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Oh, hey, it's a lady in front of you in the checkout with 26 items. Who doesn't realize she's in the express lane and is fully oblivious to your glares? Allie Ward. So, hi, this is an episode of Smologies, which we've made classroom safe so you can listen with your little ones. So the full episodes are obviously a little more spicier, more in detail, but Smologies are safe to listen to around anyone. So I hope you enjoy this. If you're looking for the full length version, it's linked in the show notes.
Okay, Scorpiology. Yes, this is a real ology. It's a subset of arachnology, arachnids. And scorpion comes from the Greek for, are you ready for this? For scorpion.
Okay, that is not something that made me say, oh my God. All right, we covered myths about scorpions, what big pinchers mean, some movie magic. How lethal are these critters? Glow-in-the-dark magic. And also, where is their butt? So bust out your blacklight. Keep your ears on alert for STEM advocate, science communicator, researcher, expedition leader, and curator at the California Academy of Sciences, Scorpiologist Dr. Lauren Esposito.
Smologies. Allergies? Smologies? My allergies.
Okay, so you are, I looked this up, you're an arachnologist, but I saw that there is a subset that is scorpiology. There is scorpiology, so I'm technically speaking a scorpiologist. Now, at what point when you were studying them did you say, holy macaroni? These are cool. You know, it was really, it started when I was doing that undergraduate internship and I realized, like, man, scorpions are amazing for so many reasons.
boy, how do you get ready for this? Okay, here we go. Here we go. One, they were the first terrestrial arthropod predators. So before anything else was on land, scorpions came on land, these little beasts. They weren't little then. They were like
The ancestors of scorpions were like a meter long. They were huge. Three feet? Yeah, three feet. What? Maybe even bigger. And they were these like underwater marine predators that were like ruling the oceans at the time. And eventually some people have hypothesized that because we found these ancient trackways alongside rivers of scorpions, so their little footprints embedded in rock. Well, it was mud that turned into rock over time.
And they've hypothesized that they actually became amphibious and were coming up on the land to eat spawning fish. Oh. Like grizzlies, right? You know, grizzlies like come in the river and eat the spawning fish. They were doing the same thing, but they were like the size of grizzlies and they were scorpions. Comes to scorpions, the bigger the better. Oh my God. I literally am having like vertigo. Like I can't just imagining a scorpion the size of like a kiddie pool. Just, just.
Just like an alligator. Basically like an alligator. They were called Eurypterids, the ancestors of scorpions. And eventually, the gills that they had to breathe underwater were internalized and that allowed them to live on land. And so, the scorpions of today basically look identical to the scorpions of...
450 million years ago. So they've been on Earth forever, right? So we can ask all kinds of questions about what happened on Earth in the last 450 million years by trying to understand the evolutionary history of scorpions. And so how do you think they got littler and littler? Well, there's a, like the main driving factor behind why insects and arachnids are not as big as they used to be, as big as the fossils we find, is the oxygen percentage in the air, in the atmosphere. Oh, okay.
Because scorpions and spiders and insects all basically passively respire, so they don't have lungs where they're breathing in and out. And they don't have closed circulatory systems. They just kind of have blood that gets pumped around by a heart, just open up in their body. And so the rate at which oxygen can get to all their tissues that they need for walking around and moving and eating and doing all the things is limited by how much
of oxygen there is in the air. And over time, the oxygen concentration has gone down. So Lauren explained that when life started coming on land and there were more and more air-breathing critters, the carbon dioxide output increased and the oxygen levels went down. So when you have less fuel, you downsize. So think of turning in a Hummer for a Fiat. But...
slowly as a result of evolution. Okay, so apart from the last 450 million years of history, where can we find scorpions? And so where do scorpions live? Clearly not in New York City. Oh my gosh, they live basically everywhere that there's not major freezes for long parts of the year. Okay. So like, imagine a place. Scorpions in your underwear. There's probably scorpions there. They're not in Antarctica. They're also not in the Arctic because it's cold.
