Californian Teens Discover Two New Scorpion Species and Are Not Planning to Stop There

While browsing the citizen science platform iNaturalist, Harper and Prakrit discovered the existence of two scorpion species that had not been identified before. Image credit: Gayle Laird / California Academy of Sciences
In collaboration with Lauren Esposito, an arachnology curator at the California Academy of Sciences, Harper and Prakrit followed the official process of describing a new species. They spent their summer break collecting male and female specimens of the two unknown scorpions at California’s Soda Lake and Koehn Lake, the sites of the iNaturalist observations, and compared them to known species.

Using blacklights, which glow under ultraviolet light, the duo searched for scorpion hiding spots, such as cracks in the soil and bushes, and eventually, all their hard work paid off: they became the lead authors of a paper introducing two new species, Paruroctonus soda and Paruroctonus conclusus, published in the scientific journal ZooKeys. The paper describes the two newly described species of playa scorpions that inhabit the dry lake beds in central and southern California.