Can you learn to love the scorpion?

Fossils suggest there were ancient scorpions over 3 feet long. Terrifying? Perhaps, but there’s a lot to love about these arachnids.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  WNYC is supported by Bear. Science is about asking questions, testing, trying again. It's not easy, but it's relentless. It evolves, and that's why science delivers. Learn more at sciencedelivers.com.

• 0:14Ira Flatow?

  Science Friday is supported by MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software for technical computing and model-based design. MathWorks, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com.

• 0:33Flora Lichtman?

  Hey, it's Flora, and you're listening to Science Friday. If you have arachnophobia, consider this your opportunity to try exposure therapy because scorpions ahead. A new study suggests that 415 million years ago, in modern day England and Wales, a scorpion the length of a golden retriever was scurrying around, complete with six-inch pincers. Some of these specimens were discovered long ago, and paleontologists had categorized them as sea-dwelling crustaceans. But a fresh look at these old fossils suggests they're not an ancient lobster at all. Dr. Richie Howard is the curator of fossil arthropods at the Natural History Museum

• 1:17Flora Lichtman?

  in London, England, and the lead author on this gigantoscorpion study. Richie, welcome to Science Friday.

• 1:23Speaker 03

  Hey, great to be here. Thank you very much.

• 1:26Flora Lichtman?

  I've seen this, these specimens described as chonky. Does that sound right to you?

• 1:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would say so. They are pretty big. They are an order of magnitude larger than any other fossil scorpion that we know of. But it's also worth considering that fossils are incomplete. It's sort of a dig saw puzzle of an animal. And so we have multiple parts of its body, but not the whole thing in one place. So it's difficult to say exactly how big it was. That's why it's roughly, we're saying roughly about a meter, roughly three feet long.

• 1:57Flora Lichtman?

  Wow, OK. You know, from the pieces you have, does it seem like it looked like just an inflated version of a modern scorpion? Or is the morphology different?

• 2:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, it did look really different to a modern scorpion. So in an arachnid, the posterior part of the body is called the epistosoma. And the epistosoma is divided in scorpions specifically into the mesosoma, which is the fat bit, and the Metasoma, which is the tail, but the sting on the end. On the metasoma of this scorpion, we have what called lateral epimera extending out of the segments. So these are sort of like wing shaped bits. They're very reminiscent, I think, of a horseshoe crab or a trilobite.

• 2:39Flora Lichtman?

  Should I picture like those lobster bits on the tail?

• 2:42Speaker 03

  Kind of, yeah, yeah. These are unique among scorpions. So that suggests to us that this was doing something different to other scorpions. I think the most likely explanation for that is that it was at least partially aquatic.

• 2:54Flora Lichtman?

  Were these scorpions, I mean, can we extrapolate what their role in the ecosystem? Were they like the grizzly bears of their time?

• 3:02Speaker 03

  Yes, this is one of the weirdest elements of the whole study, really. So the early Devonian period when Prearchurs lived is a strikingly alien landscape. So I think people are vaguely aware that there were giant arthropods in Earth's deep paleontological past.

• 3:21Flora Lichtman?

  Like the two foot dragonfly and the eight foot long millipede, right?

• 3:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. But they lived in the Carboniferous Period. This was 55 million years after when Prearchurs lived. That's a world where there are jungles because trees have evolved. It's a world where there is a much more complicated, complex landscape in terms of ecology. In the early Devonian, life has only really just started spreading onto the land. There's just some gigantic scorpion running around as well. It's kind of crazy. It's walking around in between all these sort of primitive moss-like plants and these sort of tall, weird, fungousy things called prototaxites. Basically look a bit like standing stones. Really, really, really weird landscape this animal lived in.

• 4:08Speaker 03

  And of course, that answers the question, how on earth did it sustain itself? Unless there's loads of other large animals on the land at this point that we just don't have the fossils of, which I think is probably unlikely because how have we just missed? We've missed all of them. I think what's more likely is that it was an amphibious animal. There's much larger prey for it in the water, things like armored fish. They've been found at some of these sites as well.

• 4:30Flora Lichtman?

  So your work revolves around, you know, to me, I'll just show my cards, this terrifying ancient, ancient arthropods.

• 4:40Flora Lichtman?

  What are your feelings on modern ones?

• 4:43Speaker 03

  Well, I never would have got interested in fossil ones if I hadn't been interested in modern ones as well, because the modern ones are all around us. I love the modern ones. I can't go outside without taking photos. I always want to know what arthropods are, because they're literally like little Pokémon that are everywhere. So, yeah, I think if you're not interested in arthropods, you're not interested in life.

