 Boom. What's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Sakyan. Really excited to be talking about biology, talking about arachnology. We have Dr. Lauren Esposito joining us. Hi. Thanks for coming out of the show. Yeah, my pleasure. Really appreciated. It was so fun when we met as TEDx speakers in San Francisco, and I was like, okay, yeah, she's really cool. We definitely got to get her on the show. And I was like, yes, yes, yes, because you had an actual, like, scorpion during your talk. I did. And you were like, you were holding it, teaching about it. And it was, it was a baby. It was like a baby. That was like a grown adult, but it was just really tiny. Yeah, it was a grown adult, but it was really tiny. And so there's all these different insects that exist that are need to be classified, especially spiders, arachnids, scorpions, and their kin. And how do we hunt down the unclassified ones and classify them? It's a good question. Like, how do you know what you don't know? Yeah. And that's what you get to study. That's that. Well, I get to, I study all, like, various aspects of arachnid biology, but I would say that really that's my, that's like my baby. That's the thing that I love doing more than anything is, is figuring out what's out there that we haven't figured out was out there yet. Yes. Yeah. The unknown unknowns. Now, all right. Before we get into all of the nuance, and there's, I'm super excited on packet, tell us about you. How did you end up figuring out that this was what you cared about? I always think of it as kind of like a series of mistakes that ended serendipitously. You know, actually, I was born into, into a biology family, and my parents are both biologists. So maybe it was kind of predestined that I'd become a biologist of some sort. But I hadn't really thought about what kind of biologists I just knew what I didn't want to do. And I didn't want to be a veterinarian, because what my father was, because I couldn't like stand the idea of having to like put animals to sleep. It was too intense for me. And, but I loved nature. And one of my favorite things to do as like a pretty young child was to go out into my parents' garden and like flip over all the pavers. Yeah. Because underneath all the pavers was like earwigs and roly-pollies and cockroaches. And so I'd like flip over all the pavers and move all the bricks and like, you know, totally disrupt their garden. But I was looking for insects. And, and then the early years, I would bring them into my mom like alive in my hands. But you probably mostly grew up in the urban setting and like a lot of cockroaches. And my mom, I would say she wasn't like thrilled about bringing like her three-year-old daughter, bringing live cockroaches inside. So she taught me how to make what's called an entomology is called a killing jar. And basically what that is, is a jar, like an empty peanut butter jar. And in an amateur kind of way, all you have to do is take a cotton ball and dip it in fingernail polish remover and throw it in the jar. And it creates like a euthanasia gas that he mainly uses insects. And as my mom was a biologist, she knew this. So she taught me how to euthanize the insects so that I could bring them inside rather than bringing them inside alive. And that was kind of like my earliest insect collection. And I would love to say that like from there, I just like continued with my dream of becoming an entomologist. But really actually I forgot. Like I grew up and became a teenager and was like hated everything and forgot that I loved insects and just like exploring the world around me. Was that when you were 10 when you were bringing them in? No, I was like three or four. You were three? Yeah, I was like a tiny kid. Whoa. And like I would keep them in a like an egg carton that was empty. And I would put like an insect in each little egg cup. And I had them in my bedroom and I'm like, you know, they got thrown away at some point. But what an interesting thing though that you can euthanize them humanely by putting a nail polish cotton ball inside. That's a good thing for kids to know what you want to go in. It's a lot better than keep like torturing them to a slow death in a jar like just humanely euthanize them. You can also euthanize them by putting them in a freezer. Oh yeah, that's right. You can freeze them. And then you can now get like $50 1000 time microscopes that are digital and you can then go and start looking at them. Yeah, things don't like to cooperate when they're alive. Yeah, which is unfortunate for my job but but you know it was so it was really helpful that I learned how to do that at a young age and like I had a little microscope that I would look at things under and I was really into tide pooling and stuff and it was so then it wasn't till like college when I when I started to rediscover my love for for things tiny because you went for biology. I did. Yeah, I went to University of Texas El Paso is a university in my hometown and I was originally pre-med as a major because I thought like oh I like biology and I want to like have a job so I should go to medical school because that was like the only things I knew of that you could do as a biologist was become a doctor become a dentist or become a veterinarian and I was pretty sure I didn't want to do any of those. Yes and look at how much more. We were just talking about this on the way in. There's so much opportunity that kids, children may not be aware of that exists in the field of biology. Well and how ironic like my both my parents were biologists. My mom was not with my mom was a wildlife biologist so I knew there were other career options but like still even didn't consider that I could do those careers. Yeah we need more and this is part of the science communication thing that we'll talk about is just that we need more role models communicating to children saying that hey you can be a wildlife biologist. You can be an entomologist like there's all these things that that we may not have had the right role models introducing the young people so so then okay so biology at El Paso and then and then you know so then about like my junior year of college so I started college I was a pre-med major and I was minoring in business I was like I'm going to do this all the way like I'm going to go to medical school with a business like minor and know how to run a business when I get out and I was like man what am I doing? This is not where I'm supposed to be I was like sitting in a counting class being like no this is what I'm interested in and then I took this class called field biology. Nice. And basically what it was it was like a one-credit class so like kind of like an elective and basically what it was is you came up with a research project and then you went to the field as a class for one week and you did the project that you came up with and then you came back and wrote up the results and the project I came up with we went the place we were going was this beach area in northern Baja California on the Sonoran Desert side so like mainland Mexico but in the north of the Sea of Cortez and we were in this intertidal zone that's the largest one of the largest intertidal zones in the world so like the difference between where high tide is and low tide is like like hundreds of yards and so there's lots of things that you can look at because there's things that like to live in that intertidal zone. A couple hundred yard high tide low tide whoa. Yeah so like at low tide there's like hundreds of of yards of beach exposed. Oh that might be our UPS package. UPS. I love UPS. Or USPS. Yeah we have a package. So they just leave mine in front of the house and don't tell me. It's like always a mystery if I