60 Rowland M. Shelley 



in southeastern Tennessee. The border then swings southward around 

 the bulk of the Blue Ridge Province, penetrating border counties of 

 southwestern North Carolina by spreading up river valleys from adjacent 

 states. The easternmost natural occurrence in North Carolina is in Polk 

 County; other records in this State are believed to represent accidental 

 human importations (Shelley 1994). The distributional boundary then 

 angles southeastward through the Piedmont Plateau of South Carolina 

 to Columbia and follows the Fall Zone through Georgia into Alabama, 

 before spreading onto the Gulf Coastal Plain in western Alabama and 

 extending to the Mississippi River above Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Fewer 

 specimens are available from the western side of its distribution, but V. 

 carolinianus ranges northward through eastern Mississippi and western 

 Tennessee to the Ohio River in central Kentucky; the only specimens 

 taken farther west are those from Tunica Hills. Although these records 

 still are somewhat scattered, they are continuous enough to suggest 

 regular occurrence throughout the overall range except for the Tunica 

 Hills population, which is disjunct. Vaejovis carolinianus is therefore 

 an upland species occurring exclusively west of the Fall Zone in the 

 Carolinas and Georgia. Where it extends onto the Coastal Plain in 

 Alabama, it shows a marked preference for hills or ridges like Tunica 

 Hills and the Lime and Buhrstone Hills, and the Chunnenuggee Ridge, 

 in Clarke County, Alabama. The scorpion has not been taken in the 

 pine flatwoods that are abundant in the Coastal Plain of the Carolinas 

 and Georgia. Muma (1967) considered V. carolinianus to be a potential 

 inhabitant of the northern and panhandle counties of Florida, but the 

 known distribution shows that this possibility is remote, even for the 

 most proximate part of the State, i. e., the inner peripheries of Escambia 

 and Santa Rosa counties in the western panhandle. 



The greater northward extension west of the Blue Ridge Province, 

 in contrast to that on the east, is particularly striking. East of the 

 Appalachians, the range angles southeastward from Polk County, North 

 Carolina, to Lexington County, South Carolina; to the west, however, 

 it extends some 230 mi (368 km) farther north, to the Ohio River in 

 central Kentucky. If the distribution east of the Appalachians were 

 equivalent to that on the west, it would reach to around Charlottesville, 

 Virginia! Vaejovis carolinianus is common in the Cumberland Mountains 

 of Kentucky and Tennessee, as it also is in the western Blue Ridge 

 Province in southeastern Tennessee. However, the only records from 

 the western periphery of North Carolina are from Madison and Swain 

 counties (Shelley 1994), which doubtlessly represent penetrations up 

 the French Broad and Little Tennessee river valleys, respectively. The 

 former also implies occurrence in adjacent Cocke County, Tennessee, 



