Short Wave - The Scorpion Renaissance Is Upon Us

Episode Date: October 6, 2022

Scorpions: They're found pretty much everywhere, and new species are being identified all the time. Arachnologist Lauren Esposito says there's a lot to love about this oft-misunderstood creature. Most are harmless — they can't even jump — and they play a critical role in their diverse ecosystems as a top invertebrate predator.Want to hear us talk about other newly identified animal species? We'd love to know! We're at @NPRShortWave on Twitter, and our email is [e-mail] pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Night. For many of us, it's when the world is winding down. That special time when the sun's long gone down and the world pauses, silences, or does it? Scorpions prefer darker nights, moonless nights, and it's also much easier to see them with a black light when there's not as much light from the moon because black lights, they're not very bright. As a scorpion researcher, Dr. Lauren Espicito, scours the nightland. landscape with black lights. Because when it's exposed to the black light, a pigment in the scorpion's exoskeleton makes it glow. They look like toxic sludge, like really bright green. And so you're like walking around and you're mostly tripping because it's hard to see with the black light to walk,

but then you shine this little light around and you see a scorpion sitting off in the distance, maybe under a bush or on a rock and you come closer and there it is, right in front of you. This kind of expedition is exactly what Lauren encouraged two Northern California teenagers, Procrete Jane, and Harper Forbes to do. They'd long been interested in the natural world, and for years, Procrete had been logging his animal sightings in Eye Naturalists. It's an app that lets users, anyone in the community, log photos and IDs of plants and animals they see around the globe. But the app has its limitations. What they were discovering for themselves was that it's really hard to identify scorpions in California, because there aren't any resources for the general community or even the scientific community

to identify species. And so, Procrete and Harper reached out to their friendly neighborhood scientist, Lauren Esposito. Together, they decided to create exactly the scorpion reference key they wished existed. One ambition on that wish list? Finding a particular kind of scorpion that was first uploaded to Eye Naturalist back in 2013. As far as anyone can tell, it seemed to be only found that one time, in a central California salt flat. And since 2013, there's been sort of a community conversation

about this species and trying to figure out what the identity of it is. It was like a mystery. Yeah, it was like a mystery. Like there was a lot of disagreement. People were like, oh, maybe it's this. And then somebody would come back like a year later and be like, nah, it can't be that because of this characteristic.

It doesn't match up with that species. Today's show, the mystery revealed. Lauren talks about why we're in a scorpion renaissance, the importance of community science and the wonders of this arachnid. I'm Regina Barber. You're listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science podcast from NPR. Hey, just wanted to take a moment to shout out to our Shortwave Plus listeners. We appreciate you and thank you for being a subscriber.

Shortwave Plus helps support our show and if you're a regular listener, we would love for you to join so you can enjoy the show without sponsor interruptions. Find out more at plus.mpr.org slash shortwave. So let's pick up this mystery. After years of studying scorpion species, Procrete and Harper narrowed down their suspects. Their hunch was that it was a plia scorpion evolved to live in the salt bed it was found in. This scorpion genus is found around dry lake beds or plias in the deserts of central and southern California. And once they gathered all their research for this sighting, they realized it could help solve a second more recent scorpion mystery.

They identified another previously unknown pliascorpion. So Procrete and Harper had identified two new scorpion species. The only thing left to do was named them. I went with their recommendation as long as it was properly Latinized. The first species is periroctinus soda, named after the soda lake. That's the name of the salt flat that it was found on. And the second one, they named periroctonus conclusis, which was named after the limited environmental range that it can exist in.

Like, this is it. This is the end of the line. Oh, wow. This is the conclusive of the species. What do people tend to misunderstand when they think about scorpions? Well, oftentimes people associate scorpions with deserts, but actually scorpions are almost everywhere in the world, outside of places that stay frozen for really long parts of the year. So here in North America, you can find them all the way up to Canada on the west coast. On the east coast, they don't get up quite as far north. But, like, definitely the Carolinas and Virginia, you can see some scorpions.

Even, I mean, even here in Washington State, they're just around. Yeah, they're just around. Like, in Europe, you can find scorpions in the Alps. In Mexico, you can find scorpions in Sotanos, so, like, down below sea level, like, you know, 100 meters below sea level in Sotanos, and they're, like, completely blind, eyeless scorpions. What? They like a particular kind of ecosystem, a particular... like humidity and temperature and just the right kind of soil for them to make their burrows in. When you find them, you find a lot of them. There's not just one or two. There's like dozens.

