Scorpions | Ask A Biologist

Written by: Christopher Putnam
Illustrated by: Dr. Biology

show/hide words to know

Ancient: very old.

Antivenin: also called antivenom, a medicine used to treat people who have been bitten or stung by a venomous animal……more

Arachnid: a joint-legged animal that is part of the class Arachnida. These animals have eight legs and include spiders, scorpions, as well as other animals……more

Habitat: the place where an animal or plant lives.

Nocturnal animal: animal that is active at night… more

Predator: an animal that eats other animals to survive. For example, a lion is a predator… more

Prey: animal hunted for food by another animal or animals… more

Symptoms: (1) How you look or feel when sick; like a fever or rash. (2) Changes in your body or behavior when you are sick.

Venom: a toxic substance some animals use to kill prey or defend themselves.

Don’t be misled by the title of the story. Scorpions are amazing animals, but they can pack a painful sting. So even though they are rarely deadly, you wouldn’t want to think they are harmless. Instead, spend some time reading about these arachnids and learn about what we know and what we are still learning about these ancient animals.

History and Range of Scorpions

Scorpions have been around for a long time and have changed very little in 350 million years. Scientists have identified more than 1,500 different species of scorpions and there may be as many as 1,000 more species undiscovered. Scorpions live on every continent except Antarctica and are found in almost every kind of habitat. Most scorpions live in deserts. Some live in rain forests. Others live in grassy prairies, and still others live only beneath the bark of palm trees. About 70-75 types of scorpions live in the United States. Most of these are found in the desert Southwest.

Wherever they live, scorpions are nocturnal predators. Hunting at night, a scorpion will eat almost anything, even other scorpions. After an unlucky animal is grabbed by a scorpion’s strong pincers, the scorpion uses its stinger to sting the animal multiple times. Some scorpions have such powerful pincers they seldom use their stinger. Once the animal can’t get away, the scorpion begins to tear it into tiny pieces. When the pile is big enough, the scorpion spits strong digestive juices onto the pile of animal bits. The juices melt the bits into soft sticky stew. The scorpion sucks the gooey pieces into its mouth.

Scorpions Eating Habits

Besides having bad table manners, scorpions are also very tough. Some scorpions can survive a whole year with no food. Other scorpions can live for two days under water or survive long periods of cold. Scorpions may also live for a long time. They generally live between 2-10 years, but some might live as long as 25 years! Not bad for such little guys who are usually only one or two inches long.

Scorpions are often misunderstood. Many people say that scorpions are so aggressive they will sting themselves to death, but this is not a natural behavior of scorpions in the wild. Other people say the sting of a baby scorpion is more dangerous than the sting of an adult, but again, this is false. The venom in a scorpion’s stinger is the same all through a scorpion’s life. Perhaps the biggest myth is that all scorpions are deadly, and this is totally wrong. Only a very few scorpions are potentially dangerous to people. Of the 1,500 known scorpion species only 25 have a sting potent enough to be considered potentially dangerous to humans. Only one lives in the United States. The most dangerous scorpion in Arizona is the bark scorpion, Centruroides sculpturatus.

Arizona Bark Scorpions

In the southwestern United States, Arizona is home to a large number of bark scorpions. Until 2005 Arizona was home of the only scorpion antivenin program in North America. Scorpion antivenin is used to treat severe scorpion stings. Marilyn Bloom directed the Arizona State University Scorpion Antivenin Program. According to Bloom, despite the large number of people and scorpions in Arizona, only about 100 stings each year receive scorpion antivenin, and most of those are either young children or elderly adults. Most important for severe scorpion stings is immediate access to medical treatment, whether or not antivenin is available. In less developed countries, lack of transportation to medical care contributes to higher numbers of scorpion stings resulting in illness or death.

Marilyn Bloom’s advice to avoid a scorpion sting is simple. “Don’t put your fingers or toes where you can’t see them,” she says. If you think scorpions are around, shake out your clothes and shoes before putting them on, especially if you are outdoors. Always wear shoes when outdoors, particularly around swimming pools or other water sources. If you find scorpions in your home be sure to look under your bed linens before getting into bed. Also, remember scorpions are active at night. Watch out for them after dark. Most importantly, never play with scorpions. Even though they are interesting, they are wild creatures and might hurt you.

Set Stinger to Stun

Research on some scorpions has shown that they have two types of venom. One is good for killing prey and the other is better for stunning or just warning other creatures away, like you and me. It is kind of like the characters in Star Trek that can set their phaser weapons to stun or kill. The stun venom is easier to make for a scorpion and can be used more often. The venom used to kill its prey takes a lot more time and energy to make so scorpions usually use it on things they want to kill and eat.

