Our Laundry is infested with.......just what are those things!?

I always love when people come running up to me holding a box, bucket, or coffee can claiming there is something inside and they want to know what it is right away. I have learned the hard way NEVER to open these packages indoors. Supposedly dead birds have flown into my face and then taken up roost in my office for hours while I tried to evict them. 

I arrived back from lunch one afternoon and a coworker stuck his head into the office asking me to come out to the visitor center desk and help identify something.  I popped around the corner to see a slightly frantic woman standing at the desk.  This is what happened next:
        Frantic Woman: "Do you know anything about bugs?" she thrust out a peanut butter jar towards me.
         Me: "Yep, your in luck I know a thing or two."  I took the jar making sure the lid was screwed on tight.
         Frantic Woman: (This was said all in one rapid fire breath.) "Are those bed bugs? We got our laundry back from the company that cleans it and the sheets are infested with those. Do we have to send them back to get cleaned again? Are they dangerous? Should we call the company? Do we need to look for a new company to clean our sheets?"
         Me: After a few minutes of staring into what I thought was an empty jar I noticed some brown "dust particles" at the bottom. I started to unscrewed the lid to get a better look. "Good new! They are not bed bugs, they are not dangerous to humans, probably no reason to call the company, and they are going to be easy for you to get rid of."
        Frantic woman: "Your 100% sure?"
        Me: "Absolutely! What happened is last night after your sheets came out of the dryer and were folded these little guys took advantage of the lingering heat inside your laundry bags and crawled in to stay warm since it was a rather chilly fall night last night. Easiest way to get rid of them grab the sheet shake real hard and then remake the bed and vacuum the rug and you should be good."
        Frantic woman: "Really!?"
        Me: "Yep, flicking the sheet will kill most of them and those that live with die by vacuum."

What this woman had handed me in the jar was about seven or eight little pseudoscorpions which to the average person look like little baby scorpions.

Photo By Ryan Hodnett

These are in the same taxonomic group as spiders, Class Arachnida. Now unlike a real scorpions these have no stinger or tails and can not deliver a sting. They are also super super super small body size ranging from just 1/16-1/8 of an inch long. You can tell just how small they are by comparing them to the size of the thumb and forefinger on the left side of the photo below. 

Photo By Casey Richart & Bill Leonard

These little creepy crawlies live in the soil, leaf littler, the books in your bookcase and spend their time hunting for springtails, fleas, bark lice, ants, mites. They grab their unsuspecting prey with those large claws, inject it with poison from a gland inside those claws and then once their prey stops moving they inject saliva into the prey. This saliva slowly dissolves the prey's insides before the pseudoscorpion slurps up the juice much in the same way a spider does.While they do have a thin exoskeleton you walking though your backyard squishes them flat as a pancake. I am sure if you took a magnifying glass to the contents of your vacuum cleaner bag you could find bits and pieces of pesudocorpions along with the dist mites they were trying to capture.




Want to know more:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/running-ponies/how-book-scorpions-tend-to-your-dusty-tomes/
https://extension.umn.edu/insect-relatives/pseudoscorpions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5KSNA5K57s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYBDtlZvaX0
https://www.wired.com/2015/12/absurd-creature-of-the-week-the-sexy-saga-of-the-harlequin-beetle-and-the-pseudoscorpion/
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150511-tiny-arachnids-grisly-sacrifice