Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/06/09/did-you-know-that-scorpions-glow-under-ultraviolet-light.html
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It’s just their nature.
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Well, of course they do! Li’l scamps, what’ll they get up to next?
“Although these insects freak me out…”
Yeah, “insects”. Just like trout, or giraffes, or peacocks. All “insects”.
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It’s a hazard for rockhounds collecting glow in the dark minerals. Grab for the calcite and get stung.
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But only if you wear eye protection and avoid long exposure to unprotected skin. UV light is hazardous without the correct PPE.
Don’t be like Donny!
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It’s common knowledge in areas prone to scorpion infestation. I’ve known people who have to sweep their bedroom with a UV lamp before bed to ensure their safety. Mostly in the expensive foothills homes.
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And infrared
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8 legs (plus two pincers that are actually specialized mouth parts). Arachnids.
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if you get bit by a glowing spider, you get superpowers; if you get bit by a glowing scorpion, you get a trip to the hospital
it hardly seems fair. are you sure they’re related?
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I did know that. Pretty neat!
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One other neat thing about scorpions is that the scariest-looking ones with the giant pincers are actually the least dangerous—after all, the more potent the poison the less they need those pincers to catch their food. This means that the biggest, most intimidating scorpions make for great pets.
When I was in college I had a pet Emperor Scorpion (like the one pictured below) so I got to see the cool glowing effect firsthand. My mom, knowing the scorpion was harmless, once borrowed it to take it to her office on Halloween. She put it in a portable terrarium filled with candy with a sign reading “FREE CANDY, TAKE ONE.” Some of her coworkers assumed the scorpion was just a plastic toy until they reached for a piece and saw it move, at which point they’d generally freak the heck out. I love her sick sense of humor.
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Well, not quite as bad as that. A trout or a peacock has never been considered an insect. When Linnaeus first divided the animal kingdom, though, his Class Insecta (meaning those cut up) also included other relatives like scorpions and lobsters. So really this is not complete nonsense, just missing a couple centuries of taxonomic refinement.
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How does “not venomous enough to cause serious harm” translate to harmless? I’d rather not be stung by a scorpion at all, even if it won’t kill me or make me sick.
My emperor scorpion never even attempted to sting the crickets we fed it, let alone any of the people who handled it. Kind of disappointing actually (that we didn’t get to see it use its stinger on bugs, not that we didn’t get to see it sting people).
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Although larger scorpions are less toxic on average, its an awfully loose correlation. Some large ones are pretty bad…
ETA: they highlight this one in their figure, large and highly venomous
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OK, so still best practice not to handle any strange scorpions unless you’re sure which species it is.
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Might edge over into being a golden rule 
One of the results in the paper is that the size of the claws also matters. If it is big and has great big 'orrible lobster claws, it probably doesn’t need venom much. That deathstalker has a great big fat tail and tiny chelae.
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