Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren vogel bomb here with a classic episode of the podcast.
Speaker 1: This one is about the wonderfully strange phenomenon of scorpions
Speaker 1: glowing green under black lights. Not velvet paintings of scorpions,
Speaker 1: actual scorpions, Hey brain Stuff, Lauren vocal bomb here. Some
Speaker 1: animals are just over the top. Take scorpions. Is it
Speaker 1: not enough that these stinging arachnids can survive some of
Speaker 1: the harshest climates in the world and live twenty five
Speaker 1: times longer than your average cockroach? Or that some species
Speaker 1: don't need males to reproduce and can live up to
Speaker 1: forty eight hours without oxygen, and that all of them
Speaker 1: will eat almost anything they can subdue, even other scorpions. No,
Speaker 1: it's apparently not enough, because scorpions also glow electric cyam
Speaker 1: green under ultraviolet light. Why they do this is a
Speaker 1: bit of a mystery, but it makes them pretty easy
Speaker 1: to study. All a scorpion researcher has to do to
Speaker 1: find scorpions is go out into the desert at night
Speaker 1: with a black light and watch those suckers light up
Speaker 1: like Christmas trees. Chemically speaking, Nobody.
Speaker 2: Is exactly sure what causes scorpions to glow, but we
Speaker 2: know its powerful stuff. When a scorpion is preserved in alcohol,
Speaker 2: the alcohol itself will fluoresce. Scorpion fossils have even been
Speaker 2: induced to glow under black light after hundreds of millions
Speaker 2: of years. What we do know is the chemicals that
Speaker 2: make a scorpion so rave ready are in the outer layer,
Speaker 2: or cuticle, of its exoskeleton. Scientists call it the highland layer.
Speaker 2: Scorpions molt their exoskeleton every so often in order to grow,
Speaker 2: and researchers have observed that until the slightly mushy outer
Speaker 2: shell has entirely hardened, the highlind layer does not fluoresce
Speaker 2: under UV light. This is all pretty weird. Why would
Speaker 2: an animal evolve to glow under ultraviolet light? Researchers have
Speaker 2: posited a bunch of different ideas. Scorpion fluorescents might help
Speaker 2: them find each other in the dark, protect them from sunlight,
Speaker 2: or even confuse their prey. But there's another promising theory
Speaker 2: that scorpions are somehow using their fluorescence to detect UV light,
Speaker 2: mostly because they want to avoid it. They're night hunters,
Speaker 2: after all, and a scorpion will always find the darkest
Speaker 2: place to hang out during the day or even in
Speaker 2: the moonlight. A study published in the Journal of Arachnology
Speaker 2: in twenty ten tested normal fluorescing scorpions and a group
Speaker 2: of scorpions that they had reduced the fluorescence of with
Speaker 2: prolonged exposure to UV light. The normal scorpions then reacted
Speaker 2: more strongly and negatively to UV light than the desensitized scorpions.
Speaker 2: But wait, you might be thinking. Scorpions still have eyes,
Speaker 2: and as it turns out, they can visually see light
Speaker 2: within the ultraviolet part of the spectrum, but it doesn't
Speaker 2: seem like the scorpions were reacting visually. A separate study
Speaker 2: published in Animal Behavior in twenty twelve basically blindfolded a
Speaker 2: group of scorpions and found that the critters still reacted
Speaker 2: to the presence of ultraviolet light. So it seems that
Speaker 2: they're using their entire bodies as giant UV seeking eyeballs,
Speaker 2: and that if they sense that they're glowing at all,
Speaker 2: it's time to scurry off somewhere darker. Today's episode is
Speaker 2: based on the article why scorpions glow under black Life
Speaker 2: on how stuffworks dot com. Written by Jesslinshields. Brain Stuff
Speaker 2: is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with how stuffworks dot Com.
Speaker 1: And is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts my
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