Dr. Lauren Esposito

Happy to be here.

All right, my three words are caring,

Ancient.

And I would say like intriguing is the biggest thing that has kept me interested in scorpions for the last 20 years of my life.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

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.

I would say that that's true when we think about things that have a backbone like vertebrates.

Gila 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...

That they're 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.

Oh my gosh.

You should.