SHELL SHOCKED; Holiday sisters bring home a killer scorpion.
TWO sisters who paid pounds 1 for an exotic shell found it contained a surprise gift - a deadly scorpion.The poisonous creature was in striking distance of holidaymakers Carole Kendal and Janet Marshall for a week. But they didn't know.
They kept the shell on a shelf over Carole's hotel bed in the West Indies.
Then they brought it back to Britain in Janet's hand baggage aboard a jumbo jet.
And at any moment a sting from the two-inch scorpion could have killed either of them.
It was when they got to Janet's home that the scorpion emerged. The sisters, both college lecturers, screamed - trapped it in a jam jar and handed it over to the RSPCA.
Mother-of-two Janet, 46, said yesterday: "I got the fright of my life when it scuttled across the floor.
"I knew it was a scorpion. It had distinctive pincers and a long tail.
"I feel very lucky to be alive. The scorpion's sting can kill a human in less than an hour.''
Carole, 49, said: "It makes my skin crawl when I think about how close we were to being fatally stung.''
The sisters spent two weeks on the island of Tobago with their father Ronnie, 81, and studied local wildlife.
But they had no plans to bring any home - especially the scorpion known as diplocentrus nebo.
They did see a scorpion-shaped mark on the conch shell they bought. But Janet, from Elland, West Yorks, thought that simply made the shell look "more authentic''.
What they didn't realise was that diplocentrus nebo can play dead before giving a sting that leads to its victim's heart failing.
Expert Barry Naylor, who runs a specialist pet shop in Shipley, West Yorks, said: "If that happened here, it would look like death was caused by a heart attack. No coroner would look for the poison from a West Indian scorpion in Yorkshire.''
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| Author: | Armstrong, Jeremy |
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| Publication: | The Mirror (London, England) |
| Date: | Aug 19, 2000 |
| Words: | 315 |
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