This northern scorpion was found under a rock in the Penticton back country.

Image Credit: SUBMITTED/ Luka Bevanda

Earlier this week, Penticton resident Luka Bevanda found a northern scorpion, a creature he’d been trying to find for a couple of years.

The young medical student was on break from school at UBC out exploring the backwoods, enjoying his passion of entomology.

“I’ve been trying to find a scorpion for a few years now,” he said. “I was hiking on the west bench in Penticton flipping rocks over to see if I would find any cool insects.”

He said he was on hot south facing slope with a lot of sun when he spotted a “perfect rock.”

“I thought, oh, I’ve got to flip that rock and I got lucky, there it was, I was ecstatic.”

Scorpions are under the class Arachnida, which makes them a distant cousin of spiders. Northern scorpions are the only species in Canada as well as the northernmost species of scorpion in the world, according to iNaturalist.ca. They are found in Alberta and BC, with specimens collected in the Okanagan valley. 

The critters are solitary and nocturnal, coming out to hunt insects and small prey at night making them difficult to spot.

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“I probably woke it up,” Bevanda said. “It was docile and stayed still. I was so excited, it took some restraint to leave it behind.”

Last year Bevanda bought a special UV flashlight and searched for the elusive insect at night but couldn’t find one.

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Scorpions glow electric scarab green under ultraviolet light so can be seen with a black light at night, according to HowStuffWorks, due to chemicals in the exoskeletons called a hyaline layer.

The northern scorpion is not known to sting humans and the venom is mild.

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