It's like snow on the ground all year round, but they are in places like the Alps, so you wouldn't expect them to be in the Alps, or like the upper reaches of the Andes, like in Argentina, there's scorpions. My real area of speciality is the Neotropics, so I go to the Caribbean, to Central America, South America, but I've been to places like islands off the coast of Equatorial Africa, Southeast Asia,
I don't know. I've been like all over the world looking for those little buggers. And now tell me a little bit about the basic structure of a scorpion. Like what are we dealing with? Because I feel like they got crab in the front. They got snake face in the back with the venom. They got the business end in the back. Yeah. What?
It's like a mullet, right? So, scorpions, like all arachnids, have two primary body parts. They have a prosoma, which is like the head. And they have a pistisoma, which is like the body. So, like picture a spider, there's two main chunks. But scorpions have this extra little business end, which is the tail.
And their prosoma and epistisoma are sort of fused, so there's not like a real delineation between the head and the body. And then up in the front, they have two pairs of appendages. They have chelicerae, which are the mouth parts, and they have these chewing mouth parts that they use basically to like rip up
Meat. It is raw meat. Before they get it and down their gullet. And so their eyes are on the top of their head. Yeah, like facing up towards the sky. How many eyes do they have? It depends, but usually they almost all have three sets of eyes, two in the middle and then a set of three to six in each corner of the front of their head.
And so they're arranged like in a triangle. Some people have hypothesized that they use the triangular array of eyes to look up into the night sky and navigate by the stars. Oh, my stars. Now, for those who enjoy a good crossword puzzle word or are...
choked for conversation on a long car ride. Navigating by stars is called astromanotaxis. Astromanotaxis, there. You know that now. And then they have claws that they use mostly for grabbing onto prey. Like in some scorpions, they just use the claws to...
to grab their prey. They don't ever actually need to sting them because they have these big chunky claws. Like picture those big black emperor scorpions that you see in the movies all the time. They have these huge claws up front and they almost never use their tail and their venom's not very toxic. Mm-hmm.
But other scorpions have these really slender, thin claws, and they really just use those for manipulating prey items and mostly use the tail and really powerful super toxic venom for disabling their prey and escaping predators. Claws in the front, tail in the back, and at the very end of the tail is the stinger. And the stinger looks kind of like a bulb, like a light bulb. And at the end of that is a hypodermic needle.
And inside of the bulb is a layer of secretory cells, so cells that secrete toxins. And it's surrounded by muscle that allows them to squeeze those toxins out of the cells and into the hypodermic needle that they use to inject into their prey. Okay.
Okay, so their venom bulb is kind of like one of those little squirty things you would jam into your ear hole to flush out funky chunks. Only it's a nerve toxin made by DNA that they probably had for something else, but evolved it to become venom. So what is in this exactly? But the really crazy thing is that their venom is not just one thing.
It's actually a complex cocktail of all sorts of different components. And they have things like antimicrobials in there, enzymes that break open tissue and help them digest. And then they also have these complex neuropeptides. And neuropeptides are basically things
that when they interact with your nervous system, tell your nerves to either send a signal when they're not supposed to be sending a signal, or they inhibit the transmission of signals between cells. Neuropeptides, by the by, are chains of amino acids that form these protein-like molecules that your nervous system uses to communicate. And the neuropeptides bind to receptors.
and activate a bunch of events inside a neuron. The neuropeptides in venom can jack that system by cutting off the neurons from talking to each other or sending signals when they shouldn't be talking. So venom is like when someone grabs your phone and starts DMing people it shouldn't or withholding a text from your boss. Okay, what if you're like a cricket?
and you don't have a boss or a phone. What does that do if you're a prey? Yeah, so if you're a prey, what it might do is disable you, keep you from moving, send you into a seizure, really just incapacitate you very quickly so that you can be eaten and make baby scorpions with the energy that you get from your prey. But if you're a predator...
What it does is it sends pain signals to your brain telling your brain that you're on fire. Oh my god! We're having a fire!
