Dr. Lauren Esposito

Like if you think about like a fish gill, like have you 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.

Anatomy.

Anatomy's 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.

Yeah, really.

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.

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.