‘These kids can find anything’: California teens identify two new scorpion species
A pair of California scorpion species that may have crawled under the radar for tens of thousands of years have finally been exposed – thanks to the efforts of two Bay Area teenagers. And for one at-risk species, the students’ workcould prove life-saving.
Prakrit Jain of Los Altos and Harper Forbes of Sunnyvale, 17 and 18 at the time, identified two new species – Paruroctonus soda and Paruroctonus conclusus– after a tip from social media and excursions into the harsh terrain the arachnids inhabit, aided by a black light and Jain’s mother’s car.
It began when Jain and Forbes – who met while working at a nature preserve – spotted the unidentified scorpions on iNaturalist, a social network that allows people to share their observations of the natural world. Users all over the world can upload photos of organisms they’ve spotted and others with expertise in the area can identify them, Forbes explained.
With about 115m observations recorded on the platform, “the real benefit of this for people doing research is that it allows such an enormous amount of data to be present to anybody,” Jain says – data it would “take thousands of people many lifetimes to gather on their own”.
Jain and Forbes have been interested in ecology and wildlife “pretty much our whole lives”, Jain says.
“These kids can find anything,” says Lauren Esposito, an arachnologist at the California Academy of Sciences who collaborated with Jain and Forbes. “You set them out in a landscape and they’re like: ‘Here’s every species of snake, here’s every scorpion, every butterfly,’ and it’s kind of incredible.”
The students check iNaturalist regularly, “seeing if there’s anything that catches our eye”. Unidentified species frequently appear on the platform, but these two examples caught their attention in part because of their small range. They were “geographically isolated”, Forbes says, living around what Esposito describes as salt lakes, or alkali flats – “a former lake from the glacial era, 10,000 years ago, that’s dried out over time”, leaving a brutal desert environment.
That means the scorpions – which look frightening but appear to pose little risk to humans – “have to be able to resist super salty, super hot, arid, dry [conditions], and the only way that they can do that is by adaptation through time. So these things have probably been living in these habitats for tens of thousands of years, through the last major change of the ecosystem,” Esposito says. “They’ve just become isolated there and really can’t exist in the surrounding desert.”
The specificity of their locations made it easier to identify the species without “doing a ton of background work to make a coherent description”, Jain says. But that specificity also brings risks for the scorpions: any threat to their limited habitat, such as solar farms, could be disastrous.
Last year, the students headed to two of California’s dry lakes, Soda Lake and Koehn Lake, where they used a blacklight to try to collect enough of the scorpions to conduct a thorough study. “Looking for scorpions is fairly straightforward if they’re actually out on a given night. Almost all scorpions with the exception of certain families fluoresce under black light, or UV light,” Forbes says. “It could prove quite difficult to collect them in the numbers that we deem appropriate” – typically 10 – “if we didn’t have that tool with us.”
Then began the process of describing the species for a paper with Esposito published last month in the journal ZooKeys – a lengthy effort made pressing by the environmental threat to P conclusus, whose small habitat is not protected (P soda is lucky enough to live within the Carrizo national monument). It’s a tedious process that involves detailed, comparative descriptions of something people haven’t seen before, Esposito says. “That’s why it’s so amazing that these two went through the entire process, because I think for most people at their age, halfway through, they’d be like: ‘I’m done with this.’”
But the pair soldiered on, naming P soda after the lake; P conclusus, they write in their paper, “translates to restricted or confined, in reference to the high degree of habitat specialization and severely limited range” of the scorpion. The paper calls for threatened status for P conclusus, but receiving that designation is another potentially years-long process, Esposito says.
She’s not surprised at Jain and Forbes’ youthful success. She met Jain when he was nine at a community science event. Hunting for scorpions, “he kind of shadowed me as we walked around. And, I mean, honestly, he knew more about the things that we were seeing than I did,” she says. As for Forbes, “he’s taught himself how to illustrate, by hand, anatomical features” – some of which appear in the paper – “which is something that many of my colleagues are still quite awful at after decades”.
Jain, 18, is now a first-year student at the University of California, Berkeley; Forbes, 19, is at the University of Arizona. Both plan to continue studying
Burning the world’s proven reserves of fossil fuels would emit more planetheating emissions than have occurred since the industrial revolution, easily blowing the remaining carbon budget before societies are subjected to catastrophic global heating, a new analysis has found.