And so some studies have shown that in deserts, scorpions are the highest biomass of any other group. So there's more abundance of scorpions than there are anything else other than maybe plants. And now there are two new kinds in California. Hallelujah. California is actually hyper-diversive for scorpions. California has almost more scorpion species for any comparable area of anywhere in the world. So like scorpions in California is like a great place to hunt. That's why you live there. That's well it's actually not why I live here, but it's a huge bonus. But should we be scared? There's so many. They're everywhere. They're like in my backyard in Washington State, I guess. But should we be scared? Well, no is the first answer. We're actually like

in this moment, in this period of time. It's an amazing period of time to be alive because we're in a scorpion renaissance period. Like a hundred years ago, we'd only discovered about 250 species of scorpions. And today, we've documented over 2,700 species. Wow. So should we be scared? You said it's a

renaissance. Right, it's a renaissance. I never got back to whether you should be scared or not. Okay, so the point is only a really small fraction of those species are dangerous to humans. So of the like 2,700 or so that we've documented so far, there's only about 30 that are really posed

really significant health risks to humans. That's a tiny percentage. Yeah, it's a tiny percentage. And they're concentrated. They're mostly in some parts of South America like Brazil, some parts of Mexico, some parts of the Middle East, and in those specific places, there's commercial anti-venants available to combat the envenomation.

Also, I think an important thing to always remember about scorpions is that they can't jump. So if you come across the scorpion, it's not going to jump on you. Everybody always thinks that they're going to leap across the room and attack them, but the reality is they don't jump. They can't really climb walls. But you can just leave, is what you're telling me.

Yeah, you just walk away. It's amazing. You'll be fine. I love this. Okay, you study Serbians and you think they're cool. You love them. What other things about them are awesome? I mean, love is such a strong word.

Is it wrong? But I do, I generally, I mean, I enjoy them. But the thing that I enjoy the most about scorpions is the lessons that I feel like they can teach me, because they've been around for so long. Like, we're talking about animals that have been successful on Earth for 450 million years. Mm-hmm. And so in order to be successful for that long, and in such a great diversity of ecosystems, you must be doing some things right.

So can you kind of elaborate on that? Like, why are scorpions important to our ecosystem now, then? Well, for one, they're sort of the top predator in the invertebrate food chain. And so when we think about the way that food chains get regulated and ecosystems get regulated is there's in a really simplified fashion, there's predators and there's prey. And the prey are oftentimes herbivores, so they're eating plants. And the predators are carnivores, so they're eating plant eaters. When you eliminate predators, then you eliminate the balance of the overarching ecosystem.

And when you eliminate the balance, the ecosystem starts to fall apart. and what that means for humans is that the ecosystem services that we rely on, which is like clean water, clean air, pollinators for our agricultural crops, decomposers for our waste that we produce massive amounts of, start to fall apart as well. And so those ecosystem services are things that we're reliant on. And so in order to save humanity, we really have to think about things like scorpions

and whether or not their populations are healthy and balanced in the ecosystems that are important to us. Yeah. I love that answer. And you were just to speak of, like, dangers to these species, these two new scorpions, like, they're in danger now. Now that we have all this kind of attention, I remember reading that there might be some issue with keeping them alive.

You know, I think oftentimes as natural history sciences, we feel like we're a place in a race to discover and describe organisms before they go extinct. And we're in that race because of climate change, because of human development. And so ecosystems that are unique, that are isolated, and that contain unique and isolated species with nowhere else to go because they're so hyper adapted to living in that specific place in that specific environment, when there's something small like a major construction or development project, they're inherently at risk because this is the only place in the world that they live. So once the salt flat's gone, the species is extinct. Right.

do you think that this community science, well, this community of people like studying scorpions that aren't necessarily publishing papers, are you optimistic that they can help those scorpions? The more that we're aware of the world around us, and the more that we understand the consequences of the changes that we make, the greater equipped we are to dealing with those consequences and putting in place plans to prevent biodiversity decline, which we're seeing and experiencing all over the world, particularly in the case of, of, of insects. People often say that we're in the midst of an insect apocalypse. And insects are important members of ecosystems like scorpions are. Once one thing starts to decline, then we start

to see these whole sort of catastrophic cascades of biodiversity declines in ecosystems. Yeah. I'm genuinely optimistic that people who are making and sharing observations are becoming more connected to nature. And in becoming more connected to nature, they feel more empowered to be the decision makers of the ecosystems that they're connected to. Is that how you feel? Is that how you feel and you want to share it? I mean, that's definitely how I feel. I feel like I am not powerless.

Yeah. I feel like I'm empowered. And the ways that that really comes to light is, for example, like these two freshmen in college, seeing the way that they feel empowered and the way that they are really not only cognizant of the potential impacts on environments, but ready to step up and do something about it. And so a whole generation of young people with this attitude that do feel connected and empowered are who are going to be the change makers. It's not necessarily me. But whatever I can do to empower the next generation is something that I think is promising and that I'm excited about.

I want to thank you so much for talking to us. I had a great time. Thank you. I'm always happy to Come on Shortwave. This episode was produced by Rebecca Ramirez, edited by our senior supervising editor, Giselle Grayson, and fact-checked by Margaret Serino. Maggie Luthor was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Anya Grunman is our senior vice president of programming. I'm Regina Barber. Thanks for listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science Podcast from NPR.

See you tomorrow.