![]() Solifugids are arachnids, and like vinegaroons are more closely related to spiders and scorpions than they are to insects. They aren't spiders or scorpions and certainly not puppies. Here in the American Southwest, we have the same group of animals and call them by a variety of names including sunspiders, wind scorpions, sand puppies, solpugids and solifugids. They began with American soldiers in the Persian Gulf War in 1991, and the telling has resumed in Iraq. Well, camel spiders do exist, but everything else in the message was folklore. Such a horrific creature would be right out of a monster movie, and soldiers in Iraq and their families back home certainly didn't need that nonsense to go along with an already challenging reality. A common claim was that a soldier would awake in the morning to find much of his leg or arm eaten off by a huge camel spider. ![]() They would then inject an anesthetic (Novocaine was actually claimed in some stories), and then feed undisturbed on the hapless prey. They were said to run up to 25 mph while screaming like a child and could leap high enough to latch onto a camel's belly or a soldier's body. The message that appeared widely on American computers claimed that these spider-like arachnids reached giant size ? big as a dinner plate. One recent such e-mail hoax concerned what in the Middle East are called camel spiders. It's amazing how well digital photographs can be doctored to present a false image and message. Biologists are all too familiar with hoaxes on the Internet.
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