If you think a scorpion has stung you there are a few symptoms to watch out for. Symptoms include: local pain where stung but no swelling; touching the area is painful; numbness and tingling in parts of the body distant from the sting; trouble focusing eyes or random eye movements; trouble swallowing, drooling and the tongue feels swollen; slurred speech; young children may rub their faces which may indicate facial numbness; muscle twitching; and restlessness, irritability, or hyperactivity. Not all these symptoms will occur in every person, although some should appear in the first two to three hours. Children under 10 years are at higher risk than other people. First aid for a scorpion sting is simple. Wash the sting site with soap and water. You may apply a cool compress to the sting site, but do not use ice. Numbness and tingling should pass in time. If symptoms persist or are severe, seek medical attention.

Venom!

Try your skills with our scorpion venom game and activities. Learn how scorpion venom works and how antivenin protects your cells if you are stung.

Here are some other places to read and learn about scorpions.

On the Web:

There are hundreds of sites on the web, but their web addresses often change. It is best to look for them using a search engines and try these key words scorpions, Centruroides sculpturatus.

Books:

Scorpions by Conrad Storad

Scorpions and Venomous Insects of the Southwest by Erik D. Stoops and Jeffery L. Martin

Tarantulas and Scorpions- Their Care in Captivity by Wayne Rankin and Jerry G. Walls

References:

Bora Inceoglu, et al. One scorpion, two venoms: Prevenom of Parabuthus transvaalicus acts as an alternative type of venom with distinct mechanism of action. Proceeding. of the National. Academy of Science. https://www.pnas.org/content/100/3/922. Accessed 7,08,09.

Read more about: Not So Scary Scorpions

What to know when venturing into scorpion territory

After the sun goes down, William Hayes begins his hunt. Armed with nothing more than a blacklight, he heads out into the southern California desert in search of biological treasure. The ultraviolet light doesn’t illuminate the path well at all, but it will help him spot his stinging, pinching, eight-legged prey: scorpions.

The Loma Linda University biology professor sweeps his blacklight a few feet ahead of him and spots one scurrying out from under a rock, its body glowing fluorescent green under the UV rays. Now, it’s simply a matter of identifying the species, noting behavioral data, and perhaps taking a few live specimens scooped into portable containers back to the lab where he will collect and study their venom.

He’s been stung many times in the process, sometimes deliberately, sometimes not, so it’s safe to say he has an intimate knowledge of these creatures he finds so fascinating. And what he knows will help you when you venture into scorpion territory.

Scorpion basics

Scorpions live and breed in Hayes’ natural habitat: southern California (though they also reside as far east as North Carolina and occupy many states in between, mostly dry southwest and western regions in New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, California, Arizona, and Texas). That overlap gives him an abundance of opportunity to study them, their venom, how they use it in the wild, and how it varies from species to species.

[Related: The US is running out of wasp venom. That’s bad.]

Most scorpions are between 2 and 3 inches long, and all are carnivores, meaning they munch on insects, small lizards, and even snakes. They generally capture their dinner using their pedipalps (which you may know as pincers), saving their venomous tail stinger for paralyzing larger prey. 

As invertebrates in the arachnid family, scorpions are closely related to spiders and ticks and are most active in warm summer months, hunting at night and keeping to the cool shade during the day. They hibernate in the winter, slowing their metabolism so they can last up to a year without food, one reason they are able to thrive in extreme environments.

As for their venom: “The sting of most species is no worse than that of the typical bee,” Hayes says.

Their look is worse than their sting

He knows this firsthand, as he will occasionally provoke defensive responses with his own fingers instead of the dead mice or membrane-covered beakers he and his students use to collect venom. When they force scorpions to sting, they’re attempting to determine a slew of factors: whether scorpions give dry bites (a sting without venom) or always wet ones (a sting with venom), whether sexual differences exist in defensive stings, how much venom comes with each sting, and whether scorpions can control how much they inject (they can).

But don’t worry about Hayes and his fingers; of some 2,500 scorpion species worldwide, only 30 or so have strong enough venom to endanger most humans, and only one with potentially deadly venom lives in the US: the Arizona bark scorpion.

But just because a sting isn’t likely to severely injure you doesn’t mean you should ignore scorpions entirely.

How to avoid encountering scorpions

If only scorpions were always this easy to see. Kelsey Dody / Unsplash

Fortunately, avoiding these little arachnids isn’t hard to do. Scorpions use tiny hairs on their legs and body to sense vibrations and will likely skitter into a safe hiding place before you even see them.

“They don’t want anything to do with us. They’re reclusive and they want to be left alone,” says Hayes. So if you spot one during the day, consider yourself lucky. At night, carry a blacklight to spot the creatures more easily—their brown or black bodies blend in with the landscape under normal flashlights.

Of course, hidden scorpions can still sting if you accidentally enter their refuge, so watch where you put your uncovered hands and feet when in their typically dry, rocky natural habitats, and be cautious when reaching into crevices or under rocks. They can even reside on cliffs or in trees, so climbers should proceed with caution.

