Associate Curator Lorenzo Prendini, the Museum’s resident scorpion expert, was recently featured in a CBS video about scorpions’ evolutionary history and their role in indicating climate change.
In the video below, Prendini recounts his most dangerous skirmish with a scorpion, which he was searching for at night using UV light. This technique causes scorpions to glow blue, much like the scorpions, part of Prendini’s research, featured in Picturing Science: Museum Scientists and Imaging Technologies on view in the Akeley Gallery.
Typhochactas mitchelli is among the smallest known scorpions and part of the Typhlochactidae family of cave scorpions, endemic to Mexico. Like all scorpions, it fluoresces in long-wave ultraviolet light as this image of its ventral side highlights. Credit: V. Vignoli
Blind scorpions that live in the stygian depths of caves are throwing light on a long-held assumption, showing that specialized adaptations aren’t always an evolutionary dead-end. Looking at the phylogenetic relationships among species of the scorpion family Typhlochactidae, endemic to Mexico, Associate Curator Lorenzo Prendini and colleagues found that species currently living closer to the surface (under stones and in leaf litter) evolved independently on more than one occasion from specialized deep-cave ancestors adapted to life further below the surface (in caves). This finding puts a dent in both Cope’s Law of the unspecialized, which assumes that novel evolutionary traits tend to originate from a generalized member of an ancestral taxon, and Dollo’s Law of evolutionary irreversibility, which theorizes that specialized evolutionary traits are unlikely to reverse.
Scorpions are predatory, venomous, nocturnal arachnids related to spiders, mites, and other arthropods. About 2,000 species are distributed throughout the world, but only 23 species found in ten different families are adapted to a permanent life in caves. One of these families is the Typhlochactidae, comprising four genera and nine species.
“Scorpions have been around for 450 million years, and their biology is obviously flexible,” says Prendini. “This unique group of eyeless Mexican scorpions may have started re-colonizing niches closer to the surface from the deep caves of Mexico after their surface-living ancestors were wiped out by the nearby Chicxuluxb impact along with non-avian dinosaurs, ammonites, and other species.”
Alacran tartarus, also in the family Typhlochactidae, has been found at the greatest depth of all scorpions, at 750 to 920 meters below the surface in the Sistema Huautla, Oaxaca, Mexico. Credit: P. Sprouse and A. Gluesenkamp
The U.N. proclaimed 2010 as the International Year of Biodiversity. The American Museum of Natural History has joined efforts to refocus the world on biodiversity, the complex tapestry of interconnections at every level that supports life on Earth.
