The primary impediment of long term, high-resolution, ecological studies of scorpions is the difficulty of marking individuals for monitoring and recapture. I tested the use of Visible Implant Elastomer (VIE) as a permanent subcuticular tagging technique in the striped bark scorpion Centruroides vittatus (Say 1821). Mortality and prey capture rates of tagged scorpions did not significantly differ from untagged controls. Tag readability was high and comparable to published studies on other arthropod groups. Animals molted (3 treated, 7 control) and gave birth (1 treated, 2 control) successfully. I recommend VIE tagging as a viable solution to what was a major impediment to the proliferation of fine-scale ecological and population-level field research in C. vittatus and similar arthropods.
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The Journal of Arachnology
Vol. 39 • No. 1
April 2011
Vol. 39 • No. 1
April 2011