Oh, my God.
How much do they get a bad rep? Yeah. Well, they get a pretty bad rep, I would say, overall. So far, we've discovered about 2,500 species of scorpions, give or take.
And about 25 of those are something that are a concern for a healthy human. And there's, you know, maybe a dozen or two more that are a concern for people that have a compromised immune system or are elderly or very young. So the majority of scorpions, that means like less than 10% of all scorpions are something that are really dangerous that we need to be worried about.
But that being said, all scorpions do have a stinger and they can jab it into your body and they can inject things that are in their venom. But oftentimes those things are more mild than a bee sting or a wasp sting. Oh, okay. Let me step back and say there's two major groups of scorpions. There's a group called the boothed scorpions. It's one of the oldest lineages of scorpions and it also has the greatest number of species compared to all the other lineages.
And those ones all make neurotoxins that affect mammals. So they make neurotoxins that can interact with our nervous system. Again, these are the boothids. And I looked everywhere to find out where the name boothid comes from. And I think it's from the Greek for ox or cow because their stings were thought to be real cow killers. Again, boothids. And then all the other scorpions are non-boothids.
All the other groups of scorpions. And all those guys typically don't make neurotoxins that affect mammal nervous systems. But considering their reputation of scorpions, they do carry some dramatic names, like the black-spitting, thick-tailed scorpion, or the man-killer, or death stalker. These kind of sound like 1970s carnival rides. But scientific names are dreamt up by the scientists that first recognized that species as being a new species. Have you gotten to name any?
I have, yeah. What? We discover new scorpions all the time. There's like maybe 50 or so added a year to our knowledge. Now, when you're discovering scorpions, I understand that there are black lights involved. There are, yeah. So tell me everything about why they fluoresce under black lights. So scorpions, all scorpions fluoresce. It's a trait universal to scorpions. What fluorescence means basically is that there's a...
pigment in the exoskeleton of scorpions that's embedded in there. It's called cormoran. So side note, cormoran is often found in plants. And according to this Wikipedia prose, it has, quote, a sweet odor resembling the scent of newly mown hay. It's also found in cassia cinnamon, in fake vanilla, and in perfumes. Oh, and it makes venomous arthropods glow like ravers. Anyway,
What it does is it takes in light waves just from light, ambient light, and it excites those light waves and then projects them back at a higher wavelength. So that's what causes the fluorescence. It's not like a reflection or it's actually like an excitation of light beams. And so they all fluoresce this bright, like neon, toxic sludge green under ultraviolet light.
And we don't really know why they have this feature. There's a few possibilities. One...
It's just a byproduct of how their exoskeleton forms. Like the process in which they form their exoskeleton creates a fluorescence. Or alternatively, it has like a function that's helpful for them. And there's a few possibilities. One that's been proposed is that it's a whole body light detection system. Oh my God. So it allows them to detect when there's light, which I think could very well be, but also they have eyes. So typically they can see if there's light outside.
or not, so it could be another function as well. The other functions that have been thought up are that it's a way to tell other animals that they're dangerous, like bees are black and yellow, and that black and yellow is like a sign that they're dangerous.
Scorpions are active at night, and at night colors don't show up very well, and things that are active at night can't see very well in color. So many things that are doing things at night have evolved greater UV capabilities. And so flowers that bloom at night have a UV pattern that attracts pollinators. So scorpions that are active at night might want a UV pattern to say, hey, wait, I'm dangerous and you should stay away from me, like a warning color.
Or they're actually trying to mimic something else, like a flower, and attract things so that they can eat them. Oh my god. So those are all the possibilities. Do you think that their ancient ancestors that were ginormous could fluoresce? Well, there is some geologist mention that...
