The species can't be found anywhere else in the world.
Harper Forbes , Prakrit Jain , and the California Academy of Science's Curator of Arachnology Lauren Esposito, PhD, search for scorpions.Two new species of playa scorpions were recently found in the dry, isolated grassland of California — and a couple of Bay Area teenagers are behind the groundbreaking discovery.
On a cool night in May of 2021, Harper Forbes, now 19, of Sunnyvale, and Prakrit Jain, now 18, of Los Altos, set out toward the Carrizo Plain National Monument in Jain’s mom’s , armed with black lights as they searched the rough terrain for the creature they hoped would reveal itself once and for all.had tipped them off — a joint initiative of the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco and the National Geographic Society that allows people to search through thousands of user-submitted photographs of various species in addition to recording their own observations. On the app, the teenagers had seen a photograph of an unidentified species of scorpion, and since its range appeared to be limited, they decided to try and seek it out for themselves. Suddenly, there it was, skittering along the cracks of the hard, clay soil right in front of them. Its exoskeleton was glowing in a vibrant shade of Tiffany blue under the ultraviolet light of their flashlights. Then came another. And another. They collected a few specimens to take back to the California Academy of Sciences for their research and named the species Paruroctonus soda after the shallow, alkaline-rich Soda Lake bed that the scorpions call home. “The biggest clue to the discovery was their unique habitat,” Cal Academy curator of arachnology Lauren Esposito, who has been collaborating with Forbes and Jain, told SFGATE on Monday afternoon. “The fact that they found them there, and only there, and couldn’t find any more as soon as they moved a few meters away from the salt flat gave a strong indication that this species was hyperadapted and hanging on to this harsh environment.” In other words, the scorpions can’t be found anywhere else in the world.Prakrit Jain Early on, Forbes’ and Jain’s parents saw that their children had a strong interest in nature and took them on long road trips with their younger siblings, driving them around playas so they could search for scorpions in the middle of the night, Esposito said. She met Jain for the first time about five years ago at ain Hopland — a community event focused on seeking out and identifying as many species as possible in one area over a short period of time. Esposito said that she was struck by how much Jain already knew about plants and animals despite being a middle school student. “He was particularly excited about scorpions and did a science fair project the next year about scorpion behavior. In high school, he continued his pursuit to go around and document other plants and animals, but always focused on scorpions,” she said. Along the way, he met Harper, who was just as interested in the arachnid, and volunteered with him at the McClellan Ranch Preserve in Cupertino. They later started working with Esposito to improve upon the lack of resources available to help people identify scorpions in California. “We have more scorpion diversity than any comparably sized area in the world,” Esposito said. “It was a problem.” In their spare time, the teenagers logged as many observations on iNaturalist as they could — so far, they’ve contributed about 20,000 identifications each, BayNature. And impressively enough, Paruroctonus soda wasn’t their first encounter with a previously unknown species. In 2019, the pair came across another type of scorpion on a trek out to Koehn Lake near the Mojave Desert.shared by the California Academy of Sciences last month. “Over the next couple years, we studied scorpions in the genus Paruroctonus and learned they frequently evolve to live in alkali playas like Koehn Lake. When we returned to that initial observation, we realized we were looking at an undescribed Paruroctonus species.” That scorpion had originally been observed by Cal Academy arachnologist Sarah Crews in 2011, who uploaded the photo to the platform in 2013 in hopes of crowdsourcing a similar discovery.
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