When you visit the Bohart Museum of Entomology during the 14th annual UC Davis Biodiversity Museum Day on Saturday, Feb. 8, you'll probably meet a scorpion named “Butters.”
It's a new arrival, donated by a retired educator. She did not name it Butters. The Bohart Museum student interns named it that due to it being…well…umm...pleasingly plump, shall we say. Or pudgy or portly. Or a chubster, a chunker, a butterball…
Just don't call it late to dinner.
Scorpions are carnivorous and eat a variety of insects (such as crickets, earwigs, ants, and pill bugs), spiders, and other small critters. They are not particular. They also eat other scorpions.
Tabatha Yang, education and outreach coordinator of the Bohart, asked UC Davis doctoral candidate Emma “Em” Jochim of the lab of arachnologist Jason Bond to identify the genus and determine the gender. Professor Bond, director of the Bohart Museum, is the Evert and Marion Schlinger Endowed Chair in Insect Systematics, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, and associate dean of the UC Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. He is also president-elect of the American Arachnological Society.
In the Bond lab, Jochim studies trapdoor spider evolution and systematics. She has kept scorpions for about seven years. She currently has two pet scorpions.
Jochim identified the pudgy scorpion as a Hadrurus sp., which live in sandy deserts. She also sexed it. Butters is a female.
Do You Know How to Sex a Scorpion?
This is not something most people know how to do...sex a scorpion.
“The way you determine the sex is by looking at the pectines (sensory structures on the underside of scorpions),” Jochim wrote in an email. “Females have shorter pectines and they will be further apart while males have longer pectines closer together. It's a Hadrurus sp. which live in desert environments.”
Scorpions, predatory arachnids with eight legs, are easily distinguished by a pair of grasping pincers and a narrow segmented tail curved over the back that ends in a stinger.
The genus is native to southwest United States and northwestern Mexico, and is among the largest of all scorpion genera,surpassed only by Hadogenes, Pandinus, Heterometrus and Hoffmannihadrurus. If you shine an ultraviolet (UV) light on them, they glow. There's a substance in their exoskeleton called the hyaline layer that fluoresces under UV light.
"The evolutionary history of scorpions goes back 435 million years," Wikipedia tells us. "They mainly live in deserts but have adapted to a wide range of environmental conditions, and can be found on all continents except Antarctica. There are over 2,500 described species, with 22 extant (living) families recognized to date. Their taxonomy is being revised to account for 21st-century genomic studies."
Butters' new home is in the Bohart Museum's popular petting zoo, an educational habitat which includes Madagascar hissing cockroaches, walking sticks, and tarantulas. The tenants have names such as:
- Peaches, a Chilean rose hair tarantula (Grammostola rosea)
- Coco McFluffin, a Chaco golden knee tarantula (Grammostola pulchripes)
- Princess Herbert, a Brazilian salmon-pink bird-eating tarantula (Lasiodora parahybana)
- Beatrice, a Vietnamese centipede (Scolopendra subspinipes)
Butters is right at home in a coconut shell. When's dinner?
About the Bohart Museum of Entomology
The Bohart Museum houses a global collection of eight million insect specimens, plus the petting zoo and a gift shop stocked with insect-themed books, posters, jewelry, t-shirts, hoodies and more. Founded in 1946 and committed to "understanding, documenting and communicating terrestrial arthropod diversity," the Bohart Museum is named for UC Davis professor and noted entomologist Richard Bohart. More information is available on the Bohart website at https://bohart.ucdavis.edu or by emailing bmuseum@ucdavis.edu.
About UC Davis Biodiversity Museum Day
The UC Davis Biodiversity Museum Day on Saturday, Feb. 8 is a Super Science Day. It is billed as a day of discovery, a day of exploration, and a day to chat with the UC Davis scientists about their work and see their displays. It's all free and family friendly. Parking is also free.
The participants:
- Arboretum and Public Garden, Habitat Gardens in the Environmental GATEway, adjacent to the Arboretum Teaching Nursery on Garrod Drive. Hours: noon to 4 p.m.
- Bohart Museum of Entomology, Room 1124 and main hall of the Academic Surge Building, 455 Crocker Lane. Hours: 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.
- Botanical Conservatory, the greenhouses along Kleiber Hall Drive. Hours: 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
- California Raptor Center, 1340 Equine Lane, off Old Davis Road (Located three miles south of the central campus.) Hours: 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
- Center for Plant Diversity, Katherine Esau Science Hall off Kleiber Hall Drive. Hours: 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
- Nematode Collection (part of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology), Katherine Esau Science Hall, off Kleiber Hall Drive. Hours: 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
- Museum of Wildlife and Fish Biology, Room 1394, Academic Surge Building, 455 Crocker Lane. Hours: 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
- Paleontology Collection, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, 1309 Earth and Physical Sciences Building, 434 LaRue Road. Hours: 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
- Phaff Yeast Culture Collection, Robert Mondavi Institute Brewery and Food Processing facility, Old Davis Road.Hours: 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
- Visual Journal Exhibit (new), Design Museum at Cruess Hall, Room 124, 375 California Ave. Hours: 1 to 5 p.m.
- Moth Documentary, Nocturnes (new), 2:45 to 5 p.m., Cruess Hall, Room 1002. The Bohart Museum is hosting the showing of the documentary Nocturnes, about moth research in the Himalayas. It will be followed by a discussion about remote field research with Iris Quayle, a graduate student in the Bond Lab who has been to Belize and Madagascar to study insects. "This film is beautiful, slow, and immersive and has some subtitles," says Tabatha Yang, education and outreach coordinator of the Bohart. It requires a stillness and patience, so may not be for everyone."
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