[Related: Different scorpion species share a similar taste in interior design]

Even if you’re not camping or hiking, if you live in regions scorpions call home, it’s not a bad idea to shake out shoes, jackets, and boxes left outdoors before thrusting in hands and feet.

What to do if you’re stung by a scorpion

Don’t panic. While scorpion stings can be painful, most have no lasting consequences and the pain is likely to dissipate within 10 minutes, Hayes says. 

They can cause bruising and swelling, however, and heat around the injection site. In a small percentage of people who are allergic, venom can cause anaphylactic or anaphylactoid reactions. If you find out you are allergic, carry treatment like an epinephrine auto-injector with you in scorpion country. Good news: If you’re allergic to bees, you’re not automatically allergic to scorpion venom.

Allergic or not, try to avoid getting stung by the same scorpion more than once in succession, because additional stings can be more serious. The first venom that emerges is often clear and has lots of potassium ions that cause pain, but the venom in subsequent stings is more likely to be milky in color, with a greater concentration of proteins that are likely more toxic than the initial sting, Hayes says.

If you’re only stung once by most scorpions in the US, you’ll probably be just fine in a few minutes. But keep an eye out for signs and symptoms including difficulty breathing, intense muscle spasms, intense pain that doesn’t go away, nausea, or vomiting, especially in small children. If you or a companion experience any of those or have been stung more than once, head to a hospital to see if you need anti-venom, though this is only available for Arizona bark scorpion stings.

That species, which can be identified by its dark yellow-tan color, long, slender tail and narrow pincers, can be found in Arizona, southwest New Mexico, southern Nevada, and eastern California. And if it stings you, Hayes recommends visiting a hospital if symptoms “become at all alarming.”

Even scorpions have their place

But scorpions aren’t just grumpy recluses that will lash out if you get too close. Scientists have found that scorpion venom can be used to treat brain tumors in humans and to block signals from cancer cells to prevent them from growing. Researchers have also discovered that the pallid bat and grasshopper mouse are immune to scorpion venom and are studying those species to see if they might provide the key to pain relief for humans.

And as terrifying as scorpions are often portrayed on TV and in movies, there’s simply no data to back up widespread fear: as of 2018, there had been fewer than four deaths in the past 11 years in the US (there are, of course, more fatalities in countries with scorpions that have more toxic venom). So don’t run away in fear the next time you see one of these arthropods in the wild. “They’re not out to get us and they are important components to the ecosystem,” Hayes says. Just keep your distance and let them live their lives.

Wanderings under the constellation Scorpio

: 10 Sep 2006 , First after the First World War , Volume 11,
№5

In the early 1990s, I went to Mexico for scorpions, to a beautiful desert on the coast of the Sea of ​​Cortez (as the Mexicans call the Gulf of California). My family had the opportunity to participate in several fantastic expeditions of our friend Gary Polis, the famous American zoologist, who tragically died in 2000 on one of his expeditions in the Sea of ​​Cortez. Every night we counted centruroides scorpions crawling out of crevices in huge columnar cacti onto the heated black basalt of volcanic islands, erupted from the ocean floor so recently that the soil had not yet had time to cover them.

Change of scenery: cold and rainy spring of 2002 in the Babatag mountains, on the border of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Together with Sasha Gromov, the discoverer of pseudo-hactas, we are looking for this rarest scorpion. Border guards advise against walking towards the Afghan border, mined by sappers “just in case.” We find this chalk relic right in the bed of a stream, where every day a shepherd drives cows from the village – up the stream in the morning, down in the evening. Rare creatures sit right on the dirt. (Still, when photographing them under an electron microscope, I see this sticky Babatag dirt)…

“You seem to like scorpions…” is usually noticed by first-time visitors to my office, looking at clippings, printouts and photographs pasted on the walls.

“I like to study, but I don’t,” I could answer, but American students cannot understand old-fashioned imported humor.

It’s not easy to answer seriously: undoubtedly, a zoologist cannot deal with all creatures in the world, each of us specializes – some in polar bears, some in bats . .. Other groups and species of animals are unambiguously attractive (at least least until you get closer): pandas, turtles, butterflies, after all. And suddenly – scorpions, which you can’t even pet!

How to become a scorpio

But still, why scorpions? The answer is simple: “it happened”. In 1968, being an eighth-grader of the 130th school of the Novosibirsk Academgorodok, for the first time I had a chance to sort through the collections from the Karakum expeditions of the Institute of Physiology. Giant black beetles, tarantulas in sandy camouflage and, most importantly, amber-segmented yellow eight-legged scorpions, with delicate claws and dangerous needles, captivated the imagination.

