DubiaW
Arachnobaron
- Joined
- Jan 10, 2017
- Messages
- 471
This is my first scorion post so I thought that would start off with a strange story that peaked my scientific curiosity.
During my college days I was traping craw fish in a local canal. I pulled up my trap and there were about fifty craw fish in the trap and one Veajovis sp. scorpion. To my suprize it was alive. I kept it for some time because it was the scorpion that I had caugh while fishing.
That same year when the same canal was shut down I found a water hole full of catfish. I saved one of the young fish to raise in an aquarium. I couldn't get the fish to eat anything as it didn't appriciate the clear water and the light. I remembered the veajovis sp. that had survived underwater and decided to try to feed the fish one of my many Centruroides sculpturatus, that I had collected for my first venom reserch project, hoping the catfish would sight hunt his prey. The scorpion wouldn't stay submerged because it was incased in a thin layer of air so I put a brick at the bottom and placed the scorpion on the brick. It held on and began crawling all over the brick because it had nothing else to hold onto. I turned off the lights and let it stay down there all night. In the morning it was still there crawling around on the brick. Days passed and it was still there just crawling around. I decided to leave him there and see how long it would go on. After I had given up trying different foods for the fish I decided to end the experiment with the scorpion and release the fish. I jotted down a few notes on the time the scorpion had spent underwater and removed it still alive. It seemed like a novel experiment for the future but I was too busy at the time.
I never got back to doing an experiment on how long C. sculpturatus could live underwater. When I thought about sharing this story with everyone it occured to me that people would say that I was full of it so I looked it up. It is well documented that a scorpion can live for up to 48 hours underwater, just on the air that it stores in it's book lungs, but mine lived underwater for much longer, I want to say over a week (I wish I still had that note book). The thin layer of air around the scorion never dissapeared (so it wasn't just surviving on the air in it's book lungs). This may be because it was able to crawl around on the brick with ease instead of thrashing around in the water dissipating the layer of air until it sank. It could also be that it was able to reach the bubbler. I thought back to an early excursion where I had rushed out after a monsoon had inundated the flood plane eager to find everything that had fled their flooded burrows only to come up empty handed. Were they just still down there calmly breathing a thin layer of air that encased their bodies? Thoughts.
Here is someone else's video of submerging a Babycurus gigas. Notice at 1:30 the scorpion emerges and goes back down encased in a thin layer of air.
During my college days I was traping craw fish in a local canal. I pulled up my trap and there were about fifty craw fish in the trap and one Veajovis sp. scorpion. To my suprize it was alive. I kept it for some time because it was the scorpion that I had caugh while fishing.
That same year when the same canal was shut down I found a water hole full of catfish. I saved one of the young fish to raise in an aquarium. I couldn't get the fish to eat anything as it didn't appriciate the clear water and the light. I remembered the veajovis sp. that had survived underwater and decided to try to feed the fish one of my many Centruroides sculpturatus, that I had collected for my first venom reserch project, hoping the catfish would sight hunt his prey. The scorpion wouldn't stay submerged because it was incased in a thin layer of air so I put a brick at the bottom and placed the scorpion on the brick. It held on and began crawling all over the brick because it had nothing else to hold onto. I turned off the lights and let it stay down there all night. In the morning it was still there crawling around on the brick. Days passed and it was still there just crawling around. I decided to leave him there and see how long it would go on. After I had given up trying different foods for the fish I decided to end the experiment with the scorpion and release the fish. I jotted down a few notes on the time the scorpion had spent underwater and removed it still alive. It seemed like a novel experiment for the future but I was too busy at the time.
I never got back to doing an experiment on how long C. sculpturatus could live underwater. When I thought about sharing this story with everyone it occured to me that people would say that I was full of it so I looked it up. It is well documented that a scorpion can live for up to 48 hours underwater, just on the air that it stores in it's book lungs, but mine lived underwater for much longer, I want to say over a week (I wish I still had that note book). The thin layer of air around the scorion never dissapeared (so it wasn't just surviving on the air in it's book lungs). This may be because it was able to crawl around on the brick with ease instead of thrashing around in the water dissipating the layer of air until it sank. It could also be that it was able to reach the bubbler. I thought back to an early excursion where I had rushed out after a monsoon had inundated the flood plane eager to find everything that had fled their flooded burrows only to come up empty handed. Were they just still down there calmly breathing a thin layer of air that encased their bodies? Thoughts.
Here is someone else's video of submerging a Babycurus gigas. Notice at 1:30 the scorpion emerges and goes back down encased in a thin layer of air.
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