There's some really well-preserved fossils that preserved cuticle and the cuticle fluoresces. Oh my god. So side note, this is due to their glowing hyaline layer in their axis skeleton. Also, did you know that horseshoe crabs also glow under UV light? If someone wanted to go out and look for critters at night, do you think getting a blacklight and just...
checking things out. Yeah, I mean, like in some places I saw them at Home Depot. You can go on a scorpion hunt. And the trick is to go out at night because one, you can't really see anything with the black light during the day because it's not a very bright wavelength of light. So it gets washed out by daylight. And two, scorpions are nocturnal, so they're active at night, not
Not during the day. Now, what about scorpions in movies or pop culture? Is there any movie that really does a good job with scorpions or one that really gets your goat? You know what? Like, I feel like they're always... The problem I have with movies and scorpions is that they're always very inaccurate. Okay. Like, why in every single movie does it have to be the emperor scorpion? Emperor scorpions are from tropical Africa. They most definitely do not live in deserts.
There's definitely no black scorpions living in a, like, white sandy desert. It doesn't exist. They want to blend in with their environment. They're not trying to stand out like black on white background. Are the emperor scorpions easier to handle? Yeah, I mean, they're really common in the pet trade. And actually, for that reason, they're the only scorpion that's considered to be threatened or endangered. Oh, okay.
Like they can live to be 25. Yeah, I feel like lay off the scorpions. Yeah, like lay off of them. And the other crazy thing about scorpions that I was struck by when I first learned about them is that the moms give birth to live babies. That was my next question. I've seen a picture of scorpions that are just have a backpack full of baby scorpions. Yeah.
What is happening there? Yeah, so, well, their courtship starts by what we call pas de deux. They actually dance. They do, like, a ballroom dance. They're actually quite refined animals. So, the males approach the females and grab onto their hands. They face her and grab onto her hands. And then they do this, like, dance, like, back and forth where he, like, leads her back and forth.
Oh, my God. Gestation period, you ask? Seven to nine months, similar to a human, or up to 14 months for emperor scorpions. What troopers. And once they give birth, she does this thing called a birth basket, where she arches her back up and makes her arms into like a circle, like kind of touches her hands together and makes like a little circle. And so they'll crawl up her hands onto her back, and then they'll stay up there for a
Depends on the species, but they'll stay up there until they've molted for the first time. So they've shed their exoskeleton and gotten a little bigger. And in that first period, they kind of almost look like a little larval still. Like they don't look like a normal scorpion. But as soon as they have that first molt, they look just like a little tiny miniature scorpion. So they just hop off and they're like, toodaloo. Yeah, like they'll kind of start coming off her back and then getting back on for a little bit. But in some species, they do kind of live...
semi-cooperatively. Like, they're still living together in the same area for a long period of time. So the moms actually, like, will live in a burrow with the babies. Aww.
I don't know, like months? Years maybe? And they'll just live around each other and they tolerate each other really well. And then she gives birth anywhere from two to... I think the upper limit that anybody's ever recorded is like one-fifth... Forty? Like high 140s? Wow. Maybe... Let's say 150, call it even. One hundred and fifty babies. That would be like a lot. And they all pile up on her back. What a party!
Yeah. Scorpion party. Now, what is some flim flam about scorpions that you would like to debunk? What are some myths that you're like, let's get the record straight, people? Well, okay. Here's a few things you need to know about scorpions. Okay. One, they can't jump. Oh, okay. Yeah.
It's just a thing. They don't jump. They can't walk. They can walk on some vertical surfaces if they're grainy, like a rock that has little micro areas to step on. But otherwise, something that's slick like windows, they could never walk on a window. Okay. So they're going to have a hard time getting to you if you see it from three feet away. You don't have to run away. It's not going to be able to grab you. Okay.
So with the exception of Arizona, some parts of southern Nevada, and some parts of western New Mexico, Lauren says... In the U.S., there are no scorpions that you have to be concerned about. Oh, okay. Like, worst case scenario, it feels like a wasp. Even those ones in Arizona, like, they...
If you're a healthy adult, you don't have to worry. It's not gonna kill you. It will just hurt for a little bit. Okay. You might feel like a little more like an electric shock than a wasp sting. Okay. But if you're a child, you want to be safe and not be playing with scorpions in Arizona. Just rule of thumb.
