Fun fact: Sea scorpions (extinct) were also fluorescent. Horseshoe crabs fluoresce too, and are the sister group to all arachnids. Horseshoe crabs rely heavily on moonlight to time their mating migration. So if the common ancestor of scorpions and horseshoe crabs also fluoresced, it’s a good bit of support for the moonlight detection hypothesis! Or it’s a spandrel. One or the other.
@@cognitiveconsonancescience2937 And a long flexible camera mount on the tail~ Which can apparently also detect light, so they can help set your exposure and stuff
This professor is badass. Admits to being wrong, that it happens oftens, and also not "professional" in his demeanour. He's joking and being nerdy. Love him
@@balasubramaniana9541 Most UV emitters also emit a little bit of violet light. However there are UV flashlights that have special filters to filter the remaining visible light out
I go out every night. I work the third shift. I work nightly from 21:00 to 06:00, four nights a week. The three nights a week I do not work, I still live at night. My circadian cycle is inverted because I have operated at night for decades. I always go out at night. I go weeks without seeing daylight.
Was shocked to find fluorescing scorpions in central NC - they were so small, about the size of a pencil tip, but clearly had green-glowing tails even under natural light. I haven't seen them since I got chickens 😂
Earlier this summer, I went on a short night hike with some rangers in Copper Breaks State Park, Texas. We took UV flashlights and our group counted about 70 scorpions along the way. Until that night, I had no idea that they glowed!
another fun thing for night hikes is to just shine a regular flashlight. All the spider eyes will reflect back at you. Very shocking how many there are
Another fun fact about scorpions, unlike almost all other arachnids, they give birth to live offspring, they often ride around on their mother's back until they're large enough to fend for themselves, she'll use their front legs and claws to catch the baby scorplings and either put them on her back, or, sometimes, eat them if she's really hungry.
@@SF-li9kh I got the feeling that this particular researcher leans towards 6 and that he is an expert on scorpions. It also seems likely that there arent that many scorpion specialists that focus on why they emit UV light for there to really be a point in group chats. Seems like a bit of a niche question.
I just found this online: ACS News Service Weekly PressPac: March 04, 2020, Scorpions make a fluorescent compound that could help protect them from parasites.
From what I can tell, I currently have the 16th world's largest collection of vintage styrofoam cups! (VSC) But this weekend I may be adding to that with some that I've been after for a while!!! *AND* Some of my current collection is about to mature!! _Not that that's weird or anything._
@@jaystarr6571 if you aren't being facetious i would honestly enjoy seeing what the 16th largest vintage styrofoam cup collection looks like. your description of it is nothing short of invigorating
these are the most interesting people to listen to. Everything is interesting if you give it a chance. Hell now I want to know about VSC... how you get them, what a collection looks like, what kind of conversation these guys collecting them have, lmao.
You probably won't see this, but congrats on the 10mil. It's been a long road and you have been consistent throughout when it comes to making quality content that educates and doesn't mislead people. You are the biggest channel I subscribe to by quite a ways, and it's not because you are trendy or topical or clickbaity (lol). It's because you are awesome and you're genuinely doing the same kind've thing that other legendary educators did when I was a kid. Congratulations, and good luck.
I know these guys appreciate when we notice the numbers. I knew i wasnt the only one who noticed these thing. Congratulations is very much in order! I might add this channel has 1.25 Billion views. Unbelievable!
5:00 I wonder if the heat from the bulb was controlled for? I imagine they were incandescent lights, the year being 1968 and all, and would therefore give off a good amount of heat/infrared as well. If the experiment could be redone with LEDs or some other more efficient type of lighting, I wonder if the results would still be the same.
I wondered the same. It looks like the experiment was re-created in 2012 (it's the third paper in the description) and with how precisely they controlled the wavelength I can't imagine they didn't use LEDs There isn't an explicit mention in the abstract though. Anyone with the funds feel free to actually access the paper 😆
Its always great to see someone who so readily admits that their hypothesis was wrong. These are the people who really care about advancing the front of human knowledge.
Daniel Jensen Smart people want the truth... even when it hurts. Even if it proves us wrong. Thinking in terms of the greater good. For humanity to actually be able to advance. We must share our losses for others to learn from as well. Its all relevant to our learning. Usually the truth just gets deeper and deeper. We must pursue the purest forms of truth and get as close as we can to understanding ourselves and this beautiful world. Without truth we can't reliably react and respond to our beautiful world. The world that we could make or break :(
Whenever I think of truth seeking in science, I'm careful not to forget about Linus Pauling. Arguably one of the greatest chemists and physicists of all time, two time Nobel prize winner, he fell head over heels for vitamin C as a cure all for human health. This is exactly why argument from authority in the scientific discipline should be the weakest form of argument. Smart people are great at finding real patterns and fake patterns.
@@54788654478087654345 Personally I always think of the story told by Richard Dawkins of an old professor at his university, being proven completely wrong about a theory he had spent much of his life working on.... walking up to the lecturer who had just proven him wrong and in front of everyone who attended this lecture proceeded to thank the man for proving him wrong and thus adding to the sum total of mans knowledge. That is a wonderful ideal. It might be hard to live up to such a wonderful ideal, but that is precisely what makes something an ideal in the first place.
