Communal Scorpions?

[Alex Hwang]

Hello everyone.
I am relatively new to the hobby but I had a few questions about communal scorpion species. I currently have a 72 gallon tank that I would like to use. Before adding scorpions, I will plant it heavily and hopefully establish some source of prey. I was wondering what I should use for said source of prey, substrate, plants, and species of scorpion.
If you have tried this before, please leave a comment about your experience

 

[Dave Jay]

I have, but I live in Australia so my input will be of limited use to you. I had two populations of wood roaches already set up for display with false bottoms, coir peat, rocks , logs, bark and leaves in critter keepers with pantihose as a screen top under the plastic one. To one of these I added 3 2nd instar Rainforest Scorpions, Hormurus (Liocheles) sp. To the other I added 3 2nd instar Wood Scorpions, Cercophonius squama. After a couple of years someone wanted to trade for 1 of the squama so I tore the enclosure down, there were 2 fat squamas in there, about 3 times the size they were when I put them in. Just recently I tore down the other enclosure and found 2 subadult Rainforest Scorpions, they'd been there about 4 and a half years or more, I know they were among one of the first batches of scorpions when I started out. So I'd say that was a success really, 2 out of 3 survived and moulted several times successfully. No food was added for the scorpions in that time. I also tried keeping isopods (slaters- Porcellio scaber )with scorpions with limited success, but other factors such as humidity/ventilation , appropriately sized food and swings in temperature due to location were in play so I deem that trial inconclusive. Adding a single slater to the enclosures containing small to medium sized adult scorpions I deem to be successful, all traces of white fungus/mould disappeared in days and never returned and the scorpions weren't ever bothered by the slaters. I always add a tiny bit of carrot when I add a cricket, and remove it later, the slaters ate that once the scorpion ate the cricket. When I added several slaters to 2 tanks containing colonies of very small scorpion species things were fine for a while, the slaters were unaffected by the scorpions trying to sting them and just got out of the scorpions way and despite the low ventilation no fungi or mould was growing, however the scorpions did not seem to eat the young or freshly moulted slaters as I'd hoped and there was a huge slater population explosion in both tanks, this didn't happen with the roaches, their populations stayed stable. Anyway the scorpion populations declined in both tanks, but there were lots of other factors in play, these were some of my first scorpions and in hindsight I see the mistakes I made regardless of the slaters.
I'll be interested to see how you get on. Best of luck with it.