really got something or if it like disappeared because somebody stole it. Yeah I know. This is that's why door men or women have become so popular nowadays because yeah door people are great right packages and that's like but also like what's up with the doorbell like I have one how come you don't ring it. It doesn't make any sense to me. Yeah we have a call box how come you don't ring it. Yeah yeah you're there. Boom we got the package. All right we are back at it so tell the high tide low tide differences. Yeah that's crazy so with a couple hundred yards what are what are you typically finding. There's all kinds of really cool stuff that live in that zone and like some of the things that you see are things that you might see in a tide pool so like brittle stars sea stars sand dollars but the thing that I the project that I came up with that I wanted to go and do was to study fiddler crabs you know the little ones with a really big hand and they're one of the things that lives at that intertidal zone right and my I came up with this brilliant project I had to do the literature review so I had to like go into the library and look up like all the studies that have been done on fiddler crabs and the project I came up with was to dig up fiddler crabs actually just dig up beach like sand right yeah they live in these like holes down in the sand and what I was doing was going out onto the beach digging up a meter square a meter cube so like one meter by one meter by one meter of sand onto a tarp and then like picking out all the fiddler crabs and counting how many of them had a big right hand and how many of them had a big left interesting because it turned out nobody had ever studied that nobody had ever done any kind of scientific study to see whether there's like a predominant handedness in fiddler crabs predominant handedness in fiddler crabs yeah what a dissertation so that was like my first undergraduate project that I ever did that was like a real scientific design how does one even know like where do you go and research like how how would I know where to look to figure out if that study's been done yet or not yeah I mean you know now it's like so much easier than it was back then like then I went to the library and like looked up in like the Dewey Decimal catalog like what if there was any journal articles but now it's an access scientific journals most people can do it just by going to google scholar search yeah and then you look up fiddler crab yeah and google scholar's like just like it looks like normal google but it just searches within scientific literature and you can look up like fiddler crab you could first figure out like the scientific name of fiddler crabs which is why oh I don't know I can't remember almost like decades ago so now was there a dominant handedness and why do you well it turned out that it was pretty patchy so like some patches of the beach like so certain stretches of the beach had predominantly right hands and other patches of the beach had predominantly left hands and I don't know why I've never done a follow-up study I probably should and it's a one predominant hand the other one's not yeah as large only basically like one of them gets knocked off and it as the crab is developing so like when it's a little crab one of them gets knocked off and whichever one gets knocked off regrows is a large hand whoa I wonder if this image sometimes it's weird because when you look at these you wonder if it's actually if it's actually it is not big yeah yeah it's huge like they look like they have this weird gimpy baby hand and then like a giant that's nice and they're using those hands to like try to entice females so the females have two more medium sized hands and then they also have like a tiny like ridiculous hand and other super big ridiculous hand that is a that's a that's a that's a signal for breeding for me yeah basically what it is it's like allowing the females to evaluate the strength strength relative strength because they have to carry this like massive thing around so they must have a lot of like caloric energy available to them in order to like maintain this massive thing that they're carrying around now okay now how did it go from that project to right so I'll preface by saying that that is not an arachnid right yeah so there's like a few steps in between my fiddler crabs and my arachnids yes and the next thing that that I the next class I took was entomology so I was like kind of like tightening in on the things that I was interested in and that class was great I like made a bug collection but this time for real is not in little egg cups in my current backyard um and so that entomology class made me start looking at summer internship opportunities and I found one that the advertisement was arthropod evolution and I was like oh I like arthropods like crabs and insects so arthropod evolution sounds like really interesting and it was at the american museum of natural history it was a paid internship nice and I went there for like seven years I was there for quite a while this was back when I was an undergrad and I applied and I got it and I went and that's in New York by Central Park yeah I was like New York City New York City the flash and lights the big apple yeah I was coming from Texas Texas El Paso it was a quite it was like you know I was like in the big city but did you ever do snow before that yeah it snowed sometimes in Texas in spite of popular perception okay okay um but it was also the summer so I didn't see snow not six months of freezing cold temperatures though no yeah and I got to New York and I um didn't know who I would was going to be interning with but ended up interning with their curator of arachnology this guy named Lorenzo Prendini Lauren Lorenzo oh Lorenzo Zapprendini Lorenzo Prendini and he's he's a South African scorpion biologist who had just been hired as a curator of arachnology at the American Museum of Natural History and I worked with him all summer actually he left for most of the summer so I worked with him at the beginning and the end of the summer and discovered that I liked scorpions like they were pretty all right I wasn't like committed but I was like oh they're pretty all right yeah yeah and you were keeping your options open yeah I was keeping my options open and and I spent the summer like extracting DNA from scorpions in a molecular lab in a genetics lab and looking at this collection of scorpions that the American Museum had had nice you were learning about how to classify them based on their DNA both based on their DNA and I was working in the collection with actual specimens learning how to classify them and and curate them like what being a curator means yeah what that process consists of like ensuring and you know what being a curator is we can talk about a little bit more later but but at the time what I was doing is I was pulling scorpions out of like actually five gallon buckets that had just arrived to the museum they were huge like huge amounts of scorpion dead scorpions yeah out of five gallon buckets they'd been dead a long time by the time I ever saw them and I was looking at the labels that were attached to each scorpion and recording that information in the database that we could use to make maps of where they were distributed because for most scorpions we don't have things like distribution maps yeah you know like have you ever opened a book like a birding book and there's like a map of where you can see this bird yeah we don't have that for scorpions because a lot of scorpions we only know from a couple of individuals we don't really know or the species occur so they're sending you a five gallon bucket from a specific geographical area yeah so in