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Oh hey, it's a leady in front of you in the check out with twenty six items who doesn't realize she's in the express lane and is fully oblivious to your Clare's ally ward back with another episode of Ologies, So congrats for not skipping this one. You did it. If it's in auto play and you're like, no, do play the Scorpion one, it's too late, bitch, it's playing. You're in this now. Don't pressed up, don't This one
is amazing. I promise that there are facts in this episode you will drop in conversation and it will make you one fucking forgettable. Okay, first, really quick, thank you patrons for making the show possible. Via patreon dot com slash Ologies, for as little as a dollar a month, you can submit questions to ologists and buckle the hell up because I'm about to record like ten episodes in the next few weeks, and there are so many questions
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This one, Eric Patopoff says, I've always loved science and learning about the crazy world we live in, but I bought into the idea that scientists were all super brainy people in lab quotes who preferred sterile labs to dealing with normal people. Where did I get that idea from. Not only do I love all the ology subjects, but each ologist is so gosh darned down to earth and knowledgeable and excited and someone I would love to nerd out with over a beer. This podcast fills the role
of the Scholastic book fair from minority element comentary school days. Ericapatopov, thank you for reminding me of the soft coover paradise that was the Scholastic book Fair. Okay, Scorpiology, Hell to the yes, this is a real ology. It's a subset of arachnology iraknans, and scorpion comes from the Greek. Are you ready for this? For scorpion? Okay, that is not something that made me say, oh my god.
All right.
So this ologist I met under very, very weird circumstances two years ago in a dusty field in the middle of nowhere at a festival for burning man types. While we were both speaking on a panel about science. We were a little wide eyed and just kind of sussing things out. I dug her immediately. I've wanted her on for so long. Scheduling was difficult, but she was in LA for a five hundred Queer Scientist conference and to accept the twenty nineteen Walt Weston Award for her support
that she provides LGBTQ people in stem. This is where we're gonna throw some air horns. I think we need some air horns for that now. I went to her hotel, just kiddaly and I asked her one million questions. We covered myths about scorpions, what big pinchers mean, movie magic? How lethal are these critters? Where is their butt? Do they make out with each other? Parables about scorpions, glow in the dark, magic, getting stung, and also why hiding under a rock is beneficial for some insects but can
be very difficult for people emotionally. So bust out your black light, keep your ears on alert for STEM advocate, science communicator, researcher, expedition leader and curator at the California Academy of Sciences. Scorpiologist doctor Lauren Esposito. Okay, so you are. I looked this up. You're an a racknologist, yes, but I saw that there is a subset that is scorpiology.
There is scorpiology, So I'm technically speaking a scorpiologist, but I've been trying to broaden my horizons and being a racknologist study more other kinds of irakanids aside from scorpions. So I'm abudding a racknologist, budding, and an accomplished scorpiologist.
Your business card should say accomplished scorpiologist. Now I met you a couple of years ago. Yeah, in the deserts at a festival, symbiosis festival. Yeah.
I was like shell shocked. I think when I met you, I was like, I don't know what's going on. There's so many people, and I'm pretty sure they're all high on drugs.
You know, there were so few pants and shirts worn.
I remember in the middle was it in the middle of our panel or was it I gave it like another little talk, so I can't remember which one it was, but like a fully naked guy just walking into the tent and he was so high and you just walked up to the front of the station with just standing there like mesmerized, like fully naked.
It was one of the one of the stranger places I think we've communicated science.
Yeah, but it's good, right, Like it's like take like you gotta you gotta get it in there whenever you can.
Yeah, it's if you've got a captive audience talk to about science. I remember meeting you and you you told me you were a scorpion expert, and I was like, how many scorpion experts are there? And You're like, not many? And I have bragged about you so many times. We're like, I met a scorpion expert. There's like ten in the world. How many people study scorpions with the depth that you do.
Oh, there's definitely not many of us. And I would say, like people that have a like a PhD in scorpions a dozen that most Oh my.
God, are you ever in the same room rarely?
Yeah, Scorpion biologists, I think are like kind of like scorpions. Like they're like not really particularly keen on meeting each other, like slightly combative, but incredibly intelligent and persistent. I mean, present company included.
I guess what drew you to scorpions?
Well, this is such a complicated question, like nothing, really, it was kind of like serendipity. I grew up in the in the desert Southwest, so I saw scorpions certainly as a kid, but I wasn't particularly like intrigued or wanting to dedicate my life to the study of these animals. And then I but I was like super into nature, and I loved like turning over all the papers in my mom's garden and looking for cockroaches and earwigs and stuff, which she didn't love but also especially didn't love when
I brought them inside alive. And my mom's a biologist, and eventually she taught me how to make a killing jar so that instead of bringing her live cockroaches, I would bring her euthanized cockroaches.
Oh, what is a killing jar?
Is it just like a cotton ball with cotton No, it's a cotton ball with figuring out polish remover and like an old peanut butter jar.
Oh my god, it sounds a killing jar sounds so much more.
Sounds like grotesque and morbid.
Yeah.
Yeah, like here, take this killing jar out and go out into the garden. No, but it's and it's euthanasia. It's like a humane way of quickly euthanizing insects. And so my mom taught me how to make one of these, and and I would like collect insects from the garden and make an insect collection and old egg cartons. And but then I grew up and like forgot that I liked that stuff because I was a teenager and was
mostly into, like I don't know, doing what teenagers do. Yeah, like like rebel rousing and.
Getting on people's lawns, turning up the music too loud.
