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Diablo had a secret

And so my decision to get my first mystery box has even more consequences....

Since Diablo arrived, she has reminded me time and time again why mystery boxes may not be the best of ideas. I had thought that now that she was rehoused into a 125 litre aquarium, she might be happy. I was happy thinking that I had done my best to make her happy, given that she was a wild caught animal. I felt guilty at the idea of her being pulled from her natural environment, shipped thousands of miles around the world, and dumped in a plastic tub in my front room. Since being moved into the larger housing, I had barely seen her as she had burrowed deep into the substrate. I took this to be a good thing, as previously she had been pacing her smaller enclosures, tapping on the glass. She certainly didn't seem content then, so now that her behaviour seemed calmer I thought that maybe she was content now. Well, it seems that she had a surprise up her many sleeves.... Just as a reminder, this is how she looked when I last saw her:
And this is how she looks now:
She has had babies!

At this point I'm not sure how many babies she has had - I only found them because I was worried about her. I hadn't seen Diablo above ground for several weeks, and I was worried that she may have died under the substrate so I was trying to gently dig her out. When I saw movement, I initially thought that I had found a stray cricket so continued digging. What I wasn't expected was a literal scorpions nest to start swarming out of the hole!
Once I realised that she had babies, I decided to leave the nest well alone - the last thing I wanted was for Diablo to start eating her babies out of stress. So to monitor the nest safely, I put the Spoodcam into the enclosure to monitor them remotely. Hopefully they will be okay.
But how on Earth did a scorpion that has lived the last 9 months in my South Essex house suddenly had babies? Well, apparently, scorpions can be ovoviviparous - meaning that their young hatches from eggs like most invertebrates, but unlike most invertebrates, the eggs are retained inside the mother, not laid. So when the eggs start to hatch, the scorpion mother effectively gives birth to live young, and scorpions of Diablo's species have a gestation period of up to 10 months. Diablo has been carrying her eggs inside her since before I even got her! All that extra podge on her that I thought was from overfeeding was actually pregnancy weight. Don't I feel like an ass....

So what now? At the moment I can only monitor from afar until the babies have their first molt and get off her back. Then I'll need to separate them so that she doesn't eat them, and... well I don't know what. Until I know how many she has, I'm a bit stuck. As best as I can tell, she currently has at least 6 babies on her back, but since her species have clutches of up to 50...who knows. I'd like to keep one for myself though, and maybe I can trade the others for store credit? I don't know. But hell - when will the surprises stop?
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