this case what had happened is they had received a donation of a of another collection that somebody had this guy he'd spent his whole life collecting scorpions and he donated his whole collection to the american museum and it showed up in five gallon buckets and it was my job over the summer to curate those specimens and and put them into the proper jars and make sure their information was recorded and all that kind of stuff and so then did you how did you figure out that okay fine I'll I'll do well I still still I was like I don't know like if I'm not committed to this but I started thinking about what I was going to do for my ph well not even there yet I started thinking about what to do next and I was like okay I've decided I don't want to go to medical school what do I want to do and I was like oh phd like then I I don't have to get a job I can just like continue studying I mean it is like a job it's it's worse than a job it's like an 80 hour a week job but I could continue studying and learning and that's what I really wanted to do so I applied to phd programs and city of the city university of New York yeah that was one of the ones I applied to and because Lorenzo said to me hey um as part of my position here at the American Museum I'm also faculty at the city university of New York so you could come and do a phd with me if you wanted and I said you know that's not the worst idea and well now like 16 years later here I am here you are yeah what can I say so now as you go and start doing the phd at city university of New York now you start slowly falling in love more and more and what was your dissertation on yeah I mean I think you know I just like started learning all this information about scorpions that made me realize that that they're a great model system to understand many of the basic tenets of biology things like evolution they're they're one of the oldest predators that's that ever came on to land from the sea this is like 300 million no more 500 million like 450 million years ago they came out on the land from the ocean most things at that time lived in the ocean yes definitely most things with an exoskeleton like so there were a few worms and some fungi and some kind of like proto plants not real plants that were that were on land but in terms of all the things with an exoskeleton it was all in the ocean yep and scorpions were coming up on the land and and it's been hypothesized that one of the things that they were doing in those early days was they were actually amphibious so they were mostly living in the ocean but they were coming out on the land to get to like snatch salmon or the ancestors of salmon that were spawning up river out of the river so like basically what grizzly bears do because the the salmon get up into this shallow water where they're really easy picking they're like congregating in mass numbers and so for a predator it's like a buffet like all you can eat buffet you know and the scorpions were probably taking advantage of that and now they're fully terrestrialized along with most other things and there are no there's no aquatic scorpions anymore so that's also very interesting about evolutionary biology is that you study from 450 million years ago the process of the terrestrialization of an of a creature to the point where there's no more of them that live in water right and there's some yeah in some cases they've like actually second early colonized water again like spiders for example there's a group of spiders that lives in water the diving bell spider but basically you can see all these like hints of ancestry from from like their anatomy of what their ancestors used to be like like this is a tarantula right this weird little model I have here and in the tarantula there's this is like an anatomical model which is maybe like mostly accurate but the thing I like about it is this part right here this is the respiratory system this green bit and as part of the respiratory system it has these little things that look like I don't know like a golf club this with the yellow end right here and it would normally sit inside the body and this part would be sitting up like in a little pocket where it's exposed to air so it's not outside of the body but it's not like encapsulated in the body either and what these are they're called book gills or book lungs and it's basically like a gill like you know a fish gill have you ever seen a fish when they're opening their gills up and you can see there's like lots of little white lines that are the gills and that's what helps them get the oxygen yeah because it provides more surface area and these these book lungs are basically internalized gills so they took all those little flaps that increase surface area and pulled them into their body and now it's now they actually have pages which is why it's called a book lung because there's individual pages and those pages help increase the surface area so that they can breathe so they actually just passively absorb air from outside they absorb oxygen interesting from air that's passing over those book lungs passively so they're not like breathing in and out they're just passively respiring okay so there's no that's so interesting so there's not really a the respiratory system is not really a inhalation exhalation no it's passive it's a it's just a there's no there's no inhalation actually it's just a constant flow of oxygen coming in slowly bit by bit at a time yeah they just have this book lung in this pocket that's exposed to the outside of their body and that air comes in and it flows over the pages of the book lung that's basically an internalized gill and then oxygen diffuses into their body which is actually one of the things that limits their body size it's like people are always like how big can this can an arachnid get well they can only get as big as the oxygen can reach their tissues because they have no active respiration does that make sense yeah yeah so then they're limited to the the biological mechanisms in size so they're actually limited to the chemical mechanisms of how quickly oxygen can diffuse into tissues into cells yeah you're interesting interesting but this is about the largest tarantulas that you'll get right I mean that one's bigger than you would ever see a tarantula in real life like the largest tarantula in real life like two-thirds of that size okay yeah yeah which is still like pretty pretty hefty yeah and that one's it's called a Goliath bird eater and Goliath bird eater it's unclear whether it actually eats any birds but they live in South America interesting so this respiratory system is really interesting now um now was this part of the the system the dissertation it was I had nothing to do with it just like this conversation just said okay cool now but it was one of the things that made me like really intrigued with with scorpions as a model system yes there's all these telltale signs of their ancestors but my dissertation was really focused on understanding the evolution and classification system of one group of scorpions okay and they're called the bark scorpions the bark scorpion yeah and that bark scorpion like tell us a bit about what you learned about it well it's not like it's not bark like a dog it's bark like a tree yep because they live typically they live in crevices and often those crevices are like in under the tree of the Sonoran Desert Sonoran Desert yeah well the Arizona bark scorpion lives in the Sonoran Desert but they're actually distributed from like they get all the way up into like sort of middle America middle United States and you can find them all the way down into northern South America they're found in the Galapagos they're found in all the Caribbean islands Central