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