Scorpions in Texas are cooling off in people’s homes – and bringing the whole family

It’s the stuff of midsummer nightmares — but it’s also just part of daily life in Texas and the rest of the Great American Southwest.

It’s scorpions. And they’re trying to get inside your home, according to Texas Parks & Wildlife.

The Parks department posted a photo to its Facebook page Tuesday that is horrifying the internet, prompting people who live elsewhere to question why anybody would ever choose to live in a land that harbors scorpions, and prompting Texans to suggest their favorite scorpion abatement techniques.

The photo features a mother scorpion carrying dozens of its young on its back. The young are called scorplings, and together the mother and its young make what’s called a scorpion stack, according to National Geographic. That doesn’t make them any cuter to the nearly 8,000 people who shared the image on Facebook.

TPWD officials say the not-so-touching moment was captured on the front porch of an Austin-area home.

The post also came with a warning that with the heat of the summer bearing down on ground-dwelling pests like scorpions, they often try to take shelter within people’s homes.

Hundreds of those who commented on the post said they had personal — and, mostly really creepy — experience with the phenomenon.

“WD40 and a flamethrower, to start with,” one Texan advised in the comment section.

“Oh, how cute. A demon and her demon babies,” wrote another.

Some were just thankful these bugs aren’t regional players where they live.

“As much as I hate Chicago winters, at least we don’t have to deal with scorpions,” another commenter wrote on TPWD’s Facebook post.

As brutal as their weaponized exoskeleton looks on the outside, scorpions are actually pretty fussy arachnids, according to the Austin American Statesman. They need their internal temperature to be just right, and in the heat of the summer, more and more are doing what many humans in Texas are doing to beat the heat — they’re coming and staying indoors.

And if they’ve had babies in the last three weeks or so, odds are, they’re bringing the whole family with them. Scorpion moms carry their babies — which are born live, not hatched — in scorpion stacks for the first 10-20 days of their lives, while the babies’ exoskeletons are still very soft, according to researchers at Arizona State University.