America Mexico this is like a pretty fairly common scorpion like appearance yeah yeah it's like standard looking scorpion standard looking scorpion they're called the bark scorpion yeah the bark scorpion then and i was interested in this group because they're one of the only groups of scorpions that we have here in sort of northern America so like Mexico and the US that poses any danger to humans why because they have venom that's toxic to us so now i think i asked you this before what percentage of scorpions have venom that's toxic it's really low so there right now there's about 20 to 2400 species of scorpions that have been discovered by scientists and documented formally and of those about two percent are dangerous very toxic to humans so well there's a higher percentage that are toxic to humans but there's one or two percent that are dangerous that are dangerous got it so it's like 50 scorpion yeah max 50 max so only 2400 ish have been classified scorpion species interesting and so then you went really hard into one species for your yeah and part of the reason that it's interesting it was interesting and also kind of a timely project is that there's there's a lot of pharmaceutical money that's invested into developing anti-venom to combat stings from the scorpion that's right yeah we had a company Vonomix on who's an indie biocompany that does a therapeutic for scorpion yeah and and it's it's it's problematic when you're a pharmaceutical company or a biotechnology company that's trying to develop something to combat a sting but the thing that is stinging in the first place isn't properly described right like we don't actually we weren't actually really sure how many species were posing a health problem it could have been 10 it could have been five it could have been three it could have been 20 but nobody had taken the time to really redo the classification and tell the rest of the world how you tell these species apart yeah and so i thought that that would seem like a good project it had it had some impetus aside from just classifying for classification sake which i think is also really important but this is a very rare scorpion stings are 20 000 us cases a year yeah so the one that we have um that's potentially dangerous in the united states is a single species it's the arizona bark scorpion it lives in arizona and lower nevada yep and uh western new mexico the arizona bark scorpion yeah and it's um it's not really very dangerous to adults like if you're a healthy adult you don't have to worry about it oh whoa the quarter there actually is really important it helps up with scale a lot yeah they're not very big they're a couple inches at most now you brought one of your adults like these ones are little babies those are so babies yeah they're so small now you brought one of your adults with you yeah i brought it i brought the same scorpion that that i had when we met awesome it's from malaysia so let's show let's show this let's show this video quick this is where this is you this is you going into the field in malaysia yeah and so this is kind of what a lot of me talking or talking a lot and so but this is yeah so but this is really this is you know this is what it looks like when you go and do literal field work like this is like indiana jones like this is you right here in the field like this image you know like in like this is really interesting because you know here's you with a headlamp with a with a what is that tool called that that one that's right there that that's called a leaf litter sifter and it's just one of the one of the tools that we employ to look for a arachnids it turns out don't really like being found yeah that's one of the reasons we don't we haven't discovered a lot of them yet and that thing is is you take leaves and in the middle of it there's like a screen like a with a yeah like maybe quarter inch grid screen and you take leaves in there and you you shake it up so that anything that's smaller than a leaf will fall through the screen down into the bottom sleeve yeah and then we collect the all the stuff that's fallen through the bottom sleeve and like carefully look through it to see what's in there looking for spiders and mites which are arachnids and scorpions and anything that may have been hiding in the leaves and and so that's the process of going out into the field and sifting through the again they don't want to be found so you have to sift through it and then you try and catch them and then you have to see if you've classified them before so you have to then like compare it to the other 2,400 scorpion species right to see if they've been classified before or not yeah i mean you can take some shortcuts like you can just look at the ones that that are like live in Asia let's say okay right so you don't have to look at the ones that live in oh the americas because pretty unlikely to be those yeah but but yeah you have to go through and like compare them with what we know and try to figure out if it's something we don't know yet yeah yeah that's like relatively straightforward but also kind of sometimes a kind of a pain in the butt because it's not always obvious like in the real olden days right like in the earliest days of people classifying animals classifying life there wasn't like picture there were no high resolution photo who's there was there was often not even illustrations and scientific publications because like that was too costly to produce illustrations people could just produce type and so the a lot of the early descriptions were just like a description sometimes in german sometimes in russian sometimes in french yeah just a description instead of a picture yeah now you can pull it up on your phone and make sure that it's the right one yeah now we can like you know now we have like microscope imaging so we can actually take images through a microscope of important characteristics that help with identification that's right and that's like that's like normal that's standard that you would include in this microscope photo yeah that's kind of a description of a new species when you discover new species you include lots of pictures exactly um but back then you couldn't that's just a hundred years ago even yeah a hundred years ago we weren't yeah 50 we weren't taking thousands of pictures especially microscope pictures of these and we weren't you know able to to diagnose the inside of the biology of the of the creatures i mean we people were doing dissections and like very manually doing it all um but one of the amazing things that has been in place since the earliest days of people classifying is museums yeah and what that means is that people were collecting stuff from nature and bringing it back and putting it in the museum yep and then when they discovered this wrote about the this description of a new species they would also identify where it was like what museum it was sitting in and that's extremely helpful because what that means for me is as much of a pain as it is so like have to go to London and look at the British Museum of Natural History I can actually go and look at those same scorpions that those people wrote about in their little description that they wrote up yeah now now what is what is the scorpion that you have what is it where where does it classified as and what is it living in right now to survive you know to survive it looks like dirty paper it's living in dirty paper that's his preferred habitat um so this is this is a um a little scorpion that's lives in southeast Asia uh it's scientific name is Lyokiles Australasia what's the and what would be the name that I would look up to I don't know look up that one I'll tell you how to spell it yeah how do I spell it it's