Yeah, toilet papering, you know those kinds of things. And then like halfway through college I I took an entomology class and was like, oh my god, I love this. And then I applied for a summer internship with the American Museum in Natural History, not knowing it was going to be an internship studying scorpions, which it was, And I got it and I showed up and they like dumped me in the lap of a new curator at the American Museum, Lorenzo Berndini, who would later become my PhD advisor.
Oh.
So she and this new curator spent the summer figuring out a research system and then for Newbie Lauren, the New York City subway system probably, And then when the internship was over, she realized she loved science, but she didn't want to go to medical school like she thought. She'd rather be outdoors and studying nature. So she thought graduate school. So she contacted her curator from the internship and he said, Yo, come back, get your PhD working
with me in these freaking scorps so sick. And she was like, towyt, I think that was a compo.
Like, moved to New York and do a PhD. Like absolutely, I'll do that.
Are there even scorpions in New York?
No, there's no scorpions in New York. I didn't think there's none at all. I mean, there's a museum full of probably the world's greatest collection of scorpions, but there's certainly no living scorpions. But the good news is you can hop on a plane from New York and get just about anywhere in the world relatively quickly, and I did. It was scorpions are die.
Which I feel like scorpions does. They do have a high stakes reputation pretty much like that.
I think scorpions like kind of like even more so than spiders. Everybody's like, oh, they're They're definitely gonna kill you. Oh sure, any encounter will be lethal for you for sure.
Yeah. If you see a scorpion from six feet away, you will drop dead later that day, even if you have no contact.
It's gonna jump across the room and go flying like like wings are going to come out of its body, and it will try to kill you no matter what. Are ruthless, secretive and highly organized.
They are not. We will address this later. No, at what point when you were studying them, did you say, holy shit, these are cool?
You know? It was really it started when I was doing that undergraduate internship and I realize, like, man, scorpions are amazing for so many reasons.
Oo, boy, how do you get ready for this. Oh, 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. They were huge three feet yeah, three feet maybe even bigger, maybe five in some cases.
That's crazy.
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 they were little footprints embedded in rock. Well it was mud that turned into rock over time, and they've hypothesized that they were 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.
Like like a crazy like an alligator.
Basically like an alligator. They were these things. 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 four
hundred and fifty million years ago. So they've been on Earth forever, right, So we can ask all kinds of crazy questions about what happened on Earth in the last four hundred and fifty million years by trying to understand the evolutionary history of scorpions.
And so, how do you think they got and.
Littler well, there's 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, because scorpions and spiders and insects all basically passively respire, so they don't breathe, 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 like 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 a concentration of oxygen there is in the air. And over time the oxygen concentration has gone down.
So Laurene 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 and all of your relatives dying off before you. Okay, So, apart from the last four hundred and fifty 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 like imagine a place the scorpions and you're not unaware there's probably scorpions there. They're not in Antarctica because there's really nothing, I mean, aside from like penguins and things in the ocean, and there's not much in Antarctica bacteria. 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 Caribbeans, the 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. At the point when I decided to do a PhD, I think that that was part of the intrigue for me, was that there was this potential to travel the world doing science and incorporating two things that I love, which is traveling and science. But you know what's kind of funny is is like recently I remembered this thing that happened to me when I was a kid, and it was in the sixth grade, and I had a homeroom teacher who
gave us this assignment. And assignment was to write an essay about what you want to do when you grew up? Like pretty straightforward, right, Like I feel like that happens all the time in school. But I was so upset about it because I didn't know what I wanted to be, and like I remember even like crying at home over this assignment because it was like so frustrating for me that I had to write what, like, no, at this age of I don't know how old are you in
sixth grade, ten or eleven, what I should want? What I should do when I grew up. I knew lots of things I didn't want to do, but I didn't know what I did want to do, And eventually I settled on I wasn't sure, but I knew I either wanted to be a rocket scientist or a hobo. And I mean hobo in the sense of like like train travel, see the world hobo, right.
Yeah, just freewheeling quick aside to learn you on some hobo facts. Cool cool, Okay, So the word hobo is of unknown origin, but it may be from homeward bound like hobo or homeless boy hobo or from ho boy meaning like a farm hand who would travel riding the rails looking for jobs. Can I just tell you a little bit more about hobo? Okay?
Great?
So they had specialized lingo, such as, for example, to flip meant to board a moving train, and a mulligan is a type of community stew created by several hobos combining whatever food they had into one big pot. Also, a jungle was a hobo camp. And to catch the
westbound meant to die? Is that not poetry? Catching the westbound? Also, they made a code of conduct for hobos at the National Hobo Convention in eighteen eighty nine, and the code of conduct is legit, starting with one, decide your own life. Don't let another person run or rule you.
Two.
When in town, always respect the local law and officials. Try to be a gentleman at all times sexist but a good rule. Three, don't take advantage of someone who was in a vulnerable situation, locals or other hoboes.
Four.
Always try to find work, even if temporary, and always seek out jobs nobody wants They also had codes of contact to stay clean, to report anyone who harmed children. We should all be as decent as hobos. Also, they had these symbols that they would leave to guide other hoboes. This led me to a web page for the National Cryptologic Museum in Maryland, which, yes, I now have to
do a cryptology episode, so bad. Okay. So in closing, hobos clean, kindly, respectful folks who traveled for work and saw the land, and so for Lauren is either that or be a rocket scientist.
And I feel like, actually, I like hit that that like intersection, you know, like I'm doing science. I'm like using like like technological tools like genetics and genomics and at the same time traveling the world. So I am exactly in the middle of rocket scientists and hope, oh my god, like nailed it.
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, like.