I was even more captivated by the very possibility of traveling outside my native region and the city in general. I read at that time mostly Darrell; even wrote him a letter. The most surprising thing is that the answer came – surreal for those times – that, unfortunately, all the jobs at the Jersey Zoo are occupied. But after all, there were still domestic open spaces …

The skin (cuticle) of all scorpions in ultraviolet radiation fluoresces, glows in the green-blue spectrum.

With a good flashlight, a large scorpion can be seen at night for 5-10 m.

In 1976, having left Akademgorodok and geographical Russia, I deliberately chose zoology in the deserts of Central Asia. Many of my friends did not understand this step, and I myself, of course, did not fully understand it then. Among the real reasons for such a “self-reference” were the “romance” of life in the desert, and the desire to make “real science” on the models of Darrell and pre-revolutionary Russian naturalists…

One way or another, but for the next 11 years of my life I worked as a zoologist in the reserves of the future independent Turkmenistan, at that time a remote outskirts of a vast empire, on the very border with Iran. There, in the sands and rocks, many times I encountered dangerous stingrays, collecting them in jars of alcohol along with other numerous and little-studied desert fauna. The conditions were Spartan, but the remoteness from the authorities gave the freedom desired by the Soviet intellectual. At least a hundred researchers and students from Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, the Baltic States passed through our house every year … Undoubtedly, it was they who, in many ways, did that “real science” of my dreams.

In total, there are about 200 genera of scorpions in the world, united in 12 families, and representatives of only one of them are dangerous to humans.

But the blessed days of scientific work of crazy enthusiasts in the Central Asian reserves are over. In 1986, my friend Andrei Nenilin, a talented Tashkent zoologist, died absurdly, with whom we only managed to prepare a manuscript of an article on the geography of the world’s scorpions (which was published only years later). Two years later, our family left for provincial America, where I began teaching basic biological sciences to the local younger computer generation. First – in New Orleans, the last years – in the mining West Virginia, in the foothills of the Appalachian Range. As for the scorpions, then, gradually “breaking through” into consciousness, they formed a stable and already integral component of being.

With a magic lantern

In the early 1990s, I went to Mexico for scorpions, to a beautiful desert on the coast of the Sea of ​​Cortez (as the Mexicans call the Gulf of California). My family had the opportunity to participate in several fantastic expeditions of our friend Gary Polis, the famous American zoologist, who tragically died in 2000 on one of his expeditions in the Sea of ​​Cortez. Every night we counted centruroides scorpions crawling out of crevices in huge columnar cacti onto the heated black basalt of volcanic islands, erupted from the ocean floor so recently that the soil had not yet had time to cover them.

Change of scenery: cold and rainy spring of 2002 in the Babatag mountains, on the border of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Together with Sasha Gromov, the discoverer of pseudo-hactas, we are looking for this rarest scorpion. Border guards advise against walking towards the Afghan border, mined by sappers “just in case.” We find this chalk relic right in the bed of the stream, where every day the shepherd drives cows from the village – up the stream in the morning, down in the evening. Rare creatures sit right on the dirt. (Until now, photographing them under an electron microscope, I see this sticky Babatag dirt).

Spring 2005: We are in the Balkan Mountains on the highway north from Sofia with the wonderful zoologist Alexi Popov, current director of the Bulgarian National Museum of Natural History. It’s just getting dark, cars are rushing by. On a limestone rock right by the road, as if nothing had happened, in the rays of my “magic” flashlight, luminous constellations of five, eight, twenty scorpions appear!

These and other episodes of expeditions reveal the main field “motive”: chaotic night fermentation near various surfaces (sand, basalt, limestone) with a special ultraviolet lamp. If Nabokov attracted his night fliers to the light of a lamp, then our little animals must be followed like Diogenes.

About oddities in food and love

“Hunting” in places where there are a lot of scorpions is reminiscent of picking berries in a raspberry bush. Very soon there is simply nowhere to put them – the container ends. Plastic bags or test tubes are stuffed into all pockets and bags (you can’t put animals together – they eat each other), in the dark you juggle with ultraviolet and ordinary lanterns; the wire from the motorcycle battery that feeds the flashlight is confused; by mistake you open an already occupied test tube – an angry animal runs along the sleeve and quickly jumps off it.

In other places, the catch reaches 100, 150 pieces per night. So much is not needed – several copies are enough for DNA analysis – but different species come across, and the excitement of the hunter drives. You don’t have to hunt all night: by the third hour of the night, the earth and rocks cool (both in California and in Uzbekistan) and the scorpions crawl back into their holes. The optimal time of work is right after sunset, when the sand and stone are still heated and the scorpions crawl out in large numbers with their claws forward, sit and wait for the victim. In English, such a strategy for obtaining food is called: sit-and-wait.