L-I-O-C-H-E-L-E-S and the other name part of the name will probably come up with it it did yep lyokiles australia say what is let's see oh Wikipedia says it's the dwarf wood scorpion the dwarf wood scorpion sounds good to me the line of family hemiskorpia yep it belongs to one of the 13 families of scorpions oh yeah of of of oh yeah of this little guy yeah I'll show him the end of this so so what this little guy this is a like I'll show you closer in just a second but this little guy is about adult size there are these tiny little scorpions and where they live in southeast asia is in tropical rainforests like really humid like super humid forests and they like to live in rotting logs so when you said that he was living in a dirty paper like that's exactly right he's living in a dirty paper he's just living in this wadded up piece of paper inside of a yeah like plastic jar and it's like really wet and kind of like gross smelling because that's what he likes to live in and they basically like this is something you got to get used to when you do field work because you got to get used to the sweaty smelly sweaty and smelly is like the name of my game the name of the game yeah exactly that that's part of being a child is being cool I think that's what I love about being a field biologist is like it's I get to just play outside all the outside yeah not be stuck in a cubicle behind a desk yeah yeah so so this tiny guy he's like about the size of my thumbnail right he's he's harmless to humans he has no toxins that affect our bodies ronk did you get a good shot on it okay whoa the way it just like moved it's yeah so his really his only defense is like hiding out or maybe like pinching with his little tiny claws but that's about his oh it feels so cool oh and this is a guy I collected him in nature in Malaysia and we're holding on to him because he's actually not quite an adult fully adult so we've been kind of rearing him up in our lab plus he's kind of adorable is it like a great scorpion ambassador a great scorpion ambassador wow doesn't even look like he really has a head or she you know yeah so scorpions um kind of one of the things about arachnids that make them arachnids is they have two main body parts a prosoma which is that like a head and an epistosoma which is like a body and this guy and most scorpions of prosoma and epistosoma are really kind of fused like they look almost just kind of like the head is a bigger plate than the rest of the body and that's all that it is it's like a plate at the end so it's not really a jut it doesn't really jut out yeah it's just like this first part right here is what his head is got it got it yeah it doesn't like yeah it doesn't jut out like a humans it's just more part of the body yeah like if you think of like a spider like this part right here is his head and but they kind of have a waist in between their head and their body and scorpions don't really have a waist they just have like a head that's the same width as their body and then their tail at the end yeah and now now this tiny guy there's like these are like there's lots of I mean these are so small there's got to be lots of them that live in these dirty log environments but when you find a log with them in it like there's just hundreds of them there's hundreds of them they like to like kind of I don't know that it's necessarily colonially like they're not socializing but they like to live in these like clustered communities and maybe that's just because the habitat's perfect like there it's the perfect log with the perfect wetness and they all just kind of move in but yeah they're they're not rare when you see them now why is this a good ambassador because it's kind of like just chill and calm and calm he does no toxic venom so you can handle him safely pass it to kids have the kids play with it yeah yeah exactly and that way kids don't become scared of insects which is so weird what's the deal with arachnophobia arachnophobia well you know I kind of wonder sometimes I think I think arachnids well I'm gonna say I'm gonna have to separate this into two components first spiders so people are scared of spiders it's like an eight human fear to be scared of spiders and I thought about it like so much because it's like inevitably a question everybody asks or like once it talks to me about their arachnophobia you know I'm gonna scoop them in there let's scoop them back so that we can keep focusing on convo what I think is that arachnids move so so otherly so cool than we do like trying to smell the it just smells like dirty paper towel yeah um like people eat those yeah they do people eat those around the world yeah it's like a little chunk of protein it's like a chunk of protein it's like a shrimp it's like a shrimp yeah that's yeah that's nuts yeah people eat those around the world yeah in the us we've gotten the west to eat them by turning them into like chips and granola bars and stuff we have we've had chirps chips on the show which literally does that so yeah they do that with with insects crickets crickets yeah yeah but people do eat scorpions as well especially in southeast asia it's like they have like those you know those big uh market places with like huge swaths of them that you can take I mean you know like in southeast asia and and especially countries that are protein limited they'll eat any protein that's available they find yeah so please yes arachnophobia all right so I just think that they walk really like otherly like the the way that they move is in such a way that's so unfamiliar to us it makes us like feel fear the way they move it's like the way they walk like the eight legs and yeah like their gait their actual movement yeah the gait yeah like like like take an ant right and an is an insect that six legs ants don't move that weird like they move in this very predictable way like I don't think people look at ants and they're like oh that thing's moving in such a creepy way but when they look at spiders they feel that way oh you think it's about the movement aren't they a little like omnidirectional like can't like they can just start going to the side and then going forward and then going most yeah like like most I would say like most arachnids because of the the orientation of their legs they can really move in lots of different directions yeah and plus like I don't know it's just like the order in which their legs move is like weird also it's been all of the media sorry it's media as well though this Hollywood propagation I don't think it's just about the Hollywood propagation because you go also go to cultures where there's no Hollywood yeah people are scared of spiders but not in Southeast Asia right or they are yeah they don't want to be around spiders okay yeah yeah but I would say with scorpions is something different and like I think spiders people are oh my god it's a spider like get it away smush it like kill it immediately oh people see scorpions I think they have this other reaction where they're like oh that's really terrifying because they they've heard that scorpions are dangerous like because of Hollywood because of the media but they're also curious because it's so like foreign they're like oh what but let me see it just not from close up yeah you know they're like I'm scared of that but I want to get like a little closer look yeah it's true right that's the gateway yeah it's a gateway drug so that's why this guys have been scorpion ambassador the next thing you know they're holding the scorpion they're like oh I can oh it's not dangerous it's not dangerous yeah yeah wow it is so fun what is what's over there what do you have in those two jars those are also scorpions so these are some specimens from our collection