• 5:03Flora Lichtman?

  "Don't sleep on the arthropods," is what I'm hearing. Richie, thank you for being here.

• 5:07Speaker 03

  No worries. Thank you for having me.

• 5:09Flora Lichtman?

  Dr. Richie Howard, invertebrate paleontologist and curator of fossil arthropods at the Natural History Museum in London, England. After the break, can you learn to love the scorpion? We're gonna try. Stay with us.

• 5:29Speaker 00

  Support for Science Friday comes from Science Sandbox, an initiative of the Simons Foundation.

• 5:39Flora Lichtman?

  If you are icked out by a scorpion the length of a Labrador, you're likely not alone. A study in the musings section of American entomologists found that people feared scorpions above even spiders, and they're like a phobia chart topper in America. But my next guest says we have it all wrong. Here to help us stop worrying and to help learn to love the scorpion is arachnologist Dr. Lauren Esposito, a scorpion researcher and director of the nonprofit Islands and Seas. Lauren, welcome back to Science Friday.

• 6:13Speaker 04

  Happy to be here.

• 6:14Flora Lichtman?

  Okay, give me three words to describe your feelings on scorpions.

• 6:20Speaker 04

  All right, my three words are caring, ancient, and I would say intriguing is the biggest thing that has kept me interested in scorpions for the last 20 years of my life.

• 6:36Flora Lichtman?

  Intriguing. Oh, my gosh. I'm not hearing repulsion.

• 6:40Speaker 04

  Absolutely not. Absolutely not.

• 6:42Flora Lichtman?

  Okay, well, I'm gonna stand in for the vast majority of people who feel the opposite, who would rather never encounter a scorpion. And your mission today, if you choose to accept it, is to change our minds with facts. And I'm also gonna give you categories, kind of like Jeopardy, and I want you to hit me with a story or some facts from the category that you think will make

• 7:08Flora Lichtman?

  Me and mostly our listeners, see scorpions the way you do. Do you accept?

• 7:15Speaker 04

  I accept the mission.

• 7:17Flora Lichtman?

  Okay, all right. First category is food and drink.

• 7:23Speaker 04

  Food and drink. Well, food and drink is a big one because scorpions have the lowest metabolic rate of any recorded land animal, which is like move over weight loss drugs because it should be the scorpions that we're studying.

• 7:37Flora Lichtman?

  Wait, heal monsters, I feel like are the poster child for low metabolism.

• 7:43Speaker 04

  I would say that that's true when we think about things that have a backbone like vertebrates. Heal monsters are great for low metabolism, but scorpions, they only need to eat really like once a year or maybe even less frequently than that. They don't typically need to drink water. They get all the water that they need from their prey items. And they have these like really cool adaptations to be able to restrict the amount of water that they lose. So they have book lungs. The way that they breathe is through these like internalized gill structures. So they don't like actively respire like breathing in and out, which definitely like helps reduce their metabolism.

• 8:21Flora Lichtman?

  Oh, my gosh. So book lungs, like the pages of a book, like I should be imagining the leaves of a book.

• 8:27Speaker 04

  You should, like, if you think about like a fish gill, like if you've ever seen a fish like opening their gill slits in and out, and there's all these kind of like pages inside there of gills. Imagine if they just took all those gills and they squished them down and they stuck them inside a pocket in their body. So a lot of arachnids have book lungs and it's really a leftover from their ancestors that lived in the ocean. So before they moved on land, these were gills that were functioning in the ocean, just like fish gills.

• 8:51Flora Lichtman?

  Which we talked about in this last segment with this giant scorpion. Okay, I'm, I feel like my wonder meter's going up, but I'm still not, I'm not getting caring, uh, really.

• 9:03Speaker 04

  We'll get there, we'll get there.

• 9:05Flora Lichtman?

  Okay. Our next category is anatomy.

• 9:08Speaker 04

  Anatomy. Anatomy is a good one. One of my favorite things about scorpions, and I like to say that we're in the midst of a scorpion renaissance period, where we are discovering more information about scorpions than we've known cumulatively across all of history, like every single year.

• 9:24Flora Lichtman?

  Really?

• 9:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, really.

• 9:26Flora Lichtman?

  Is it because people are just like jumping on the scorpion bandwagon?