There is up to one scorpion per square meter of sandy desert – more than any other animal, with the exception of insects

The number of scorpions is really huge. Polis estimates that there is up to one scorpion per square meter in the sandy desert – more than any other animals (excluding ants and termites), although not all of them, as established by marking and trapping, crawl out to the surface at the same time. And here the question arises: what do these hordes eat and how do these hordes reproduce in such a meager ecosystem?

Well, firstly, scorpions are unpretentious in food and eat everything. More precisely, all in a row, because they are predators, and besides, they are “cannibals”. But they eat little, very little – a cricket a month is enough for them. Since their metabolism is amazingly slow compared to any other animals, the calories from the same cricket are burned extremely efficiently. When they do not eat and do not multiply, they fall into a kind of catalepsy, then their life is truly a dream.

How do we collect them? Only with long tweezers, carefully – behind the specially “created” tail. Technically, of course, scorpions don’t have tails. Vertebrates have a tail, it is considered from the anus and carries the postanal vertebrae. Therefore, by the way, those are wrong

who thinks that a snake is a solid tail with a head at one end. However, uanatomov is the term “postcranium” – everything that comes after the head …

The “tail” of a scorpion (the anus of which opens, by the way, on the fifth, penultimate segment, in front of the poisonous vesicle) is scientifically called metasoma, but there is also a wonderful Russian word for it “posterior abdomen”. How absurd and how beautiful in Russian are these zoological terms, all these tentacles, trochanters and spiracles of urothopods and unequal-pterans, the technical lexicon of a specialist, lying far beyond Dahl, invented to describe truly alien bodies . ..

Such words were invented and creatively translated from German or Latin by dozens of unmercenary scientists caricatured by Bulgakov in Professor Persikov. Such was, for example, the Moscow zoologist M.N. So was N. A. Kholodkovsky, the author of textbooks on entomology and the translator of Faust.

My idol since childhood was A. A. Byalynitsky-Birulya, at one time the director of the St. Petersburg Zoological Museum and the author of the first (and only) volume of the scorpion fauna of Russia, published on the tragic October 1917 years old. The most prominent scorpiologist of those times in his youth swam as a polar zoologist on Kolchak’s expedition, for which he later ended up on Solovki. Birulya died in 1937 in exile in Alma-Ata after the camp, having managed to publish in the series “Fauna of the USSR” an amazingly written volume of phalanxes – another detachment of nocturnal arachnids, hairy and aggressive.

And now I still receive letters from Iran and Turkey with a request to send Biruli’s articles on local scorpions, written in German more than a hundred years ago

Scorpions also breed strangely. All “normal” invertebrates lay eggs. Even the aristocratic spiders, the architects of silk fetters, primitively pack their fertilized eggs in cobwebs and glue them to nets to the delight of parasitic wasps. Scorpions are not the same: the female carries embryo cubs in herself (sometimes for more than a year!), And gives birth to live ones, but not one, but two or three dozen! And then he wears them on his back until they grow up.

Scorpio can store sperm and give birth in batches without additional fertilization. The latter are performed in a way that is not characteristic of higher animals: the spermatophore package is deposited by the male directly on the ground, then the modest groom, taking the female with claws by claws, leads her to the “gift”. Driving turns into a mating dance that can last for hours. (I first observed it in a scorpion Languedoc (otherwise – Occitan ) near Avignon, the great French entomologist and writer Jean-Henri Fabre.)

winding paths, only without any music. And all this in the darkness of the night, only in the last 50 years, occasionally interrupted by ultraviolet lanterns of zoologists.

Is the scorpion so terrible?

Yes, I completely forgot – poison. I always forget. Recently in Vienna, Christian Komposh, a zoologist from Graz, and I were talking at breakfast about the Alpine representatives of my favorite genus.0011 euscorpius – European scorpions of a special kind, relics at the subfamily level, whose closest relatives live in Mexico. The smallest of them (less than 3 cm long), euscorpius germanus , lives in the valleys of the Austrian Alps up to 2200 m above sea level. It seems that in alpine ecosystems this lithophile (rock-lover) has no enemies and the only limiting factors of its distribution are the nature and temperature of the substrate. But why doesn’t anyone eat scorpions? The two specialists seriously discussed this issue over Viennese coffee and buns, until they finally guessed: they bite!

Although no, this is inaccurate: they do not bite, let alone sting. They prick! Unlike the attack of a bee, which leaves a sting in the body of the attacked, or the bite of the poisonous mandibles (chelicerae) of the spider, the swift blow of the scorpion with its tail forward over the head is a classic hypodermic injection, as in a clinic. The muscles of the poisonous vesicle inject poison from the gland – a breathtaking mixture of several dozen (!) Various toxins.

Unlike other invertebrates, scorpions are viviparous.

After the birth of the cubs, the mother carries numerous offspring on her back until they grow up.