at the academy whoa look at that this is on the bigger side whoa he's dead but and would also make a good ambassador but like you know even though this guy is harmless because the toxins that he produces in his in his tail are not dangerous he he's he's big and like if he did sting you it would still hurt but it would be like a thumbtack right it'd be like getting a thumbtack jabbed in your hand like that hurts it's just not dangerous a thumbtack jabbed in your hand yeah that'd be how much it would hurt look at the bottom of this you get a good let's see if I can get a good where you going just keep it over there okay Ron Ron we're getting I thought you were on that that camp but yeah this is yeah look at the bottom of it this is this is very very very beautiful so that that guy right there is an emperor scorpion emperor scorpion yeah and they live in Africa and um this one is not the biggest specimen I've ever seen by any stretch but they're the in terms of weights they're the largest scorpions okay by weight this is the largest yeah because you see how huge their hands are like those hands are heavy and they have this kind of stout body that's also pretty pretty weighty and they're big overall like their overall size is quite large king scorpion the emperor the emperor scorpion now doesn't what does an emperor scorpion eat they eat what all the other scorpions eat which is anything they can catch anything they can catch yeah and mostly that consists of like insects mostly insects that are active at night so like crickets cockroaches moths things that are nighttime moving and when the the emperor or scorpions just try and sting it first no they would they would actually just try to crush it with their claws okay so they try and grab it and crush it yeah claws they're probably not this kind of scorpion both the the one that we just held that was alive yeah the dwarf for a scorpion and the emperor scorpion both of those would use their claws as the predominant way of capturing and subduing right okay so claws for capturing subduing and then what's the tell us about that one again and this one here it belongs to the other main category major category of scorpions which is scorpions that subdue most things with their tail and this is a belongs to a family called boothity and boothity is a group of scorpions that contains all scorpions that are dangerous to humans oh this is one of the dangerous yeah so this one is actually called androctonus androctonus australis australis yeah yeah um the the fat fat tailed scorpion and that guy can kill an adult human this can kill an adult human yeah yeah yep so the venom's toxic yeah the venom's very toxic and it'll kill me in how long like do i have like a day couple hours yeah a few hours but typically what happens is the scorpion would sing you the venom that it injects is a like a a mixture of multiple things but one of the things that it's injecting into you is a neurotoxin and neurotoxin yeah and and what the neurotoxin does is it targets your your cells of your nerve cells in your body and it either tells your nerve cells to stop communicating so it inhibits communication whoa or it activates communication telling your nerve cells to communicate like sending a signal that something's happening but not really it's just like tricking your body yeah and what that thing that it wants to convince your body is happening is pain yeah because its goal is to escape because you are not a prey item you are a predator predator yeah so it's you're getting stung because you are a predator because you're perceived as a predator perceived as a predator and it's trying to like escape like it's thinking that it's in a life or death situation right like it's it's sting or get eaten and it stings and it causes your body to feel pain even though nothing painful is really happening like the stinker small it's not really large enough to induce extreme pain in your body but it's telling your nerves to send a message to your brain that you're experiencing pain this is this is very very like you know when you when you when you speak of things like getting stung and a neurotoxin hits it's scary yeah so this is Giza Giza Egypt is what I read yeah so you're reading the label on there yeah so in every along with every scientific specimen is a label that tells when where and who collected it this is 1959 so this is actually a record like this is like a little time machine that we're looking at right now we are looking at a little time machine yeah it tells us what was happening on earth at that place in time that's right what is the liquid that it's suspended in it's suspended in ethanol which is like alcohol yeah vodka yeah and that's what we use as that's like this the standard preservative for for arachnids and how do you use a how do you get a how do you get the sheet of paper and you print ink on it and then you put it in there but it survives yeah we use ethanol insoluble ink ethanol insoluble ink so just ink that doesn't wash away and ethanol and same thing paper insoluble well we just use archival paper archival paper that enables you to read like that yeah but you know archival paper is like what you use like to back a piece of fine art or it's very common wow this is nuts that this is that this was found in egypt and it can has the neurotoxin ability to wow yeah you even have a little like looks like a little like it's going across yeah yeah interesting okay okay so that is nuts now i have more questions for you my my questions range everything from like unpacking this and more nuance because you're talking about the way that they eat they you know they use the claws first to kill smash the prey and then eat that and then what else about the survival of arachnids is quirky that we should know that's like fun knowledge well my one of my favorite facts about scorpions is that they give birth to young so they don't lay eggs they just like straight up give birth like we do like baby scorpions come out yeah yeah like we do yeah you can look a video up of it on youtube and it's great right it is it's kind of like what we do with yeah it's like comes out of a birth canal exactly a little baby and it's like an amniotic sack and it breaks out of the sack and it's like a live little scorpion and it's out in the world now it's actually like not i mean it's out in the world but it's not on its own because it takes care of it yes so then that's strange because if this is like 450 million years ago evolution that i wonder did they ever lay eggs um it's we we have no evidence of them laying eggs and there's even some evidence that the ancestor of scorpions which is this thing called a eurypterid okay a sea scorpion um there's some evidence that that eurypterids also internalized they're young um that's debatable whether they gave birth or not but but certainly like the ancestors of scorpions at some point in time were laying eggs yeah but i mean it's really beneficial to life on land and like to not laying like moving into new areas of the of the world to give birth to like young because then all it takes is one female right one female who's pregnant to make it to a new island that has no scorpions on it and then suddenly like start a new population of scorpions in that place oh versus if if it needed to do eggs and it couldn't versus if it needed to do eggs we would have to stay near its offspring yeah where the eggs are laid right right yeah oh interesting like or say the eggs would have to make it to a new place so you can be movable with your offspring yeah oh interesting so the offspring either you lay an egg and you'd have to stay around it or you could bring it with you while it's developing inside you and then go and that