Relationships Between Morphology and Feeding Behaviour in the Syntopic Scorpions Urodacus armatus Pocock and Urodacus novaehollandiae Peters (Scorpiones: Scorpionidae)

Adults of the syntopic scorpions Urodacus novaehollandiae and U. armatus were separated by factors of 1.59 (males) and 1.67 (females) in the length of the hand and fixed finger, the structures used to grasp the prey, and by 2.00 (males) and 2.77 (females) in the wet weight of muscle dissected from the hand, which bears directly on the strength of the grip. When capturing prey, the larger U. novaehollandiae used its sting on only 37% of occasions, while U. armatus stung 75% of its prey and both species mainly ate prey head‐first. Prey remains retrieved from burrows in the field showed that both species took a similar range of prey taxa, but that U. novaehollandiae took significantly larger prey.