• 9:30Speaker 04

  I mean, I think that you'll be jumping on the scorpion bandwagon at the end of this conversation. But yes, that's part of it. Part of it is that there are simply more researchers studying scorpions than there's ever been. But I think the other part of it really has to do with a recent revelation that does have to do with anatomy. Scorpions have an exoskeleton, so their skeleton is on the outside of their body. But what's really cool about scorpions is that they have this pigment embedded in their exoskeleton that fluoresces under ultraviolet light. And so if you take like a black light, like a party light, normally you'd shine it on your shoelaces and you'd see they're like really bright and purple. But if you shine them on a scorpion, they glow this bright green color.

• 10:10Speaker 04

  And what that's allowed us to do is to go out at night when they're active and look for them with UV light. It's like a secret weapon for detecting scorpions. And it's allowed us to discover way more species than we ever knew about. So like 100 years ago, we knew about something like 200 scorpions on Earth. And now we know about over 2,500.

• 10:31Flora Lichtman?

  What about their venom?

• 10:32Speaker 04

  Okay, I mean, let's get to the brass tacks, which is scorpion venom, right? That's the thing that we're scared of. We're scared of scorpions stinging us because that's like the legends that we hear. Like you're gonna die instantly if a scorpion stings you. And I'm not gonna say that that's not true entirely, like universally, right? But that's untrue. Because there are places in the world where there are genuinely dangerous scorpions. But often the thing that makes them more dangerous is people's access to medical care. So nowadays, we have really effective antivenins that can counteract the effects of scorpion venom very well. And so if you can reach a hospital and get antivenom, you'll be able to survive a scorpion sting.

• 11:15Speaker 04

  So the vast majority of scorpions pose no danger whatsoever to humans. Of the 2,500 scorpions on Earth, there's only about 50 or less that are dangerous to humans. Like 99% of scorpions don't pose any harm to humans.

• 11:31Speaker 04

  But.

• 11:31Flora Lichtman?

  That is, that's helpful. Go ahead, go on.

• 11:34Speaker 04

  The one percent are really interesting, not because they could kill you, um, which it's not actually the scorpion venom itself that can kill you. It's the effects of your body responding to this like trick that the venom plays on your brain. And so venom is a cocktail and one of the things in this cocktail is a neurotransmitter, um, inhibitor. And so what it does is it goes in and it interferes with the way that your cells signal each other, your nerve cells. And so it tells your brain that your hand is like experiencing some severe trauma, when all that's actually happened is you got a prick in your finger, like nothing else is going on other than the scorpion venom tricking your brain to think that you're like being smashed with a sledgehammer.

• 12:17Speaker 04

  And what happens is that your brain turns on this immune response that raises your blood pressure and that really rapid increase in blood pressure can have downstream consequences like a heart attack. And the heart attack is ultimately what kills you. So it's not technically the scorpion, it's you.

• 12:33Flora Lichtman?

  It's me killing me, as always. Okay, let's get to my favorite category, mating and dating.

• 12:41Speaker 04

  Scorpion dating is like pretty serious business. So here's how it works. Scorpions are out at night, checking, surveying the scene, seeing who's around. A male finds a female. He approaches her and as he approaches her, he starts kind of doing this like shuddering movement. That's like, almost like, hey, check me out, look at me. And

• 13:04Flora Lichtman?

  Like flashing his, his little, his pincers or his tail?

• 13:09Speaker 04

  No, like shaking his entire body, like his whole body's shaking. Yeah.

• 13:13Flora Lichtman?

  Cool.

• 13:14Speaker 04

  And as, if she doesn't react aggressively or run away, he keeps making slow movements towards her. And eventually he reaches out and grabs her hands with his hands and begins hands, like their claws are grabbing each other. So they're facing each other, they're holding hands and they start to dance. And we call this like in a scientific term, we call it a pas de deux, like a couples dance, a ballroom dance. And while all arachnids do some kind of mating ritual, like all of them kind of dance for each other or do some kind of thing that's interactive, scorpions are like the ballroom dancers of arachnids. So when I say it's like dating, it's really like kind of a courtship that is picky.

• 14:01Speaker 04

  And they continue this dance for a while and eventually if the male does like a good enough dance, then he'll finally deposit sperm onto the ground. They deposited on this kind of jelly stalk that they comes out of their body and at the top of the stalk, they put a little package of sperm and he'll guide the female towards it because they're still holding hands. Oh, I forgot to say that they sometimes they kiss each other and they do occasionally sting each other in what we call sexual sting.

• 14:27Flora Lichtman?

  On the mouth?

• 14:28Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 14:29Flora Lichtman?

  Like what?