that's kind of funny because that takes us to the whole idea of like whatever anchor babies and stuff like that in different countries you can go to a country while you're pregnant and then have your child there and stuff that's that's very interesting so whoa the live the live birth now i'm i'm so i'm so curious because the how what you know we had this video up we didn't we didn't end up getting a show but that the male was like wrapping the female or was the other way around that spider yeah in the spider bondage spider bondage well so the other amazing thing about arachnids all arachnid spiders scorpions is that they all have courtship rituals and how they mate so yeah like they don't have this like they don't like randomly just deposit eggs and sperm and like mate they they actually like the males court the females in every single case that we've that we know of and that happens in all kinds of different ways and in this one example that we were talking about earlier the males of wolves of this one species of wolf spider they like find the female and they're like half her size so it's like dangerous territory when they approach her like she could eat yeah she could eat she could eat him if she wants to so what what they've done what they've like evolved through time is that the males actually like wrap the females legs with silk they call it spider bondage and it probably doesn't prevent the female in any way from eating him really but that silk is probably very laden in pheromones in chemical signals telling her that he's a courting male so it's probably like less about restricting her movement and more about like communicating to her as much as you possibly can that you're a courting male and she should not eat you like you are of the same species and you're here for a different kind of purpose yeah yeah the courting rituals yeah i'm always trying to like anthropomorphize things and be like i wonder how humans relate to that yeah because we have our own like quirky courtship rituals we have all kinds of weird courtship rituals but one of the other bdsm that yeah i mean it's like that right but one of the other things that that like almost all arachnids have to be able to do if they're male arachnids is be a good dancer like they've got to have some moves and what do they how do they dance it depends like scorpions they um do a promenade to do so they like face the female and hold hands with her and like dance back and forth like like ballroom dancing like this yeah like he holds her hands and like pulls her backwards and pushes her forwards and like and then they have sex in the case of scorpions actually what they do is he deposits this gelatinous oh stalk called a spermatophore and it's like just kind of looks like a triangle of like jelly yeah and then at the top of it he puts a sperm packet what yeah a little oh my god and then he then he pulls there they're still dancing while he does this he has to do it at the same time that's multitasking and then he pulls her over the gelatinous stalk and if she thinks his courtship was good she'll like pick it like inseminate herself and if she didn't think it was good like someone she'll eat it or she'll just like leave it there this is so weird oh my gosh yes because it's weird because it's so different to what we know so so dancing and then i deposit this gelatinous stalk with sperm at the top yeah and then i pull the female scorpion over it and then she gets to pick whether my courtship was good enough and she can inseminate herself or just eat it or leave it alone yeah what a freaking crazy mating ritual but it doesn't even in there because then the females can actually decide whether they want to store the sperm or use it oh so she can either then like use the sperm and actively inseminate her eggs or fertilize her eggs or she can just store it in this little chamber until she like decides it's a good time of the year to get pregnant whoa whoa which is interesting because then that they can wait a month a couple months potentially if it's probably years they can wait whoa so they can almost like store the sperm and then go and try and court with other males to see like they could choose to use a different male sperm yeah yeah and they could they can kind of like rank the different courtships until they find the right like oh this guy's a much better dancer i wonder what their inventory is like can they hold like six of them or could they only hold one like how large is their inventory it feels like a game we really don't know it turns out you know we've only like observe scientifically observe courtships like in you know a few dozen species at the most I want to observe courtships so if anyone wants to get involved in observing by all by by being a biologist and observing courtships I think that would be a fantastic profession there's actually a whole lab at UC Berkeley that does just that what is it called uh it's called the elias lab okay and they take high-speed video and record the songs that spiders sing to their mates and the dances that they do spiders actually sing yeah well it's it's really like a an acoustic signal so it's transmitted through the ground and then they have ears in their feet that hear whoa crazy whoa yeah let's get more labs like that please and they study jumping spiders and jumping spiders do a coordinated song and dance so they like make a sound that's independent from the dance they're doing and there's like the peacock which is spider jumping spiders and it has this beautiful on it's what is this called the bulb this is this is called the body the body at the body it looks like a peacock it was very beautiful okay let's transition like they're like the birds of paradise of the spider world birds of paradise of the spider world the other beautiful and we'll um let's let's finish up by talking about science communication okay so this is that's kind of meta right yeah I know we're just about communication communicate about communication yeah yeah let's let's have dialogue about it okay because here we were talking about this at the beginning we were explaining how if there were more role models that were teaching children that they could have the potential of working in a field in like field biology and whatnot that that's how we get more and more involvement in children in these fields so what have been some of the principles because we care so much about science communication and inspiring young people to build the future what have been some of the cool things that you've learned over time about science communication that you want to share I mean I think part of part of the reason that I'm work at a museum and in particular the California Academy of Sciences is because of the opportunities for science communication um for me personally I feel like as a scientist especially a scientist in an era where science is questioned we have a personal responsibility to communicate the science that we're doing and not only the science we do but the importance of science in general so I never really received any kind of training in how to be a science communicator I think I've just felt really passionately about it and practice it a lot so that's that's like number one thing like just practice and passion and and I have I would say I have a policy and every my students know that this is my policy and I'm very vocal about it and that's that I say yes to everything that I'm asked to do every opportunity for science communication that I'm asked whether that's talking to a kindergarten class of seven people or like speaking in front of 4,500 people I say yes and that's because I think that we need to get the message out there in every venue that we possibly can about what we