They got the business end in the back. Yeah, what it's like a mullet, right, So, so scorpions, like all arachnids have two primary body parts. They have a pro soma, which is like the head, and they have a pistosoma, which is like the body. So the picture a spider, there's two main chunks, but scorpions have this extra little business end, which is the tail, and their pro soma and epistosoma 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 callissary, which are their mouth parts, and they have these chewing mouthparts that they use basically to like rip up meat roma before they get it down their gullet. And then they have claws that they use mostly for grabbing onto prey. Like in some scorpions, they just use
the claus to grab their prey. They don't ever actually need to sing them because they have these big, chunky claws like picture those big black imper 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 venoms not very toxic. 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. Steady stabby claws in the front, tail in the back, and at the very end of the tail is the stinger, and the stinger is a 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 crete toxins, and it's surrounded by muscle that allows them to squeeze those toxins out of the cells into the hypodermic needle that they use inject into their prey.
Okay, so their venom bulb, it's kind of like one of those little squirty things you would jam into your ear hole to flesh 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 there's not supposed to be sending a signal, or they inhibit the transmission of signals between cells.
Neuropeptides, by the bio 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 and 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 prey?
Yeah, so if your prey, what it might do is disable you keep you from moving, send you into a seizure, really just dis incapacitate you very quickly so that you can be eaten and make baby scorpions mm hmm 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, we're hiring on fire sale.
Oh my god, when you're really not. And that pause, that signal interruption caused by the scorpion venom allows the scorpion a moment to escape from the prey while the predators reacting to this signal that it's forcing its body to send to itself.
What types of scorpions have venom that is powerful enough to say incapacity like a dog or a human? Like, how much do they get a bad rep?
Yeah, well they get a pretty bad rep. I would say. Overall, there's like, so far, we've discovered about twenty five hundred species of scorpions, give or take, and about twenty five 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 compromise immune system, or are elderly or very young.
So the majority of scorpions, that means like less than ten percent of all scorpions are something that are really dangerous that we need to be worried about. 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 beasting or wasp sing.
Oh, okay, what happens if you do get stung by a scorpion? Well, has that ever happened to you?
It's happened one time. For a long time. I got to say, no, okay, I'm a professional, and I take precaution.
Suit of armor.
But like a year ago now, yeah, actually almost exactly one year ago, I was at this event and I was passing scorpions around that I had found in the forest a little children for them to hold as one does, And like I was passing a scorpion from one child to another, and it got grumpy, like I think it had had too many grubby kid hands on it, and it stung me, and I was like almost confused when it was stinging me. I was like what are you doing?
Because I'd handled these kind of scorpions like many, many times. It's a scorpion called the Pacific redwood scorpion or Pacific forest scorpion. We have them all throughout the Bay area and northward. And I was like, what is it, what are you doing? What's happening here?
This is not normal?
And then it hurt, you know, My finger kind of throbbed for maybe ten or fifteen minutes, and it felt like if I had jammed of thumbtack in my finger, you know, like if you jam with thumbtack in your finger, your finger throbs. But then it went away and nothing, there was no long term consequences. Let me step back and say that 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's 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 booth heids. And I looked everywhere to find out where the name boothed comes from. And I think it's from the Greek for ox or cow, because there's stings were thought to be real cow killers.
Again booth hits, and so all of those have a more painful sting or put in. The ones that are potentially lethal to humans belong to that group, the boothoeds. Oh, and then all the other scorpions are non boothoeds. Ah. 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 nineteen seventies carnival rides, so bitchen ps. When I googled scorpions with cool names, I pulled up an article entitled no Joke from a baby blog, Ten fierce baby
names for your Scorpio. Given I am a scorpio, I had to read it, and among the suggestions for your autumn infant who will undoubtedly cause drama are the names Crispin, evening, steal, and nix not unlike scorpion venom itself. This article caused some involuntary sweating and gagging.
But scientific are jumped up by the scientists that first recognize that species as being a new species.
Have you gotten to name any I have?
Yeah, Well, we discover new scorpions all the time. There's like maybe fifty or so added a year to for knowledge.
How do you decide how to name?
Well, different people have different approaches, and a name is really considered like something in honor of So if you use a person or a thing, you're naming it in honor of that person or that thing. And oftentimes people take the approach where they're like naming it something that describes its physical attributes, so the name has like Latin
words for slender or pale or yellow or whatever. Other people use names that come from indigenous languages where they're found, which is one of the things that methods I like to use because I feel like it's it's honoring the place where the scorpion is from and integrating the indigenous knowledge.
That's great. Ask me how many species I've discovered?
How many?
None?
Oh, well, we could fix that if you want.
Can I count the desert. Just turn over some rocks, be like, do we know this guy yet?
My favorite place is a tropical jungle. So you could come in a tropical jungle and do that.
Oh my god, it's just sign up, just large luggage, put me in it. Oh my god. 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. Every time I see it, I feel like I'm looking at like a Bob Marley poster and I'm on drugs in college, Like what's happening? Might be?
That is so trippy. So scorpions, all scorpions fluoreses. It's a tree universals of scorpions. What fluorescence means basically is that that there's a pigment in the exoskeleton of scorpions that's embedded in there. It's called cormorin.
So side note, Cormorine 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 perfume. Oh and it makes venomous arthropods glow like ravers. Also ps. I never did drugs in college. I was straight edge goth with like five jobs and a bunch of science lab homework. But my roommates owned a six foot bong, so I observed a lot of black light staring anyway, Cormoran.
What it does is it takes in light waves just from light, ambient light, and it excites those white 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 fluoress this bright like neon toxic sludge green under ultra violet light. And we don't really know why they have this feature. There's 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, 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 that are doing things at night have 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 this, 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 they're ancient ancestors that were ginormous could fluoresce?