So that's a thing. I have so many questions from listeners. Can I ask you? Yeah. Okay, so before we get to your Patreon questions, a few words from the folks who sponsor the show. And one thing about having ads is it makes donations to a cause of theologist choosing possible. So this week, it's to...
Islands and Seas. This is a nonprofit that Lauren founded with Eric Steiner. And Islands and Seas is building these small field stations that serve as research facilities for scientists in the area. They also serve as centers for science and environmental education for nearby schools. They have internships for teenagers interested in science, field guide training. Ah, so good. Islands and
seas.org. That's islands, plural, seas.org. So thank you, Lauren and Eric, for starting that. Now a few words about sponsors making that donation and the production of this very show possible.
Look at me. Even I did it.
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Okay, back to your questions. Okay, so this is kind of like a lightning round. Okay, Sonia Karpovich wants to know, should they be kept as pets? And if yes, do they make good pets? I say, I'm gonna say yes, they should, should, there's no reason they shouldn't be kept as pets. But like all things that are kept in captivity, I think it's really important to have captive bred ones.
because then that keeps people out of the natural ecosystems from over-harvesting, over-collecting for the pet trade. So there are quite a few species that are really common in the pet trade and are bred in captivity. So if you want a scorpion as a pet, don't go get it out of your backyard. Leave it there. It's doing something important in the ecosystem, and rather buy one that's been captive-bred by a breeder. Okay. Okay.
Emily Hawking has a question about the waste management system. Where is the butt? Do they pee? They do. They have just like a single kind of cloaca thing that excretes everything. They don't have like separate pee and poo situation. And so it all comes out from right before the stinger. Oh. Wade Lee wants to know, is it true smaller scorpions are more venomous in general? Smiley face emoji. It depends on where you are. So it's not a simple yes or no answer.
In some places, smaller scorpions belong to that one group, Boothidae, so they are more venomous. But I would say in general, a better frame of reference is if they have thin hands and either a really long or really fat tail, they're probably more venomous. And if they have big fat hands and their hands are much broader than the width of their tail, then they're less venomous. So it's not like the overall body size, but the proportion of hands to tail size.
So, counterintuitively, big pinchers, less scary. And now, best thing about Scorpions, best thing about your job, what do you love? You know, I love my job because I get to wear so many hats and I'm at an institution that feels, I'm at an institution that was such a good match for me, which is why I wanted to work there. The California Academy of Sciences is, I think, an incredible museum because it's,
equally committed to science outreach, which is something I love doing, and like really high quality science research. So for me, those two aspects of my work life, I always felt like I was going to have to give up one for the other. But I found a really great fit. And I think for me, that's like the great thing about going to work every day is
They love all the things I'm doing, including running a little nonprofit that's focused on conservation and doing a visibility campaign for queer scientists. And it's nice to be somewhere where I can bring all of me to the job. Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you. Oh, my God. This is great.
So ask smart people questions, because how else would we ever find out that scorpions are 450 million years old and were once the size of like a couch? What? What? To learn more about Dr. Esposito's endeavor, you can find her on Instagram at Cara Bales. More links will all be up at alieward.com slash ologies slash scorpiology.
You can follow Ologies on Twitter or Instagram at Ologies. I'm on both at Allie Ward with one L. Also linked is AllieWard.com slash Smologies, which has dozens more kids safe and shorter episodes you can blaze through. And thank you, Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio and Jared Sleeper of Mindjam Media for editing those, as well as Zeke Rodriguez-Thomas.
And since we like to keep things small around here, the rest of the credits are in the show notes. And at the end of the episode, I give you a piece of advice. And this piece of advice sounds simple, but it's huge. And that is that you are enough as the person you are and you are wonderful as you are. And anyone who is worth being your friend already loves you the way that you are and you don't have to change to make anyone happy. So just be yourself and the right people will come to your life. Okay, that's my piece of advice for you. Took me a long time to learn it, but it's important. All right, bye-bye.
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