he's back

My swimming pool is my combination recreation-dining-reading room when summer settles into this part of the world.

For the past couple days, our temperatures here on the tropical Pacific coast of Mexico have taken a distinct leap forward in humidity. At the least the humidity has. The temperatures have sauntered around the upper 80s and lower 90s, as they will until the rainy season lets up in late October.

But it is the humidity that adds that extra bit of oomph to the pit-watering heat index that graces our summer weather. One day, the weather is practically perfect in every way. The next it feels as if that fat guy in the company sauna, who flouts the towel rule, has poured a gallon of water on the heater.

Thus, the aforementioned "past couple days" coupled with "my swimming pool."

This is the time of year when I spend the greater part of my day standing or walking around in my pool. This morning, I was catching up on the news in The Economist -- how the teacher unions in Colombia have endangered the education of the students they should be teaching -- when I felt something climbing up the inside of my right leg. 

That feeling is not unusual. My pool is often visited by a variety of insects. And most of them are no more interested in human beings than we are interested in them -- with the exception of insects who need us as an integral part of their sex lives.

The only insect visitors to my pool who violate that rule are some sort of small black water beetles with an annoying habit of biting. Me.

I suspect they are merely eating sloughing skin, but they often bite to the quick. I noticed yesterday that they are starting to show up along the water line of the pool again. I dispatch them as soon as I see them.

But it was not a beetle this time. It was a true bug. Or, more accurately, a rantara. We sometimes call them water stick insects because they look like their landlubber relatives.

There are certain insects found in God's Great Plan in the "Jokes" section. The most unfortunate is the tailless whip scorpion (locally known as a cancle), who looks ferocious, but is one of the area's most docile and beneficial insects (laughing at heaven's door).

My visitor in the pool fits in that same category.  Its rather startling appearance has earned it the name "water scorpion." It is easy to see why. Those arms, designed for grabbing, and that tail, looking like a stinger, could fool the unwary.

But it is not a scorpion. The arms really are used for grabbing -- just like a scorpion or praying mantis. However, the tail does not hide a stinger. It is far more utilitarian for a gill-less aquatic insect. It is a breathing siphon.

The water scorpion does carry a type of venom, though, as do most hunting insects. To calm its prey, the water scorpion inserts its proboscis and pumps in a sedative. When the prey drifts off into twilight, the rantara dines.

The same proboscis acts as a defensive mechanism, as well. In fear, the water scorpion will poke humans with it, though the effect is not even close to a true scorpion sting. I have been nipped at least twice now. It is nothing more than a little pinch.

This is probably the sixth one that I have seen one in my pool over the past seven years, and I am not certain why they troll my waters. Their usual prey are tadpoles, small fish, and other aquatic insects. With the exception of the water beetles, who I slaughter on sight, my pool appears to be devoid of likely prey.

That may be why they do not stay long to enjoy my company. As soon as they discover the water-filled pool is a dry prey-hole, they crawl out on the edge of the pool, do an uncanny imitation of a praying mantis, and fly away like some strange alien in an M. Night Shyamalan film.

Of course, I may simply not be thinking like a water scorpion.  Maybe this guy had the same ambition as the spiders in one of my favorite Gary Larson cartoons, and knew just where he could find a more resplendent meal.