Well, there is some a geologists mention that there's some really well preserved fossils that preserve 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 and so do proteins in human saliva, sweat, urine semen. Just in case you like checking hotel rooms for secretions. How many black light flashlights do you have?
You know what? I feel like, I just like go through them like like candy. Like I can't even keep track of them in ninety percent of the time. But I do have two that are really nice ones that I like, spend a lot of money buying from a company that like crafts them m hm. And those ones are my babies. I know where they are at all times.
If someone wanted to go out and look for critters at night, do you think getting a black light 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 thing that 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.
And in case you're looking for a black light bug hunt or a guess that splatter game in your hotel, you can get a UV flashlight for around ten bucks. But then I was curious as to how much a really good one costs, and I searched on Amazon the highest to lowest price. There's one on there. It's four hundred watt ultraviolet led emitter. It's six grand, and then they jump down to a couple hundreds. Also, at this point we talked a little bit about the zodiac sign
for scorpios. We're like mm, and it's like, okay, if you're a certain time of the year, there's a connect the dots with some stars. It really could have been anything. Sure, does the constellation look a little bit like a scorpion. Maybe it also looks kind of like a Bissle steam cleaner, So who knows. Instead of a scorpio, I could have just been like a carpet cleaner. 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 there are 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. Oh, it doesn't exist. They want to blend in with their environment. They're not trying to stand out like black on white background. M hm.
So why why? I just don't understand it, Like can they consult with a biologist and figure out what the appropriate colored species is for the place that they're shooting.
Are they ember 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 ooh, because they've been over harvested for the pet trade because of all those movies. You know.
So, some researchers think that scorpion venom may have cancer fighting properties, or it could be used to develop like anti inflammatory drugs, and it's reported that a gallon of scorpion venom is worth are you ready thirty nine million dollars? Thirty nine million dollars. In a year or two ago, there was this get rich quick scheme that started to spread in the Middle East countries like Iran. It was just promising a fortune to anyone who could poach or
raise and milk scorpions of their venom. But it's turned out to be a total bust. So labs are not interested in amateur venom milkers. So what are they gonna do with all these scorpions now? I guess just release them, they're saying, or perhaps sell them as food. Scorpions can be like eating tiny land lobsters, but before you fasten
a postage stamp sized tiny plastic bib. Doctor Spisito says that most scorpions don't even reach sexual maturity until the age of five or six, So she gets a little sad thinking about crunching and munch at.
Them, like they can live to be twenty five.
Yeah, I feel like lay off the scorpions.
Yeah, like lay it, layoff of them. Yeah. And the other crazy thing about scorpions that I always that I was struck by when I first learned about them is that the moms give birth to a live baby.
That was my next question. I've seen a picture of scorpions that are just to have a backpack full of baby scorpions. Yeah, what is happening there? Yeah?
So they get so while their courtship starts by the what we call pod dey, do they actually dance? They do like a ballroom dancer, actually quite refined animals. So the males approach the females and grab onto their hand. They face her and grab onto her hands, and then they do this like dance like back and forth where he leads her back and forth, and then he does this thing called cholesterol massage, which means he's like kind of touching her hit her mouth parts with his mouth parts.
Is basically scorpion kissing. And sometimes in some species the male will sting the female in that particular place on their body and we don't know what they're doing. They're probably injecting some sort of pheromone or some kind of slight, very mild sedative to keep from getting eaten because usually they're smaller. Oh my god, And if he does the dance well. She likes his moves. She likes his ballroom dancing. Then he'll deposit this this gelatinous stalk on the ground.
It's like a thing made out of like a jelly sort of material, and at the top of it he puts a little sperm packet and then he leads her over it and she she'll pick it up with her genital opening, and then she stores the sperm this specialized structure in her body and decides when she wants to inseminate herself, and also with whose sperm.
Does she have different pockets like this is jewels, like this is whatever.
It's clear how they like differentiate once they've been inseminated, if they have like a way to separate the packets, or if the packets sort of stay. That part is unclear.
It's her business.
But at the point when she does decide to inseminate herself, she has this complex overuterus system. It looks almost and many species. It looks almost kind of like a figure eight, and there's little spaces within that overuterus where the embryos start to develop, and once they reach parturitionian age, she gives birth gestation period.
You ask seven to nine months similar to a human, or up to fourteen months for emperor scorpions. Just think they have eight ankles. They could swell up walking around pregnant. What troopers. Some female scorpions are just pregnant most of the time, just most of their life, kind of like my Catholic grandma who had eleven.
Children and little baby scorpions come out of her birth canal.
Oh my god, is that viviparous or what is it called viviparous? Clearly a word I read more.
Than viprous and oviviparous, which is where you internalize eggs and when the eggs hatch, you give birth. But those are fully viviparous. So they're actually like connect like same as as humans kind of. They're they're the embryos are connected to the mom via a membrane, so receiving nutrition directly from her, and then they come out and they're they're kind of in like an amniotic sack sort of and it's clear, and once they give birth, the babies
break the sack and climb up onto her arms. And while she's giving birth, she does this thing called a birth basket where she arches her back up because the opening is like on their stomach. She arches her back up and makes her arms like 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 it 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.
Did I just watch several macro videos of baby scorpions being squeezed out of a scorpion vagina while sipping my morning coffee? I sure did. It looked like if you were to squeeze unpeeled shrimp through a drinking straw, just one after the other, like coming through a water slide, just bloop bloop. So then they just climb up on the when they live there like people on deck of a yacht until they molt, so they just hop off and they're like Tulu.
Yeah, Like they'll kind of start coming off her back and then getting back on for a little bit. At some point, she's like, hasn't eaten in months and months, and she's like hungry, and she'll just eat those little suckers if they don't leave her alone.