Unlike giant bee or spider protein molecules, scorpion toxins are small (30-50 amino acids) oligopeptides that selectively target membrane channels through which sodium, potassium, and chloride ions enter our cells. Plugging these channels like miniature plugs, scorpion toxins prevent membrane repolarization, causing paralysis at the cellular level. Scorpion venom is a nerve-paralytic weapon of defense and offense.

At this point, it is politically correct to note that of the 1500 known species of scorpions, only 30-40 are deadly to humans. The poison of the rest is not so strong, and is usually dangerous only for insects. Among other things, scorpion venom is also used in medical practice.

However, 3-4 tens is also a lot. Deadly poisonous ones are not found everywhere, but in those places where they live, a person has long and not in vain hated and feared scorpions. The Middle East is especially unlucky in this sense. Scorpions of the genera leyurus and androktonus (the latter is translated as “killer”) are plentiful, like cockroaches in the kitchen, in all deserts from Egypt to Iran. Moreover, they crawl into discarded shoes and clothes at night, so if you travel as “savages” in Israel, and in Turkey, be sure to shake everything well before putting it on. Better yet, get yourself a small ultraviolet flashlight (cheap and affordable these days) to check the perimeter around the tent before going to bed, as we always did in the Mexican desert.

All species dangerous to humans belong to the same family – butides . Among the ancient Sumerians, these formidable beasts guarded nothing more than a gate to the underworld. In all the deserts of Central Asia, there are plenty of butides, but those species are not too dangerous for humans. Species of the genus mesobutus are found up to the 50th degree of latitude in Kazakhstan, they are also in the Russian Federation: in Kalmykia, in the south of the Astrakhan region, in the North Caucasus. Representatives of the genus euscorpius can be found even in Sochi. They also exist in the Crimea – according to our preliminary genetic data, they were brought by the ancient Greeks from the islands of the Aegean Sea.

The first to notice the Crimean scorpion back in Catherine’s time was the great traveler, academician Peter Simon Pallas, resting from his Siberian wanderings in Yalta and Alupka. One hundred years later, another famous zoologist, the rector of St. Petersburg University, Karl Fedorovich Kessler, described the Mingrelian scorpion in the first review of scorpions of the Russian Empire, published in 1874.

I happened to collect Mingrelian euscorpius with my lantern in 1985 in the Batumi botanical garden above the Black Sea coast, where they sat in every crack of stone fences. Then the border guards pushed their way through the bushes and began to find out if I was signaling in the direction of Turkish territory. I had to show them under ultraviolet rays a stone wall infested with lithophilic scorpions: the guards were dumbfounded, and there were no more questions.

Messengers of a foreign world

Biodiversity is the key word, sometimes small grants are given for it. It is believed that all living things should be protected, since they all “benefit” ecosystems. This also applies to scorpions. Of course, not all creatures are equally significant in this sense – among them there are, so to speak, basic species. But how complete and accurate is our knowledge of this subject? We began to study nature not so long ago: the same Fabre taught in Provence at a time when my grandfather was a medical student in Paris.

We have already talked about relic species of scorpions. It should be noted that a person does not have a sense of “deep time” at all: it is difficult for us to imagine a thousand years, where can we feel the difference between two and ten million! And scorpions are just an excellent occasion for the emotional perception of the passage of time: with them we easily operate with numbers of the order of hundreds of millions of years – a scale at which the origin of not only Cenozoic youth like snakes or whales is lost, but also venerable Mesozoic reptiles.

Therefore, often, when listening to colleagues – rodent specialists or botanists – one has to catch oneself at the amusing thought that even ten million years is considered a respectable age in their science! And among scorpions, even species that have survived from the Carboniferous period (300 million years !!) differ little from modern ones. Using the stamp, they can truly be called “living fossils” – they have changed so little since those unimaginably old times, when there were no birds in the sky, no flowers in the meadows, and there were no meadows themselves. An ancient terrible world, alien to man, which can be understood and imagined only by the power of imagination based on knowledge.

Scorpion venom is a powerful nerve agent.

And the same imagination brings me back to Babatag, to the valley of Surkhan-Darya, the abode of the little pseudo-haktas. The description of this scorpion, given by the Almaty zoologist Gromov, appeared in 1998 in the Moscow Zoological Journal. Then my colleague from California, Michael Soleglad – I think the most brilliant scorpiologist of our time – jokingly called it a hoax, and “very smart.” The author, according to him, took all the most primitive features from all existing groups of scorpions and blinded them together: and two keels at the bottom on the fifth segment of the posterior abdomen, which were not heard from Paleozoic fossils; and a suspiciously small number of bristles on the leg tentacles; and rows of spines on the tips of the legs . ..