do and why we do it and why it's important to keep doing it and other people should consider it as a career yeah I don't think I've ever heard anyone say that one of the principles of their of their passion with science communication is to always say yes because that then opens up more and more minds to the yeah that's that's cool I like that it does open up minds and it also like for me personally it opens up like potential impossibilities it does yeah it's open a lot of doors for me to say yes yeah and I encourage my students to say yes like obviously I don't want them to say yes if it's adversely affecting them and they're their like lives and their ability to get their work done as sciences because first and foremost that's what they have to do as students but I think that it's important to impress upon them that that we need to communicate what we're doing and and the more practice you get communicating what you're doing the better you get it telling people the story that's right and making them believe that it's important because I think as a scientist we all believe that what we're doing is important otherwise we probably wouldn't be doing it yeah and then what do you think about the sort of we have this we have a little bit of a there's like this gap between the really prominent sort of scientific researchers that are only in their own fields in the very deep nuance of their fields and then the general public yeah there's a huge gap so like what do you think about I mean I think we're trained to have that gap like part of the training of becoming a scientist of getting a PhD is to become so specialized and such higher level thinking in in the field that you're studying that like you have a hard time figuring out how to like step backwards back down the ladder to tell the normal person what you're doing and I think that there's a lot of ways that you can think through how to communicate like your elevator pitch right like how to communicate what you're doing to an an ordinary person um and I would say that more than ever we need to figure out how to do that yeah because people like aren't believing in science anymore which is horrible but a good place to start is just like in your own personal life so even if you don't have time to go out and speak publicly or you don't have the inclination to go out and speak publicly because you have a fear of public speaking or you know whatever personal anxiety you have you all you do have relationships with other human beings and most of like some of those people are not scientists and if you can get them to understand what you're doing and why it's important then you can explain to anybody yeah I like how you you're really you know it seems as though you're very you have a very strong you have a strong emotional tie to this and and I do too I think I think I think civilization as we embody science and as we embody figuring out how to collectively progress together I think we'll be able to prosper better and I and I totally agree with the 32nd elevator pitch we talk about that to entrepreneurs all the time where like get your 32nd pitch down get your 32nd pitch down ask powerful questions ask powerful questions and so when you can when you can really get someone inspired about about biology or evolution really quickly I think that can be a big light for people that you know you can just like you were saying at the beginning you're flipping over some bricks and you're looking at what's underneath of them some stones and just seeing what creatures live under there all right last last couple of questions that we like to ask on the show do you think we're in a simulation I don't know I think about it and it like kind of freaks me out so I have to stop myself but like I'm gonna I'm just gonna like hope that we're not because if it is like I feel like something's going wrong with the simulation right now and it's like spiraling out of control the challenge but uh this is an experiment to see if humans can persevere through the challenge I mean in some ways like evolution is a simulation right like it's yeah it's all a bunch of variables and being computed right now and think like inevitably humans are going to go extinct like that's inevitable in the evolutionary scale of time we can digitize our consciousness we could but then who will care who cares now yeah yeah yeah okay how about are we alone in the cosmos I don't think we are yeah okay I feel like the like the probability of that is so low that there has to be other other beings whether they're conscious beings or not it's not for me to determine but like the probability of other of other life I'll even go as far as to say other carbon based life being in the cosmos is high yeah and then what do you think that looks like I don't know I hope it looks like a bunch of like giant chihuahuas because they're cute yeah yeah you have a you had I had a chihuahua yeah I had a chihuahua for 17 years yeah this is your bias towards wanting civilizations of chihuahuas like imagine just like a herd of chihuahuas running around and then they like stop and start talking to you tell you exactly like a thousand of them at the same time like just like like think of the like Taco Bell chihuahua exactly yeah okay last question is what do you think is the most beautiful thing in the world I think that the most beautiful thing in the world is like real nature and that's really hard to find like an unhuman mediated nature basically doesn't exist anymore I mean humans have been around for a very very long time changing our ecosystems like way before like the agricultural revolution or the tech revolution or anything else totally and so we've been changing those landscapes forever and there's very few landscapes that we haven't touched and when you see those it's like really a thing of beauty nature and the history of evolution of life on earth has created some magical stuff that was such a good answer and I don't think we've had that exact answer yet we've had like the most beautiful thing is that it's it's earth without the humans or something like that but that's like the closest we've gotten and I think we've talked on the show a lot about what were the feelings that were felt in humans that first made it to land that was unexplored and that that is such a profound feeling and you talk about the beauty of that land and I think that's what really gets us wanting to birth out of the womb of earth is to be able to go and look at what those other unexplored territories look like and also make these virtual worlds where we can then synthesize what it would be like to go and find new land it's just yeah it's exhilarating and it's gorgeous and you can have a thousand Chihuahua civilizations with waterfalls and star systems and maybe that's what the Aztecs were after that was such a that was such a good answer Lauren this has been such a pleasure oh the pleasure is all mine this is look at all of this cool stuff that we learned about today and thank you for coming on to the show thank you for having me we really appreciate it thank you thanks everyone for tuning in we greatly appreciate it give us your thoughts in the comments below we'd love to hear from you go and build the future go and manifest your destiny into the world everyone much love and join us join us in the movement hit that subscribe button below also join us if you want to see us scale our content impact more people we have plenty of positions that we want to hire for chop these clips up from 60 minutes down into one-minute segments and circulate those join us patreons below cryptocurrencies below join us across those platforms twitter instagram you can find us everywhere much love and we'll see you soon peace