Oh my god.
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. Oh 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 from anywhere from two to I think the upper limit that anybody's ever recorded is
like one fifth forty, like high one forties. Wow, maybe let's say one fifty, call it even one.
One hundred and fifty babies.
That would be like a lot. And they all pile up on her back. Oh my, and like a big giant pile.
What a party? Yeah, and now party what about Have you ever seen one in the wild that's covered in kinda bibbis?
Yeah? So like to find scorpions, I go out during the day and flip over rocks and logs and things that they like to hide under. And oftentimes I'll flip over a rocker log and they'll be a mom with babies under there in the right season like spring.
Mm hmm. Is it always kind of a special treat to see one.
Yeah? And you know, like I collect scorpions and euthanize them in order to study them, and I always leave the moms. Yeah. I don't want to. I don't want to take those moms and all those little babies. There's no need for that.
Is it hard to collect and euthanize them for research or do you feel like you're like, the more we learn about them, the more we can kind of conserve them as a species.
Yeah, I mean certainly, that's for me. The rationalization is that we for most scorpions, we don't know like basic natural history information like how long they live, how many babies they have, how they may, how what they eat, what eats them. We don't know any of that information except for like half a dozen species.
Okay, so we have the low down on only six out of around twenty five hundred species. So future scorpiologists, the world is your oyster which is actually a mollusc. So I guess the world is your arthropod.
So the more information we know, the better we can protect them. And the truth is they're actually really environmentally sensitive. So most scorpions species, as soon as an environment gets disturbed by humans, can't survive there anymore. Oh wow, And so they're good indicators of the relative health of an ecosystem. But yeah, I think I'll say that I didn't get into the business of studying scorpions because I love killing them. Unfortunately,
they're not that cooperative sitting under a microscope below. Yeah, and the only way to identify species and study things like venom or reproduction is to look at them under a microscope.
I think that's all entomologists have to It's not like, definitely a struggle. Yeah, you can't exactly look at them through binoculars and just observe them for ten hours like wolves or something, you know.
And unfortunately with most invertebrates, we're nowhere close to where we are with with vertebrates in terms of of knowing how many species are out there and what they're doing. Right, maybe once we get there, we can switch to the binocular. Yeah, the binocular model. We'd need like a like a really some really strong binocular very strong.
Now, what is some flimflam 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. Here's a few things you need to know about scorpions.
Okay.
One, they can't jump. Oh okay, it's just a thing. They don't They don't jump. They can't walk. They can they can walk on some vertical services if they're like grainy, like like a rock that has little micro areas to step on, but otherwise like something that's slick, like windows. They could never walk on a window.
Okay.
So they're gonna have a hard time getting to you if you see it from like a like three feet away, like you don't have to run away. It's not gonna be able to grab you.
So, with the exception of Arizona, some parts of southern Nevada, and some parts of western New Mexico, Lauren says.
In the US, 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 wasps thing. But if you're a child, you want to be safe and not be playing with scorpions in Arizona. It's just rule thumb. So that's the thing.
You have cool tattoos? Do you have any scorpion tattoos? I do not.
You don't have a care to get a scorpion tattoo because like I don't know, Like I don't want to go with a cartoon one because I feel like it would bug me, and like a real biologically accurate one, like what if something came out wrong, I know, you know, like or what if like the drawing was wrong to start with and I didn't notice it, and then like I would have look at it for the rest of my life. Right, Also, like I do sometimes hate them because research is really hard, and I have those days
where I'm like, I hate you. I don't want to look at you, like I look at you all day and then I'd have to go home and look at it like we've taken a shower. Look at that scoria. I don't want to see those things.
I have so many questions from listeners, can I ask you? Yeah, it's kind of like a lightning round oo boy. 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 I get to approve everyone I endorse. And also it makes donations to a cause of the ologists choosing possible. So this week it's so
dope to donate 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. These stations are carbon minimal, they reuse gray water, they harness green energy also, and they offer outreach programs for schools.
They have internships for teenagers interested in science field guide training. Ah. So good Islands sees dot org. That's islands plural sees dot org. So thank you Lauren and Eric for starting that. What total badasses with huge hearts. Great brains. So donation is going to islands and seas. Now a few words about sponsors making that donation and the production of this very show possible.
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Okay, back to your questions. Okay, so this is kind of like a lightning ground. Okay. Sonya Karplovich wants to know should they be captus 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 captus pets. But like all things that are kept in captivity, I think it's really important to have captive bread ones because then that keeps people out of the natural ecosystems from over harvesting, over collecting for the pet trade. So there are some, like quite a few species that are really common in the pet trade and are bread 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 bread by by a breeder.
Okay, so it's the opposite of dogs.
Opposite of dogs.
Don't rescue one out of the wild.
Kindly rescuing their their just fine on their own.
Got it. I was like, how much do scorpions cost? And I found myself on a website selling medium Emperor scorpions for forty nine to ninety nine and they have a live arrive guarantee, which I guess when you think of it, it's really an elite selection of people who when mailed the box of scorpions would be disappointed to find that they are not a live scorpions. And Alyssa Katahiss wants to know why is it in the scorpion's nature to sting the frog? In quotes? Have you heard
that phase? There a fable?
Yeah, there's a fable right where the scorpion is on the frog's back and they're swimming across The scorpion convinces a frog to give it a right across the river and says like, oh no, I'll never sing you because if I sing you, we're both gonna die. And then stings it in the middle of the river and the frog says why, and it says, because I'm a scorpion. It's in my nature. Oh, I mean, I don't know. I guess it's like the point of the fables that people are who they are and don't change.
Sort of, that's the philosophical answer. Let's look at this practically, though.
