California teens discover 2 new scorpion species — and they're just getting started
CBC
When Prakrit Jain and Harper Forbes first saw the picture of an unidentified scorpion in the California desert, they knew they were looking at something special.
The teenage duo know a lot about scorpions. Both budding young scientists are passionate about ecology, and are on a mission to document every species of the arachnid in California.
They were looking through photos on the citizen-science website iNaturalist when they saw an image that caught their attention — a translucent, brownish scorpion that didn't look like any species they were familiar with.
"We immediately knew that they were something new," Jain told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.
After some meticulous field work, the pair confirmed it was, indeed, a previously undescribed species. They dubbed it Paruroctonus soda, because it lives in the salty clay soil near Soda Lake in San Luis Obispo County. It's one of two new species of scorpion they have described in a new paper published this month in the journal ZooKeys.
Jain, 18, and Forbes, 19, published their findings in collaboration with Lauren Esposito, a California Academy of Sciences arachnologist who has been a mentor to them both.
Esposito says they first met Jain at a local science event when he was about 11 years old. Already, he was brimming with knowledge about the California landscape.
"He was just, like, extremely enthused about literally everything," Esposito said.
Jain says his fascination with nature began when he was a child going on hikes with his family. His parents, he said, did a great job of encouraging his curiosity and helping him learn how to interact safely with wildlife without being afraid.
"I recall the first scorpion I saw was when I was like eight or 10 years old, and I found that really, really cool," Jain said.
"I think I know more than most people about California scorpions, but far, far from everything that there is to know. Almost every week, I learn something new about California scorpions that I didn't know before."
And there's a lot to learn. California is one of the most diverse regions in the world for scorpions, says Esposito.
"There's, like, more scorpion species in California than there are in pretty much the rest of the United States combined. But there's no resources … to identify them," they said.
So Esposito, Jain and Harper set out to create those resources themselves. Esposito says the young men traveled the state with their families, photographing and detailing the scorpions they came across.