An Auckland family got an unwelcome surprise this month when a creature that has no business living in New Zealand turned up on their bathroom floor. It was a scorpion, about a centimetre and a half long, and biosecurity officials believe it hitchhiked all the way home from the Pacific in someone’s luggage.
The find was made by food and travel writer Anna King Shahab, who runs the popular Instagram page Lazy Susan at @lazysusan.nz. Her partner spotted it first and at a glance thought it was nothing more than a bit of fluff. It was only on a closer look that the shape of the thing became clear. “He was in the bathroom, and he saw something on the floor that looked like a piece of fluff. That’s when I heard him call out to me, ‘I’ve just found something that you would never see in New Zealand. It looks like a scorpion’,” she told the New Zealand Herald.
Her first instinct was disbelief, because scorpions simply are not part of the local wildlife. “I thought, ‘Hang on a minute, this can’t be a scorpion. There must be something that lives here that looks similar to a scorpion’,” she said. The family stayed fairly calm, although Shahab admitted one of her children was less impressed. “I don’t think either of us was particularly scared, but one of our kids was at home, and of course she had a bit of a freak out.”
Part of what makes the story so easy to relate to is the size of the thing. People tend to picture scorpions as fearsome desert creatures, but this one was barely bigger than a fingernail. “I think when people think scorpion, they think something the size of a giant wētā, but this was tiny. So it would very easily be missed,” Shahab said.
She posted footage of the creature online, and the clip quickly drew attention given how unusual the sighting was. The scorpion was in very poor shape by the time it was found and did not survive long afterwards. Shahab suspected it had stowed away in her bags after a trip to Fiji and Bali earlier in the year, surviving for four weeks or more since she got back to New Zealand.
That theory turned out to be a good one. The Ministry for Primary Industries collected the specimen and its experts confirmed it was indeed a juvenile scorpion, most likely of Fijian origin. Because the animal was still a nymph, the precise species could not be pinned down straight away. “Because it is still in the nymph stage, we need to carry out further testing to determine the exact species,” Dr Carolyn Bleach, Biosecurity New Zealand’s manager for plant health incursion investigation, told Stuff.
For anyone now nervously eyeing their own bathroom, the officials had a reassuring message. New Zealand has no native scorpions, and the climate here is one of the country’s best natural defences against them ever gaining a foothold. Most scorpions are built for hot, dry places and would struggle badly in a cool, damp New Zealand winter. “Most scorpion species have very specific habitat and climate requirements, often consistently warm, dry environments, which means they can’t easily survive in cooler, wetter climates,” MPI biosecurity surveillance manager Nick Ward said.
That is why the ministry treats these arrivals as a low biosecurity risk. Exotic scorpions are not established in New Zealand, and the occasional one that slips through the border is treated as a rare and isolated hitchhiker rather than the start of a population. The bug found in Auckland was also in such a weakened state that it stood no real chance of going on to breed.
The Auckland scorpion is far from the only one to make the journey. According to MPI, there have been 10 scorpion detections nationwide since 2018, split evenly between five found alive and five found dead. The bulk of them have turned up in Auckland and Wellington, the two cities with the heaviest flows of international travellers and imported goods. In almost every case the trail led back to overseas trips or freight, with the creatures tucked away in luggage, clothing, produce, electronics and cargo.
Stories like this are a small reminder of how easily unwanted pests can ride into the country on the back of ordinary travel. Border officials and detector dogs catch a great deal at the airport, but a tiny nymph buried in a suitcase is exactly the sort of thing that can slip past unnoticed. Shahab said she is normally meticulous about her bags, which made the surprise all the greater. “I always repack my luggage, take everything out, I shake it, I roll it, pack it back in all neat and tidy,” she said.
For travellers returning from warmer destinations, the advice is simple enough. Shake out shoes, bags and clothing, keep an eye out for anything that does not belong, and report unusual creatures to MPI rather than flushing or binning them. As the RNZ coverage of the find made clear, the great majority of these arrivals are harmless one-offs, but each report helps officials keep track of what is making it across the border and whether anything more worrying is starting to slip through.
Have you ever found something unexpected hitchhiking in your luggage after a trip overseas? Tell us about it in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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