But a scorpion sitting on frogs back when we're seeing the frog because they have all their eyes on the top of their head, and they wouldn't even know what they were doing.
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 all 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. And 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 with your in laws. Navigating by stars is called astromenotaxis. Astrominotaxis. There, you know that. Now Nelson Chan has a question that I think you are going to enjoy answering.
Okay, I'm ready.
Are all scorpions poisonous? And I know that there's a poison venom discussion to be had.
There is, So no scorpions are poisonous because poison is something that's secreted and then when something else eats that thing, it makes them ill. All scorpions are venomous, which is something that's secreted and then injected into the destined hoast like another animal. So there's a delivery apparatus for the venom. So all scorpions are venomous. Not all scorpions are venomous to humans because they don't necessarily have that mammal mirrotoxin. But they're all venomous to something.
If you ate scorpion venom would it be poisonous?
No, it's a protein and your stomach acid would do nature it.
So if you ate a scorpion, unless it stung you on the way down, you're good to go. You're good to go, and then it would still be venomous because it wouldn't be digested, so poison versus venom.
But I would like not recommend eating a thumbtack. Okay, so like in that sense, maybe not eat the stinger just because it's like sharp and I don't know what's going to do in your stomach. It seems like not a good like, not a good look for anyone.
Yeah, and also let them live, Let them live? Can I live? Jordan Jarrett wants to know what your opinion is on the scorpion and Honey Ashrunk the kids. They say, I love animals, but scorpions are the one animal that just creeps me out. Did you ever see honey a shrink the kids? Is there a scorpion of that?
Yeah? And well here's what I'll say about that scorpion. Scorpions are opportunistic predators, so they'll they'll basically eat anything that they can get their hands on.
Mm hmm.
They don't forge during the day, and I want to say, like when that happens, it's daytime. Oh, that's inaccurate. It was also an inaccurate species for where it was. But for sure scorpions will eat anything they can get their hands on, and that includes like if they could get find like a tiny gecko that they're bigger than, they'll eat it. If another scorpion comes along, they'll eat it. If it's a cricket, they'll eat it. If it's a moth, they'll eat it. But they have really low metabolism, so
that is another thing that makes the good pets. They have like one of the lowest men tabloism. So if you forget to feed them for like, say a year, they'll be If you forget a week, they're gonna survive.
Oh my god, I didn't know that. They're like camels kind of j Owens has a question if you remove their tails, is it true they die from constipation? And what is their mechanism if that's true?
So maybe I will say that there's some truth to that end. That their anus is actually at the end of their tail, right before their stinger. Really, so they're like rectum goes all the way through their entire tale. And then like they're they have just like a single kind of chloeca thing that has that excrease everything, and they don't have like separate p and pooh situation and that's so it all comes out from right before the stinger. Oh so maybe they could die of constipation because it
would be like ruptured and broken. Yeah, I think they'd probably just die of blood loss, to be honest.
That was actually Emily Hawking's question about the waste management system. Where is the butt?
Do they pee? Now we know they do. They excrete like uric acid, same as other things, and other waste products comes out of their butt.
There's this one researcher, Camillo Mattoni in Argentina, who has observed that some scorpions will voluntarily break off their tails to escape. And yes, in that case, in the absence of an ans, poo will just build up like emails. You don't want to check. But sometimes they can break off another tail segment to get rid of the poo and then continue to live just long enough to mate again. Like Hey, yeah, hi, hi, I don't have a stinger. I do have this stumpy column of impacted pooh happening.
I got scared once and broke off part of my body. But I would love a chance to just get to know you better, maybe have several dozen babies. Wade Lee hy Wait Wad high Way Wade wants to know. Is it true smaller scorpions are more venomous in general smiley face emoji.
They it depends on where you are, so it's not a simple yes or no answer. In some places, smaller scorpions are belong to that one group boothity, so they are more venomous.
M hm.
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. Ooh, So it's not like the overall body size but the proportion of hands to tail situation.
So counterintuitively, big pintures less scary.
And you know what they say about men with small hands, You can't trust them.
Dory Grillas seals. There's a lot of consonants in that. And I don't know if I said it right. Dory Grillis seals, I think trust you not scorpion related. But could you tell us about the five hundred Queer Scientists initiative? Why did you start it? Why do you think it's important? Future plans and Carolyn Swift has the same question in said, as a queer science I'd also love the answer to this. Huge thank you to both doctor e and you and Dory for asking.
Well, I am queer and I'm an a racknologist, and I think for most of my professional career and student life I kept those two aspects of my identity really separate. And when I started my position, I realized that I was the only queer faculty member at my institution. Really yeah, and I'm in San Francisco. I was going to say, Right, San Francisco is like the gay Mecca. So I'm the only queer faculty member, and so my knowledge, I'm the only queer faculty member in the history of the institution.
What because first of all, we're a small institution, so it's not like a university that has hundreds and hundreds of professors. We have fifteen faculty but still so but still it's San Francisco, right yeah, And so I started thinking, like, if I feel this way, I feel like those aspects of my personality are separate. I'm in a really queer
friendly place, I'm the only queer faculty member. I feel kind of isolated in that sense there must be people out there in parts of the world where being LGBT is not a protected class for jobs, like you would be fired if people found out at work that you were gay, or if you're just in a place where, like culturally it feels unwelcome to be out and open. Surely, if I feel this way in San Francisco, there must
be people in other places. And so I decided that I would start a visibility campaign and it's called five hundred Queer Scientists, and where we have a website, we also have social media accounts on Twitter and Instagram, and we take user contributed stories of scientists and science students at all levels, from undergraduate all the way through deans of universities have contributed their story and it's really just people sharing their stories of what they do in STEM
and their identity as an LGBTQAI person and how those things fit together. And it's been I think great for the community to be able to identify each other because often it's like one of those attributes that's hidden. It's quiet, but it's a really strong part of your personal identity, and so it's hard to identify others that you can just commiserate with or have as role models or as colleagues that you feel comfortable sharing that part of your
identity with. And so I think it's been a great way for the community to find each other and connect with one another.
