Some research help.

[Animalia]

Hey guys I'm doing a project for school over scorps.
So of course i know to use Google and search, but I used search and kept getting random stuff.. So any help or links to good articles or people to ask with the following questions.

How is scorpion research conducted?

How are species distinguished? I know like pectal numbers and size hairs and other such things. But like if I have two scorpions here that can hybridize and they look alot alike (like most barks) How can scientist determine one is say Centruroides A while the other Centruroides.

Pictures of labs? any one here entomologist?

Good books on Taxonomy or places articles anything to read about.

Also I continually read there are 25 medically important species... But cant ever find more information than that. What is there importance. How are they used. all that....


Anything else is welcome guys.
Thanks Animalia

 

[John Bokma]

You can find scientific papers on a certain species, say centruroides as follows:
http://www.google.com/search?q=filetype:pdf+centruroides

More generic:
http://www.google.com/search?q=filetype:pdf scorpion genus

You can replace genus with family. Loads of very interesting papers.

FWIW I have recently been on two awesome field trips in Mexico with scientists to collect species I "discovered" (between "" since other than recognizing one as being a Megacormus sp. and the other as a Vaejovis sp. I had no idea they might be new species). So to somewhat answer your question: scorpions are collected, bagged & marked, and taken to a lab to further examine them. From what I've heard there are currently about 100+ new species from Mexico, waiting to be described.

edit: you can limit your search in Google to a specific site, e.g.

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.physorg.com filetype:pdf scorpion

will find all scorpion publications in pdf format on www.physorg.com.

 

[skinheaddave]

Man, have you just asked a mouthfull. The first question would be what level of schooling this is for and what is the nature of the actual assignment? People have spent lifetimes developing the answers to the questions you ask .. might help to narrow it down a bit.

Cheers,
Dave

 

[Animalia]

Man, have you just asked a mouthfull. The first question would be what level of schooling this is for and what is the nature of the actual assignment? People have spent lifetimes developing the answers to the questions you ask .. might help to narrow it down a bit.

Cheers,
Dave

This is like my Senior high school project for Advanced Placement Biology.

Our actuall project should be "Our proposal for the AP project is a research paper and presentation over, how breeding and experimenting in the scientific class of Arachnida order Scorpiones has lead to breakthroughs in the taxonomic and systematic discoveries of the order. The information we will present will cover topics on.
• Methods of keeping and breeding scorpions in captivity.
• Classification methods.
• Discoveries made through this research
• Other important information related to the topic. "

Lol A large undertaking... But I have a couple months to assemble the informations and get everything ready.

Also thanks a thousand john boka for the links

 

[skinheaddave]

Wow. You've picked yourself one hell of a topic. Your biggest problem is going to be the question you've set yourself. In general, the breeding we do as hobbyists and the stuff that is done with live scorpions in labs have relatively little bearing on the world of systematics. There are other contributions that hobbyists have made and certainly the world of systematics does have some impact on the hobby. There is also a fair bit of really neat experimental biology being done with scorpions. Some neat behavioural stuff, some interesting field work etc. My initial concern was that you'd set yourself far too broad a topic .. but in fact the question you have set is going to be a needle-in-a-haystack.

That being said, if you want to stick with the topic (most teachers are pretty open to changes if your initial research shows the topic is untennable .. you could expand either the scope of the nature of the research or the scope of the findings one garners from breeding and experiment) then there are a few papers that stick out off the top of my head.

One is a paper on three populations of C.exilicauda. Differences in, among other things, size was noted between two mainland and one island population (I believe, been a while). I believe lab experiments were done to glean some insight into mate selection.

There is also a Lourenco paper on a hybridization between C.gracilis and C.margaritatus, if I recall correctly.

The area of parthenogenesis is also a good place to look. It has definite implications for systematics and the possibility for a particular species can be determined in a lab (in some ways this is much easier than in the field since you can ensure isolation from a very early instar up through partuition). This is not necessarily the case with things like hybridization .. if the species are not sympatric then it has little explanitory power when taken to the real world.

PM me your email address and I can send you some papers to get you on your way. That being said, this would only be a start. You are definitely going to have to get your way to a good college library where you have electronic access to journal databases. You are going to have to do some reference hopping and other searches if you want to do a truly good job of this project.

Cheers,
Dave