriapods, a name that is much more apt, given they all have lots of legs, but the number varies a lot. They are centipedes with more than 100 legs, and a species of millipede was discovered with 1,306 legs! Myriapods have the distinction of being insanely ancient - so ancient that their lineage invented breathing. Really! The genus Pneumodesmus, known from fossil records, is the oldest animal we've found that breathed air on land. Modern Myriapods both share this ancient air-breathing architecture: unlike most modern insects and arachnids, which breathe through an organ called lungs, the Myriapods use tubes that directly pump air to their cells. This primitive system is well-equipped to the oxygen-rich Ordovician, but not to our current Quaternary, with so many more animals fighting for the air.

The main concern with caring for millipedes is making sure they do not dry out. Dessication is a concern for all the animals in this list, but millipedes live in dirt, and their cuticle leaves them dependent on absorbing moisture from the air. You can keep millipedes in deli containers in a drawer with some substrate, some branches to climb on, and some cuttle bone (a product made from cuttlefish shells that provides calcium). They don't need light, and unless you live in Greenland, they probably don't need a heat source, besides the heat of your home. Oh, and I think this is the ONLY thing in our catalog that can't eat flightless fruit flies (or any live feeder). It needs to eat decaying things.

Answer: Assassin bug

The assassin bugs are a fairly diverse group, but most have red and black coloration and shield-shaped bodies. I chose the specimen in the photograph because its thoracic spines resemble the largest and most popular pet species, the "horrid king assassin bug." Other species of assassin bugs can stridulate (i.e., hiss) or spray repugnatorial fluid. A few, called kissing bugs, are ectoparasites that will bite humans, and are responsible for the spread of Chagas disease. I don't recommend keeping those!

Assassin bugs belong to the diverse order of insects called Hemiptera, the "true bugs." The mouthparts of all Hemipteran insects (which also include stinkbugs, cicadas, water striders, aphids, treehoppers, toe-biters and bed bugs) are long, spear-tipped straws designed to suck something out of something. For most terrestrial bugs, that means sucking sap out of plants, but assassin bugs are a fully predatory family. Assassin bugs are fully kitted out ambush predators. Their bite delivers a venom that, besides hurting you, allows them to take down prey a few times larger than themselves. It swiftly liquefies the prey from the inside, allowing the bug to suck it out at its leisure.

Horrid kings and other assassin bugs can be easily kept in a relatively simple enclosure, provided you can give it some bark or egg cartons to hide under and a fair number of friends. While each individual bug will only survive a few years, with enough members, your colony will be able to reproduce and grow indefinitely.

The incorrect answers are also real invertebrates. The death-feigning beetles are another popular hobby insect of a comparatively mild disposition. Deathstalkers are highly venomous scorpions. The Cooloola monster is a cousin of our friend the Jerusalem cricket, a unit of an insect discovered in Cooloola National Park, Australia, that vaguely looks like a cicada husk stuffed full of lead.

Answer: Venomous legs

If it's fear you want, a giant centipede is for you! The specimen photographed is the New Zealand giant centipede, which grows to about 8 inches (20 cm), but several different monstrous species are available. Unlike the millipede we saw earlier, centipedes are venomous - dangerously venomous. Their two front legs, called "toxicognaths," have been sharpened into the equivalent of fangs. Coyote Peterson, whose YouTube channel is all about getting bitten for (I assume) fun, claims that the giant centipede's bite is worse than a bullet ant's. They are fast, take-down predators with the ability to bend completely back on themselves. Zoologist Clint Laidlaw has said: "It is more difficult to find a place that is safe to touch on a centipede than on a king cobra. And that's insane."

Despite the similarities, care for centipedes is about as different from millipedes as two terrestrial arthropods could be. The one similarity is that centipedes, like millipedes, are very dependent on moisture in the air, so you'll have to regularly mist them to avoid dessication. But to reiterate, centipedes are predators, and millipedes are burrowing scavengers. You will want to give your centipede lots of room for it to run around and chase prey, and so you can admire its death-colors. (Some people keep tarantulas in opaque totes or Tupperwares - don't do this with your centipede. Know where it is before you open the lid!) You want to make sure to buy a very good enclosure with a very secure lid, but I probably didn't need to tell you that. A centipede will eat anything it can take down, but Dubia cockroaches are a reasonable primary food source. Some centipedes also like to nibble on fruit, apparently. Real cuties they are.

So, can I bag him up for you?

Answer: Vinegaroon

Vinegaroons are a widely distributed group, with species living in the U.S., South America, Southeast Asia, China, parts of the West African jungle, and even parts of Europe. The worst a vinegaroon can do to you is make you smell like vinegar. Their repugnatorial fluid is a mix of acetic acid (vinegar) and caprylic acid.

Although whip scorpions are also chelicerate arachnids, they are not closely related to scorpions - they just have a body plan that's similar in some ways. For one, like scorpions, they've modified their pedipalps into claws, though theirs are not nearly so big. Their tail ends with a flagellum (the "whip" for which they're named), but this is harmless - all it's used for is sensing the world behind it. In addition to this, like the Opiliones, they've modified two front legs into sensitive antenniform legs, which sense the world in front of it. If you look closely at a vinegaroon, it actually looks a lot like an insect, since it only has six legs that work like legs are supposed to.

Keeping a vinegaroon is a lot like keeping a tarantula. They are also burrowers (although they don't ambush directly from their holes), and will appreciate a similar substrate to what you'd use for a fossorial tarantula. Like female tarantulas, female vinegaroons can live for several decades if kept properly. They'll also eat the things a tarantula will eat - Dubia roaches, crickets, and so forth (they tend not to like mealworms). They are probably the single gentlest, least-dangerous arachnids you can handle, if handling them is something that appeals to you. And vinegaroons are very cheap to purchase. With that in mind... let's keep looking, shall we?

Answer: Tailless whip scorpion

One wonders how a whip scorpion can have no whip; sort of like a headless, megacephalic horseman. They are also called "whip spiders," which is one of the stranger double-misnomers I know of. With that said, as you can see, the tailless whip scorpions (members of the Amblypygi) do appear more similar to vinegaroons than anything else between Heaven and Hell. (Not that that's saying much, as these are two of the most alien species you can find on this planet.) Besides the missing whip-tail, amblypygids are charcoal-colored, wispy, slow-moving predators with two large claws to secure pray when they eat them.

Unlike the vinegaroon's claws, the pedipalpal claws of an amblypygid extend the length of their body and meet right in front of their mouth, making them look quite similar to Xenomorphs. They also have two antenniform legs. An amblypygid's legs can be three to four times the length of their body, and they'll often sit still, only waving those legs, slowly back and forth as it waits for food to cross its path. Oh, and they can teleport. Not literally - but close to it. While they're slow-moving by nature, they move by crab-walking side to side, and sometimes the spirit compels them to run extremely fast for a few centimeters. Keep this in mind if you dare hold one. God had a sense of humor making these two, and He wanted to share the joke with arachnophiles.

The care for a tailless whip scorpion is similar to a vinegaroon's as well. In contrast to vinegaroons, which are ground-dwelling, amblypygids like to climb up onto a tree or piece of cork bark and stay there for a long time. Moreover, while most vinegaroons you can get in the U.S. come from elsewhere in the country, most common amblypygids are tropical, so controlling a higher humidity will be a necessity. Just don't get the enclosure so damp it endangers the creature. This, rather than the need for burrowing, is the main reason they'll demand a thick substrate. Finally, many keepers choose to keep their tailless whip scorpions with a few other members of their species. And who wouldn't want to go to that kind of party?