• 14:30Speaker 04

  Like they're facing each other and they'll put their squish their little scorpion mouths together and they'll like kiss each other with their mouth.

• 14:36Flora Lichtman?

  I feel like you're making this up Lauren and we'd never know because no one studies scorpions, but.

• 14:42Speaker 04

  There's like 25 of us, come on.

• 14:45Speaker 04

  Uh, and then sometimes there's a sting, which is like, you know, the sort of kinky side of dating, but eventually if she's pleased with all of this, then she'll pick up the sperm package that he's left for her and she'll store his sperm until she feels like the conditions are good for having babies and which point she'll inseminate herself.

• 15:06Flora Lichtman?

  Wow. So she has control over when she's getting pregnant?

• 15:11Speaker 04

  She has control over when she's getting pregnant. So she like kind of evaluates the environment and if the conditions are good, if it's like a good rainy year with lots of prey, then she'll allow for internal fertilization using the sperm and the craziest thing is.

• 15:23Flora Lichtman?

  Where does she keep the sperm? Like in a purse? What? I don't understand.

• 15:26Speaker 04

  It's like in a little scorpion purse inside her body, like genuinely. There's like a little pocket and she stores the sperm inside the pocket.

• 15:34Flora Lichtman?

  Let me just tuck this away for later. I gotta live my life. I gotta live my full life right now.

• 15:39Speaker 04

  Exactly. She's living her best life until she gets pregnant. So scorpions, unlike all other arachnids and basically all insects for the most part, uh, they get pregnant. So they inseminate themselves and then that sperm, you know, combines with all the eggs that she has in her body and those eggs start to grow into embryos inside her body, just like a mammal gets pregnant and they don't come out until they're fully formed little scorpion legs.

• 16:04Flora Lichtman?

  Wait, live birth? Is that what you're telling me? That's unusual, right?

• 16:09Speaker 04

  It's pretty unusual and they even like, it's so crazy because they come out in like a little amniotic sac, just like a vertebrate does. And then the sac bursts as she's giving birth and then they crawl up onto her back and she takes care of them after that.

• 16:21Flora Lichtman?

  How many in a litter?

• 16:23Speaker 04

  Well, it depends. So like scorpions vary a lot in size and some smaller species maybe only have two scorpionlings. That's a technical term, scorpionlings.

• 16:32Flora Lichtman?

  That's, that's the first cute thing I've heard.

• 16:35Speaker 04

  It is. It's cute. And then like in other species, the, the highest number recorded is like 156.

• 16:42Flora Lichtman?

  Oh.

• 16:43Speaker 04

  That's a lot of babies.

• 16:43Flora Lichtman?

  That's a lot of babies.

• 16:47Flora Lichtman?

  And then she takes care of them.

• 16:48Speaker 04

  Then she takes care of them. She keeps them on her back for the first, well, instar is a technical term, but it means like the first time they molt their exoskeleton and grow a new one. And at that point, they'll kind of start to wander away from her. Sometimes they'll stay a little longer. Sometimes they'll leave immediately, but um, that's sort of the end of the parent-child relationship.

• 17:08Flora Lichtman?

  Oh my God. What's your favorite scorpion fact?

• 17:12Speaker 04

  My favorite scorpion fact is that we are still describing new species every single year from the United States.

• 17:19Flora Lichtman?

  Wow.

• 17:20Speaker 04

  Which I think for me, that's like an important fact because as a kid, I always grew up thinking that we've discovered everything there is to discover. And if we find something that's like from some remote jungle out there in the world somewhere that nobody's ever been in before. But the reality is like, we're finding things from the Central Valley of California, which is one of the most high intensity agricultural areas in the world. So I think the really cool thing about scorpions is there's so much left to learn and we need so many more scorpion biologists to do it.

• 17:51Flora Lichtman?

  That's right. Get over your ick, young budding scientists. There's a whole scorpion world out there. Lauren, I think you've convinced me. I think you've, you've done it. They're amazing and there's so much more to learn.

• 18:04Speaker 04

  Yay for scorpions.

• 18:05Flora Lichtman?

  Thank you. Thank you for coming on and doing this.

• 18:08Speaker 04

  Thank you. It was a pleasure.

• 18:09Flora Lichtman?

  What about you listeners? Did we convince you scorpion skeptics to become scorpion stans? Give us a call, 8774 sci fry is our number. And if you have any other scorpion questions, we know who to call. This episode was produced by Shoshana Buxbaum. I'm Flora Lichtman. We'll catch you next time.