How long good did you start it?
We launched last June and I had collected fifty bios of people by email, like emailing all my friends and asking them to email all their friends. And two weeks later we had five hundred.
Oh my god.
And now we're eight months and eight yeah, eight months, and we have eight hundred and fifty Wow, And we've had like over a million interactions on social media in those eight months. And you started it, Yeah, So I started it with the help of others, but certainly it was my little brainchild, and I'm really happy with what it's become.
So you can find five hundred queer Scientists at five hundred Queer Scientists on Instagram or go to five hundred greers Scientists dot com, and you can read first person stories such as Charlotte, who says I am a lesbian and a chemistry student. I made the decision to return to education after spending a long time selling phones for a living For me, studying chemistry is the most wonderful thing I have ever had the opportunity to do. It started when my wife and I returned from our honeymoon
in New Zealand. All we can think about is how do we go back there? We considered the usual ideas of learning a trade or something similar than One day I woke up and hit me. I nudged becks and said I want to go back to school. She asked why. I told her I wanted to study chemistry. She replied, well, four, so I can teach it. She simply replied, well, then go do it, and rolled over and went back to sleep.
So here I am Amy Turish, student at the University of Manchester, chasing after an interest in radio chemistry and a dream to teach at the academic level. Or Alexi who writes I'm by and a wildlife educator, animal trainer and artist. I floated through college studying biology and social psychology, not knowing what I wanted to do. In an interview where I uttered the phrase elephant diaper, the managers of the local zoo's education department saw something in me that
I didn't know was there. As someone who was impacted by David Attenborough. I never expected I could be doing the same for kids of color and all kids in general on the ground, But here I am educator, trainer, scientist, and mentor to several queer teens of color. So if there's something missing from your day, and that's something is crying with pride for total strangers and or making some
new friends, do check out five hundred queer scientists. And if you are a queer scientist and you're looking for a place to find some community, maybe share your story. Look no further fam So follow the folks on there, fill your feed with really great scientists, fill your heart with joy and admiration. How has it changed your life having started it?
I think for me the biggest change has just been realizing other people that were not necessarily in my field. Although I have met a few people now in the field of a racknology that are queer, but in the greater field of entomology, which is the study of insects, doesn't really include a rachnology, but they allow us to participate it's close enough. So I've certainly met lots of entomologists.
But I think also I've just realized, like how meaningful it is for people to realize that there's others out there, because I've heard over and over from so many people at this point that prior to this campaign, they'd never met any other scientists in their field that was LGBT. So I wasn't alone, certainly, And I think that's the reassuring part of it, is like you're not alone. There's others. They're out there, they're just maybe not as visible as we'd like them to be.
Anything that you would suggest for people to kind of keep an eye on, or anything that people could do to up the inclusion, anything people could do to be allies, Like any advice for people who are like, oh, I'm not quite sure what I could do to help.
I think some simple ways is just acknowledging people in the workplace or in your student community and asking, like point blank, if there's ever anything that they can do, or if there's if you are witnessing something that's that's would make them feel uncomfortable or you perceive that they're uncomfortable to speak out, so that they don't have to
speak out. I think that that's huge, and you know also that I would say for me, that's been one of the really great things about having run this campaign. By talking about it this much, this aspect of my identity this much around my colleagues who are straight and heterosexual, non transgender, gender conforming, whatever, they've become much bigger allies for me, like huge advocates and have expressed their desire for advocacy in a way that like prior to this
thing never would have done. And so I think for all the people that are lgb TEA out there, like taking the step of putting yourself out there and like expressing your needs to your colleagues and telling them point blank how they can help is scary, it's like terrifying, But when you do it, like they're really appreciative of that because they don't necessarily know how to help you and how to be an ally so just asking which is I think it's always like hard to ask for help,
no matter the context, right, But if you can find the courage to do so, it makes a huge difference.
Ah, you're changing so many lives, it's amazing.
I don't know about that. It's not me, it's the community. Yeah, those eight hundred and fifty stories, only one of them's mind. But I'm happy to be the spokesperson for the community whenever I have, whenever I can, because I am in a place of privilege where I can talk openly about my identity in my workplace and not have any fear of retaliation or retribution and have this full support of my institution. So so I'm happy to do that work
for the community when I can. Like, there's not that much information about out there about the experience for LGBT people in the workplace them, but the few things that we do know is that about forty percent of queer faculty members in academia and in industry are not out.
So there's a lot of people that are out there that are not comfortable expressing that part of their identity because of fear of retribution, which is a valid fear, because surveys have shown that of faculty members that are out, seventy percent of them have been made to feel excluded or harassed at work by their colleagues.
Oh my god.
So there's like a huge motivation not to be out, even though being out is great for the community, it's great for future students, it's great to be a role model. But there's so much, there's so much, there's so many reasons not to do it, because you're going to be uncomfortable at work, it's going to be terrible. You don't want to do that, And so I think it's hard to feel that you're in a space that's comfortable enough to be out and to be visible.
So they can commiserate and hear other people's stories. And that's amazing. Oh, I'm so glad that you did that. You're doing so many good.
Things and helping peoples and queer people who know that's a thing. I don't know how any queer scorpions, but.
Oh, there's got to be something out there.