Oh, come on. You are sitting around, presumably in your pajamas on a Saturday morning, drinking your coffee, REEVALUATING your fanaticism of scorpions? I find that hard to believe.
@@AllAmericanGuyExpert i was about to say "i dont find that hard to believe" and some other stuff but then i realised its almost 5 am and maybe i shouldnt say something possiibley stupid when my brain is operating at the lowest possible speed im going to sleep now
Hello Derek! This was an awesome video. I loved seeing the professor's enthusiasm and appreciated you letting him speak about his working hypotheses and experiments while giving background information on the science in the video. As someone in research myself, this style of exposition did not go unappreciated and I'd love to see even more videos like this covering a whole range of scientific/mathematical phenomena!
When I was a Police Officer, my agency has our National Academy in a southern state - for advanced classes, we stayed at a really cheap government contract Travel Lodge, in a really bad neighborhood. Prostitution, drugs - the run. It was a horrible place to have lodging while you went to advanced classes for weeks at a time. Until the students from the Crime Scene Investigator classes started doing testing on the conditions of their rooms and sending the results to their Senators... LaQuinta picked up the contract! Eww, but LOL at the same time.
@@jezzbanger With corresponding six-figure grant funding for five years of "research."
3 года назад
Hi, My family always watches your videos. We live in Sweden and this summer we went to Greece for vacation. We had a pretty large circular swimming-pool about 1 meter deep and about 10 meters in diameter. And me and my family started walking around the pool trying to get the pool in a circular motion. We asked some other people for help and they did help us. We were in total 7 adults and 5 kids doing it. The motion in the ocean :) began and every new person that entered the pool felt it and had to go with the flow direction. The funny thing is that we did this every day for a week and everybody believed that this was a pool that had fans and they swam around and around enjoying the pool. When we told people that this was not a mechanical motion and that it was started by us walking around most people did not believe us. The problem was that we just had an idéa that we tried and it worked but we could not explain it. You could make a video explaining this and I bet people with circular swimming-pools would go nuts over it. Sorry for my terrible english.
I don't think that's good for them, mine rune away when I shine UV on them, and the video here said that exposing them to UV photobleached them, so be careful, don't put your enjoyment of an animal over that animal's wellbeing.
Fun fact: Scorpions can hold their breath for 6 days. They have something called book lungs. They are layers of membranes- like pages of a book- in the exoskeleton of scorpions these membranes trap and hold their oxygen. However there is a species called the northern pseudoscorpion, can go up to 17 days without breathing. They are found in Canada, near the Arctic Circle. They are smaller than other scorpions. Hope this helps 😊
Baboons look for scorpions under rocks, as a snack. I've never had scorpion, except for a few stings, but now I'm curious. Could scorpions replace barium?
Yeah thanks it does help it helps alot. Ive always wanted to challenge a scorpion to a breathe holding contest and now I know to make sure my opponent isnt a northern psuedoscorpion.
5:35 if you shine a light on your skin, you can feel it, but it doesn't mean you can "see" the light, like where it's coming from or distance, you just know when your arm is hot or not
So their entire body is like a light detector, letting them know when it is and isn't safe to hunt for food. Evolution really works in mysterious ways.
I think the stuff on Pandora was bioluminescent (emitting its own light, rather than sort of reflecting light in a different color like fluorescence does). There's even a soundtrack from Avatar called "bioluminescence of the night".
I understand that the scorpions arguably had their ability to detect UV removed by bleaching the UV coating away, but how does this disprove the idea that the scorpions were not simply exposed to the UV light for so long that they were conditioned to it. This idea of course proposes that they have another system to detect UV rays, but I feel like with the information I was given about the test, it poses a small flaw (I do not know about scorpion psychology nor their ability to retain information or how they handle it, this is a mere thought I thought would be interesting to voice)
I share the same thoughts however there seems to be other compounding evidence of the hypothesis so I suspect it is fairly accurate if not precise. I think it's also worth noting that more than one hypothesis can be true and they are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Not even conditioned to it, but maybe even their eyes were damaged beyond function. If they were in UV for so long that it photobleached the entire body, they were certainly in there long enough to do damage to the (human) eye. I only work with lasers so I don't know how scorpion and human eyes differ.
@@balasubramaniana9541 Two reasons: most cheap/consumer UV flash lights and bulbs don't perfectly emit a single wavelength, they emit a range of wavelengths that's strongest in the UVA range but also emit some light in the visible range. You cannot see the beam of an expensive UV laser since it's focused to a narrower range of wavelengths; that also makes UV lasers extremely dangerous since you cannot tell if the beam is pointed at your eye. The other not-as-major reason is that there isn't a distinct line between visible light and UV light; the eyes can faintly detect some light at the boundary of the UV range but not enough to see UV light in any meaningful way.
cool transition @ 9:26 ..🤯.. it's been awesome watching this channel transform from a nerdy Ontario student's basement hobby into the popular & professional world-renowned viewing experience it is now. Informative & inspiring, thanks Derek! 🙏
Crayfish also prefer dark places and also have light sensitive receptors in their tail section. By casting a shadow on this spot, even when their eyes are painted over, it elicits the tail flip escape response. Such a skill would help the crayfish escape from a predator luring in the water above it. Possibly the scorpian's light sensing abilities have a similar function?
