In real life, the bug in the picture above is very, very small. It’s the house pseudo-scorpion (Chelifer cancroides)–not an insect, but an arachnid–and is highly beneficial to us humans.
Jambo! Mr. Nature here, with a critter that’s mostly too small to be noticed, although it can be found in very many homes. And if you’ve got them in your home, you’ve got a good thing.
Pseudo-scorpions don’t harm us or our stuff, and here’s what they eat: carpet beetle larvae, clothes moth larvae, book lice… and bedbugs! (The USS Connecticut, desperately trying to fight off a bedbug infestation, could use twenty or thirty thousand of these little guys.) There’s a good chance you have them in your home but have never noticed them.
If you think you have a pseudo-scorpion, you probably need to look at it under a magnifying glass to be sure. If you can then see it’s not a pseudo-scorpion, it’s almost certainly something bad that you ought to get rid of. But if it does turn out to be a pseudo-scorpion, release it and let it go about its business.
I wonder how many bedbug or clothes moth infestations never got off the ground because of pseudo-scorpions.