Maybe there's lots of examples of weird things in nature.
Yeah, they're just under a rock. There's so much more fluidity in nature.
Yeah, much gender fluidity. Right, and yet like as humans who want to dichotomize that. It's so crazy.
I know this Nails episode we talk a lot about you know, just you come b yogs, bring your own Jenny's and and now the last couple of questions. I always ask her, what's the worst thing about your job or the most annoying thing about scorpions? What's the shittiest aspect about being a scorpionologist, a scorpiologist.
You know, I think the hardest thing about working in science in this moment in time, in this country especially is like the funding so tough. And I think in the field that I work in, which is sort of evolutionary biology, the successful funding rate to the main place that we apply for funding is the National Science Foundation
government grants, the success rates about four percent. So as an early career scientist like breaking into that because you know, like almost certainly that four percent is not evenly distributed across all genders and ethnicities and stages of career. It's certainly biased because the people that are more senior, are more established, to tend to be more white, more male,
and are better at getting grants. So to be an early career researcher, trying to break into a four percent funding rate is daunting and hard, and it makes it really hard to find enough money to do the thing that you want to do and feel is really important contribution to society.
Do you have to write all your own grants or do I do?
Yeah? I do. I submit probably three or so a year, and you know those each of those takes months and months, so it's time away from research, which is what I really love and want to really be doing.
Yeah, and now, best thing about scorpions, Best thing about your job? What do you love?
And 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 Calibournia Academy of Sciences is 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. Like in a faculty job at a university, I was going to have to give up the outreach because that's like extra credit, it's extracurricular. It's not something that's considered in your annual review or your job performance. Or doing science outreach, I was going to have to give up science because there's very few science outreach jobs where you can still engage as much as you need to in the science research itself. 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 a queer sciences And it's nice to be somewhere where I can bring all of me to the job.
It's a beautiful place. Oh my god.
If you've ever if you're going to work every day is also not so bad.
Oh man, if you're in San Francisco, go go go. It's just oh, I could spend days.
I just like walk through the park to work in the morning. I see coyotes and there's like crows quawking, and redtail hawks fly soaring through the air. It's like pretty amazing special. Lately, we have a turkey that lives in our business entrance and she just like hangs out in the in the like little walkway, like like fluffing up her others and like walks around. There's lots of different names for her, but everybody's got a different name.
What do you call her?
I call her burn That Okay, somebody I didn't make the name up. Somebody else did, but that's my favorite one. I feel like it's like like burn and that's like a real Turkey kind of name. It's definitely she's a pretty turkey too.
Oh my god, I need to come back and visit. Thank you so much for doing this.
Thank you, Oh my god, it's great.
Oh I've been I have been gently prodding you for too long, Like.
Like ships in the night, we can never like manage to meet up on us. We did it, I did.
We did it. So ask smart people stupid questions, because how the hell else would we ever find out that scorpions are four hundred and fifty million years old and we're once the size of like a couch? What what? To learn more about doctor Esposito's endeavor, you can find her on Twitter at a racknology nerd. She's on Instagram at karrabalz and I will put links in the show notes. Her education nonprofit again is Island and sees It's islandscs
dot org. You can go to five hundred QUEERSI on Twitter on Instagram they are five hundred Queer Scientists and it's five hundred Queer Scientists dot com. More links will all be up at Aliward dot com, slash ologies, slash scorpiology. You can follow Ologies on Twitter or Instagram at Ologies. I'm on both at Aliward with one L and there's tons of links again for each episode up at alleyward dot com slash ologies, and you can become a patron.
If you like patreon dot com slash Ologies, you can get merch at ologiesmerch dot com or through my website. Thank you to Bonnie Dutch and also Shannon Feltis for helping manage that. Thank you to Aaron Talbert and Hannah Lippo for adminting the Really Wonderful Ologies Facebook group. Thank you to interns Harry Kim and Caleb Patton of the You're Never Too Old podcast, to assistant editor Jarrett Sleeper
of Mine Jam Media. He also hosts the podcast My Good Bad Brain and a combat sports podcast called fight Stuff. And thank you to Stephen Ray Morris of the per cast Antcy Jurassic Right for never being a frog stabber and editing this all together. Also Nick Thorburn of the band Islands, who wrote and performed the theme music. And if you listen to the end of the episode, I always tell you a secret. This week I want to
tell you about Herbert. Herbert is my tiny tooth I have this one tooth that I had a veneer on because it's just tiny, and so I was trying to get my teeth moved around. I've been doing in visiline for like four or five months to get Herbert back into place, and they had to take the veneer off to like fix it, and I did not know how
small he was. It's been a while since I've seen him, and so now I just have this one little tooth I'm in between the veneers, and I got it taken off, and I asked some close friends like, look at this, and they were like, I didn't. I wouldn't have even noticed it. Ali, you're tripping like it's I wouldn't have even seen it. And then I went and saw my friend Daylan by the way, Happy birthday Daylan. It's her birthday today. And one of the first things she said, well,
happened to your tooth. And I was like, is it noticeable? She's like yes, I said. Other friends were like, they wouldn't have even seen it. She's like, they're lying to you. So I'm gonna get it fixed. But meanwhile, if you are at the museum and you're like, Allie, what's up with her? Tooth. That's what's up with it. It's almost fixed. You'd never know, but I figured I might as well
use the end of this episode to tell you about Herbert. Maybe, Patreon, maybe I'll just post a little smiley video of me and Herbert up there and Daylan, Happy birthday. Thank you for always telling me the truth.
I love you so much, Okay.
Pacadermatology, hommeiology or do zoology, lithology, minology, meteorology, paratology, nathology, seriology, elenology.
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