An enormous 3.5tn tons of greenhouse gas emissions will be emitted if governments allow identified reserves of coal, oil and gas to be extracted and used, according to what has been described as the first public database of fossil fuel production.
The database, which covers around three-quarters of global energy production, reveals that the US and Russia each have enough fossil fuel reserves to single-handedly eat up the world’s remaining carbon budget before the planet is tipped into 1.5C (2.7F) or more of heating compared to the pre-industrial era.
Among all countries, there is enough fossil fuel to blow this remaining budget seven times over, propelling people and ecosystems into disastrous heatwaves, floods, drought and other impacts never seen before in human history. Governments have agreed to restrain global heating to 1.5C but have largely declined to actively halt new fossil fuel leases or extraction.
“You’ve got governments issuing new licenses or permits for coal that are completely decoupled from their own climate commitments,” said Mark Campanale, founder of Carbon Tracker Initiative, which is launching the new Global Registry of Fossil Fuels with Global Energy Monitor on Monday.
“It’s like a country announcing that they’re going on a climate change diet and they’re going to eat salad for lunch and then sneaking back to their office and working their way through a box of donuts,” he said. “You’re not on a diet if you’re stuffing your face with donuts, but that’s what’s happening with countries and their developers of fossil fuels.”
For the world to have an even chance of avoiding 1.5C or more of global heating, scientists have estimated the world can only emit 400 to 500bn more tons of greenhouses gases. This would involve drastically cutting emissions by around half this decade before zeroing them out entirely by the mid point of the century.
However, the US alone has the potential to release 577bn tons of emissions, most of that from coal, through its known fossil fuel reserves. While Joe Biden has presided over America’s first ever climate change legislation and vowed to tackle what he has called an “existential threat to humanity”, his administration has continued to hand out leases for oil and gas drilling, including in vast swathes of the Gulf of Mexico, site of the BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster.
Of these reserves, 27bn tons of emissions are set to be released from approved American projects already under development, which include 33.2bn barrels of oil, according to the database.
Russia, meanwhile, has enough identified fossil fuels to unleash 490bn tons of greenhouse gases and is currently developing projects that are set to emit 11bn tons. China, India and Australia also all each have enough fossil fuel reserves to push the world to the brink of climate breakdown.
While countries agreed in the 2015
Paris climate accords to curb global heating, three decades of international talks did not yield any commitment to actually reduce the primary cause of the climate emergency – the burning of fossil fuels. At UN talks last year in Glasgow, wrangling by diplomats did yield a promise to “phase down”, but not out, the use of coal.
“Countries like to talk about emissions, they don’t want to talk about fossil fuels,” said Campanale. “Emissions are from the use of fossil fuels and you can’t do anything about emissions until you’ve actually come to a conclusion about what you’re going to do about fossil fuels.
“When we’re in a situation where you’ve got two, three, four times more fossil fuels in development for the remaining carbon budget, then that tells you that policy is more than slightly out of sync. It’s fundamentally out of sync.”
Many large companies are pushing ahead under the assumption of expanded fossil fuel use, despite government commitments. In May, the Guardian revealed there are nearly 200 ‘carbon bomb’ projects in train around the world, helmed by companies such as Exxon, BP and Shell, that would each result in at least a billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions over their lifetimes. Private equity firms, too, continue to pour billions of dollars into the sector.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has exacerbated this situation by pushing up prices of oil and gas and causing European leaders to seek the expansion of gas imports from around the world. Campanale said new gas import facilities “risk becoming stranded” as they are superseded by cheap renewable energy, such as solar and wind, causing investors to heap pressure on companies to more quickly embrace a greener future to avoid financial wipeout.
That pressure is ramping up. More than 200 health organizations, including the World Health Organization, last week called for a global fossil fuel “non-proliferation” treaty and upcoming United Nations climate talks in Egypt will see activists urge countries to end their issuance of mining leases.
But António Guterres, secretary general of the UN, has warned that the pace of the energy transition is not fast enough, with global emissions already returning to pre-pandemic levels. The recent heatwaves in Europe, the US and China, as well as the cataclysmic floods in Pakistan are the “price of humanity’s fossil fuel addiction”, Guterres said.
“The current fossil fuel free-for-all must end now,” the UN secretary general added. “It is a recipe for permanent climate chaos and suffering.”