Later, when I caught this small rarity with my own hands, I was convinced that this scorpion was not “made of duck and beaver,” as was suspected by the first sailors who brought the first Australian platypuses to Europe. And they suspected, by the way, not in vain – a lot of skillfully created man-made mermaids and dragons were exhibited in European cabinets of curiosities.

However, platypuses, although they are Mesozoic relics, of course, cannot be compared with our scorpions – the latter are comparable in age to coelacanths, the famous lobe-finned fish. An Uzbek hermit sits on his mud in the gorges of Babatag, most likely from the Cretaceous period. And the dinosaurs walked by, not noticing it just like the current cows.

In general, scorpions first appear on the scene of life in the Silurian, more than 400 million years ago – long before the dinosaurs – and they were then marine benthic giants, more than a meter long. By the way, they should not be confused with crustacean scorpions, a long-long extinct marine group of animals, which, perhaps, were not close relatives of our hero at all. This topic, by the way, has long and constantly been a bone of contention between scorpiologists in different countries. It’s funny and touching to see how an American university professor and a German museum curator break their spears in Swift-like fury over events that took place half a billion years ago.

After all of the above, it must be admitted that it is difficult to understand what is more interesting to write about – about the fantastic ancient creatures themselves with their nocturnal life, deadly poisons, unique adaptations acquired over half a billion years of evolution – or about the unusual people who catch and study them. After all, not only Paganelli is alive, but also Benedicta’s cousins ​​from The Fifteen-Year-Old Captain: Jules Verne wanted to laugh, but created, as usual, another immortal image of a scientist with a disinterested passion for knowledge.

Scorpions appeared on Earth more than 400 million years ago – long before the first dinosaurs

Gary Polis used to say to his junior colleagues and students, “Scorpions are everywhere (almost everywhere), so let’s study them in the most beautiful places on Earth. ” Following this principle, he visited the sandy deserts of Namibia and Australia, comparing the ecology of the local species and Californian scorpions living near the home of Polis in San Diego County. My other colleagues are fascinated by the tropical forests of Borneo and South America, the Pacific Islands. And I am drawn from the deserts and mountains of North America back to the European land, the nature and geography of which is no less complex than its history – and much more ancient.

In recent years, I have visited Greece and Bulgaria several times, and I have forever fallen in love with this exaggerated Crimea, the core of our civilization. And scorpions do not occupy the Balkans – rock-loving brown euscorpius (the same ones that Darrell carried as a child on the island of Corfu in a matchbox), large yellow mesobutuses (the westernmost relatives of our Central Asian relatives), huge black relic iuruses … And in the same Turkey, right in the mountains near the resort of Antalya, if you are lucky, you can meet the ancient and extremely rare genus Kalkhas, described by Biruley and named after the Homeric soothsayer. ..

And then at home, in West Virginia, together with students and graduate students under an electron microscope, we will again discover bristles and spines unknown to the world on the leg tentacles of ancient, unlike creatures. Who will benefit from this, who will be happier? We.

: 10 Sep 2006 , First after the First World War , Volume 11,
№5

Scorpion Tropic | Publications | Around the World

Vokrug sveta magazine articles

A sting, that is, a hollow needle connected to a poisonous gland, is one of those inventions of evolution that arose many times independently in various creatures. Some use it only for self-defense, others apply it with equal success to those who want to eat them, and to those whom they themselves eat. But none of the actively poisonous animals, and there are not so few of them on Earth, attacks a person first. Although this fact is not taken into account when people label them as murderers, considering them to be the embodiment of malice and deceit. Such prejudices have fully affected the scorpions known to man for thousands of years. The first mention of them is found in the written monuments of the most ancient civilizations, and they are all filled with disgust and almost mystical fear. Later, in the Christian tradition, the scorpion became one of the most prominent representatives of the hellish fauna.

Meanwhile, not only the cultural but also the biological history of man is only a short moment compared to the history of arthropods. Representatives of this group lived in the Silurian seas about 400 million years ago. It was they who were the first to land on land, almost without changing their structure. Well, except that the gills-legs, with the help of which they breathed in the water, “curled” inside the body, forming lung sacs, and the structure of walking legs changed slightly. In general, a stable flat structure, created for movement along the seabed, turned out to be suitable for the development of the land environment, where gravity was unknown to aquatic creatures. However, as is often the case, over time, the brave pioneers were pushed aside by various upstarts who snatched up the most seductive ecological “positions” and left only dark corners and cracks for the land pioneers.

