Scorpion Sex
Scorpions are utterly ancient.
They predate dinosaurs by longer than dinosaurs predate us. This is every bit as nonintuitive as how Cleopatra is closer in time to us than the building of the pyramids, but on a vastly longer time scale.
This seems wrong because scorpions are still with us today in mostly the same form they had 430 million years ago.
Trees are still around, too, but scorpions are older. Maybe even more nonintuitively, scorpions predate insects. They were true land pioneers, among the very first animals to transition from living in the water to living on the land.
With 430 million years of history, scorpions are about a tenth as old as our planet. To put it mildly, their resilience is remarkable.
You’re probably thinking they’ve utterly streamlined the reproductive process by now, so they can easily produce new baby scorpions en masse, thereby increasing survival rates and ensuring that the species stays around for another several hundred million years.
Instead, we get one of the most elaborate and bizarre rituals in all of reproduction.
First, there’s a random encounter between a male and female scorpion; typically, scorpions are not scouring dating sites or otherwise actively looking for mates.
The male senses the female by smell—pheromones specifically evolved for this specific task. He’s got to be cautious here, though, so he gives a little knock, tapping the ground with his legs or body, creating little vibrations the female scorpion can sense.
Assuming she’s interested, the two scorpions will carefully approach one another. They’ve got to trust each other to a very high degree, because either can sting the other, potentially ending not only the mating ritual, but the life of the stung scorpion.
Their dance involves the duo locking claws, potentially lasting for hours. Biologists compared this slow but intricate dance to a ballroom dance called a promenade à deux, and that name is still used to describe this ritual.
So far, so normal, right?
The next thing that happens kind of breaks any anthropomorphizing spell that might still be lingering from the ballroom dancing metaphor, because the male scorpion then…. erm, deposits something on the ground. That something is called a spermatophore, and it is pretty much exactly what you think it is.
The male carefully guides the female over to the… pile… so that she can sort of scoop it all up with her own genital opening.
The actual sex isn’t the only wild part of the scorpion reproductive process, either. Most arachnids (spiders, ticks, mites, and scorpions) lay eggs, but scorpions give birth to live babies. Then, the mother carries the newborns around on her back for a few weeks, making sure they have time to develop tough exoskeletons through molting.
There’s one other really stunning thing about scorpions I want to share with you today, and it probably goes further to explain just why scorpions have been so resilient, outlasting nearly all other types of animals.
It’s also about their sexual reproduction, or rather, their lack of it at certain times. Mind-blowingly, certain species of scorpion are able to reproduce all on their own. Some females are able to use parthenogenesis, reproducing with an unfertilized egg.
Finding out this was a one-two punch combination for my brain, immediately after learning how scorpions do it. Apparently, some of them simply reproduce and create little versions of themselves spontaneously.
Nature is full of these sorts of little surprises. As predictable as the rules of the game can be, there’s plenty of room for surprises, too.
If you’re looking to explore some of the more eyebrow-raising observations about nature, you might enjoy reading about tardigrades, little “water-bears” that can survive excursions into space, among other things:
Water Bears in Space
Ever hear of an animal that can survive boiling hot springs, being frozen inside a glacier, and even the vacuum of space?
There are immortal jellyfish, zombie ants, and something akin to an internet made of fungus out there for us to explore. So many critters have evolved over the years, and I have a lot of fun thinking about how all that diversity could have come to be.
Have you ever seen a scorpion in person, not like behind a glass in a museum or pet store, but like in your neighborhood? I know we have a few desert-dwellers among us here. Are scorpions common where you live?
It's interesting that some critters evolved quicky to a point and then remained static for millions of years.
Not enough poop. Three stars.
We were just in Gothenburg last weekend for Nathan's hockey tournament, and we went to a very cool place called Universeum, which is sort of a hybrid of an aquarium/terrarium/zoo/science museum.
Inside is a multi-floor rainforest section you can walk through. And on one of the floors, there's a pitch black box covered with glass, with two holes inside and two shining red buttons behind them. It says "Press a button to see animals who are mostly active at night" (or something like that). It's really hard to see inside, but when you squint, you can tell that by one of the buttons there's a scorpion, and by another one there's a tarantula.
My family refused to try and touch the buttons, so of course being the brave man I am, I ended up doing it. When you press the button, the entire box lights up for a few seconds, and it becomes clear that....all the animals inside are just rubber toys.
(Also, I figured that last part out before touching the red button. Ain't no way I'm putting my hand next to a living scorpion.)