Did the study about scorpions sensing light rule out the possibility of them reacting to heat output? At the time that study took place light bulbs were extremely inefficient, producing an abysmal amount of light compared to their heat output.
I have doubts about their findings in the 1968 experiment. Clearly I don't have it to read in detail but sounds more like...we painted sunglasses over their eyes and they could still detect light. So it must be from their body 🤪
@@alexschalk5439 I looked at the reference link for the 1968 report on it's findings but it seems only the abstract from the report is a available for free. Here is a quote from said abstract. "A chance observation suggested that in the scorpion part of this activity might be an artefact caused by the illumination of the metasoma (the “tail”)." A chance observation doesn't sound like it was repeated. If there are more recent experiments seems the video didn't mention them.
I'd like to hear more about the sensory hypothesis. It seems to me that if, in order to make a scorpion non florescent, he has to light them for long periods with a UV light, those particular scorpions might have adapted their behavior to the increased UV environment, thus explaining the behavioral differences.
UV light is more dangerous for scorpions and creatures (lessens their glow after a period of exposure and causes more stress). It's a good way to kill them. Besides scorpions are nocturnal and don't need light to hunt.
I was literally *just* discussing this with a professor from Melbourne University who studies colour in invertebrates! Het name is Devi Stuart-Fox, if you're ever able to come back to Melbourne you should totally reach out to her, she's great
So much sea life actually sees in Ultra Violet. When you watch deep sea diving videos were they use UV cameras the ocean floor looks completely different and colorful
Congrats on 10 million Derek, I've been a subscriber for quite a while now, and I think this channel is one of the best channels on RU-vid! Thank you for making quality videos, and allowing us to learn new things :)
Isn't it amazing that some people say that there's no chance of alien life when we're discovering new things on our planet still today! There is no great filter we've just not looked long enough and I'm positive that there's definitely something out there :)
Well there is definitely something out there if the universe is infinite, but that doesn’t mean it is possible for us to find aliens. The speed of light is finite, after all.
@King Pistachion I wish RU-vid showed dislikes on comments so you could have the opportunity to realize how little positive impact comments like those have on the people around you.
@@HaganConnell it was nice back in the day when you could, but it led to mass disliking. Now it just flags it as offensive or sends it down the main comment list sadly.
Funny when he mentions that it may be used for sensory and jokes that "some" have hypothesized it. Like, to him that's funny. To us it sounds normal. That's when you know this guy is a scorpion nerd.
First time in 2yrs , i was ill and was not able to see your videos 😢 , but as soon as i got well watched , sadly from the moment I fell ill u uploaded 2videos but np i am happy , moreover this is my *1st* comment ever in any RU-vid video *any* . I like this channel very much lol 😆
or add filters that remove everything but UV and compare that to the same level of UV but with other light too or test an equivalent amount of total energy all in UV vs. spread across the spectrum
I like the defense mechanism to detect how visible they are to their predators hypothesis. Really awesome video. Really makes you think about evolution
I admire and love people with weird obsessions to "know". Someday, the information he's collecting may ... anything. Solve world hunger, save the lunar colony, help us communicate with aliens. Everything we learn is always useful eventually!
are the biologists sure that the scorpions do detect "light" when hiding from the lamps even when they can't see... or did they feel the heat (IR radiation) and they hid from that?
@@jimmio3727 not necessarily... if one uses an IR filter, than it's fine.still, at high intensity, the UV will thermalize and heat them up. the guy doesn't appear to be a dummy, but Derek (as a physicist like I am).. should probably have asked the same thing.
Scorpions are so metal. From Damascus tipped tails, to having 8 eyes, and being able to absorb the harsh radiation from the sun and reflect it back at it. They're amazing
I love the pride that man has when he discovers his hypothesis is wrong. He was so excited by what it COULD be that the finding was just as relevant even though it didn’t validate his original thinking
They're very well-adapted to their environment. In that case, one might think of this as an adaption that prevents UV-radiation induced genetic damage, as an adaption to help preserve other adaptions. I at least think that that is not implausible, and not incompatible with the light-sensing part of it all either.
Of course, the reason Capital One Shopping is free for everyone is because the user is the product and your data is being collected, as part of the agreement to use the service.
@@okaydetar821 The difference being that RU-vid makes money by presenting advertisements to people and doesn't have access to data such as things you're buying if you don't provide it, whereas Capital One Shopping makes money exclusively by selling your data. Neither is great, but you have more control over your data with RU-vid.
@@joeo3377 Wait....Did you really just make the point that because youtube collects and sells your data in adition to other forms of monetization, that it isn't as bad? That makes no sense, and they obviously track what you buy, how else would they know the efficacy of the ads? They can't run profitable ads without collecting data about you anyways, that is just the modern landscape.