The latter, by the way, can be taken literally. Today, scorpions are small creatures: the largest of them reach 20 cm in length, while most species fit into 5-10. They live on all continents except Antarctica, but they do not go further north and south than the 50th parallel. Some inhabit tropical rainforests, others live in deserts or mountains, but they are all active at night, and during the day they hide under stones, under loose bark, in the burrows of other animals, or burrow into the soil. Tropical species do not tolerate low temperatures, but the inhabitants of the highlands (some species live at an altitude of 3,000-4,000 m), as well as the northern and southern edges of the Scorpio Belt, have learned to endure cold winters by hibernating. With such a lifestyle, the appearance of a person with his dwellings – warm, with many nooks and crannies, with layers of materials superimposed on each other – was simply a gift of fate. Scorpions are happy to settle in any buildings and often sting people there when they sit on them or step on them with their bare heels. These injections are painful and, in rare cases, are fatal. After all, absolutely all representatives of this family are poisonous. Moreover, based on the ratio of body weight to the amount of poison they produce, they can be considered one of the most poisonous creatures on Earth. The most dangerous scorpion, common in Tunisia, is Androctomus australis. AT 90% of cases, androchtomus venom causes death of a person.

At the same time, people hunt them. To do this, it is enough to arm yourself with an ultraviolet radiation lamp in order to easily detect fluorescent scorpions in the dark. The phenomenon of green glow appears due to the organic substance hyaline, which covers the shell of arthropods with a thin layer.

Catching scorpions is quite simple and profitable. The demand for them is growing year by year. Not so long ago, a restaurant with the promising name “Edible” was opened in London for lovers of exotic dishes, the menu of which, along with various snakes, spiders and insects, also includes scorpion delicacies. They are served in different forms: in salads, in a glass of vodka or martini, in chocolate or powdered sugar. The owner of the restaurant, Todd Dalton, assures that such dishes are not only absolutely safe for humans, but also have an original, unforgettable taste.

The gastronomic passions of scorpions are living creatures, the size of which is smaller or slightly larger than the arthropods themselves. The tactics of their hunting is standard: the scorpion slowly moves forward, spreading its claws in front of it and raising the “tail” above its head, which is more correctly called the “flexible jointed stem”, since in fact it is the back half of its abdomen. At the same time, he does not really rely on vision, despite the abundance of eyes: two large ones in the center of the front edge of the cephalothorax and up to five smaller ones on each side of the large ones. But how many of them will you see when hunting at night, and even in a tropical forest or in the bowels of a stone placer? Much more reliable are sensitive hairs growing on claws, which are especially sensitive to the movement of an object. Having received such a signal, the scorpion estimates the size of the prey. If the creature encountered is very small and incapable of resistance, it grabs it with its claws and sends it into the mouth, where it chews with a pair of smaller claws – chelicerae.

But back to the hunting scorpion. If the prey is large and resists, the pincers hold it in place, while the poisonous “tail” strikes from above. For most victims, one sting is enough for instant death, although some species of insects are practically insensitive to scorpion venom. If it turns out that the creature encountered is too large and can itself be a threat to the hunter, the scorpion retreats, spreading its claws and waving its sting. However, hunting failures do not bother him: he can eat nothing for several months without reducing activity. It is even less dependent on water: most species do not consume it at all, and only a few tropical scorpions drink occasionally. The main thing is to survive yourself: despite its formidable weapon, a scorpion can become prey for large predatory centipedes, salt pugs, some spiders, praying mantises, lizards, birds, monkeys and, of course, other larger scorpions.

Within one species, relations between them are quite friendly. During the mating season, the male and female, grappling with claws, walk decorously, not parting for many hours, or even days. The female will carry the fruits of this meeting in herself for several months, in some species – more than a year. The number of offspring varies in different species: from five to six to hundreds. Some scorpions lay eggs that hatch very soon, but most immediately give birth to live young, which immediately climb onto the mother’s back. There they will stay without eating anything for several days – until the first molt. As soon as the covers harden, young scorpions part with their mother and go into independent life, although they are still separated from maturity by a good year and a half and six molts. How many they live in total is not known for certain, since no one has yet seen a scorpion that died of old age.

Similarly, no one has seen a scorpion commit suicide, although the legend of their suicidal tendencies is known even to those who know nothing more about them. It says that a scorpion, placed in a ring of burning coals and convinced that there is no way out, stabs itself with a sting and dies. Indeed, in such circumstances, the unfortunate animal rushes about in a fiery trap, violently waving its tail in all directions, and then falls and remains motionless. It turns out, as the famous entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre established, the scorpion resorts to the well-known trick of arthropods – thanatosis, or imaginary death. If left like this among the coals, he would really die soon – from heatstroke. But if the coals are removed, then just a few minutes later you can see how the “suicide” rises and hurries to the nearest shelter.

Watching the behavior of scorpions is quite fascinating. Perhaps that is why in recent years they are increasingly becoming pets. True, keeping them in captivity is not at all easy: they are distinguished by a rare love of freedom and are extremely demanding on the conditions of keeping and feeding. For most scorpions, crickets, grasshoppers, stick insects, some types of cockroaches serve as food, the main thing is that all insects are alive, they do not eat dead ones.