Scorpions are blind, aren't they? I thought I read that somewhere.
this post was submitted on 11 May 2025
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About this community and how I post the comic strip… Many moons ago, I would ask my Dad to save the newspaper for me everyday so I could read my favorite comic strips and one of those was The Far Side. These days of course you find just about anything online including www.thefarside.com where they post several comics a day and I repost them here. Just to note, the date you see in my posts is not the initial release date, but the date they were posted on the website.
The Far Side is a single-panel comic created by Gary Larson and syndicated by Chronicle Features and then Universal Press Syndicate, which ran from December 31, 1979, to January 1, 1995 (when Larson retired as a cartoonist). Its surrealistic humor is often based on uncomfortable social situations, improbable events, an anthropomorphic view of the world, logical fallacies, impending bizarre disasters, (often twisted) references to proverbs, or the search for meaning in life… Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Far_Side
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We know from Scorpions that Love is Blind
Seems like they're not blind though, just don't have great eyes:
Even with all those eyes, scorpions can't see very well! Yet the sensitivity of their eyes is among the highest in all arthropods and dependent on the kinds of habitats in which they live. In general terms, however, their eyes mostly tell movement and light from dark.
Interestingly, they might use their bodies as eyes:
Scorpions don’t need to use their eyes to get a full picture of their surroundings: their body seems to function as a basic eye under ultraviolet light.
To test the idea that the waxy cuticle covering a scorpion’s body can detect light, Doug Gaffin of the University of Oklahoma in Norman exposed 40 of the arachnids to visible or UV light. He studied their behaviour both with and without “eye-blocks” – pieces of foil placed over their eyes to act like opaque glasses.
Wearing their shades, the scorpions did not move around much when illuminated by green light. But under UV light they scuttled around freely with or without the glasses, suggesting they did not rely on their eyes to see. The larva of the fruit fly is thought to be the only other creature whose body can detect light.
Carl Kloock at California State University in Bakersfield says the idea complements his own work. He found that the ability of scorpions’ cuticles to fluoresce in UV light affects their behaviour at night, since moonlight contains a modest amount of UV.
After I posted that, I got sucked into a Wikipedia sinkhole about scorpions. Similar to what you posted, the two things that stuck out to me were that
- Those top eyes are so light sensitive that they can navigate by starlight. But, yeah, their resolution is shit.
- Some species have light receptors in the tail segment with the sting.
Oh, and some species can jettison their tail to save themselves from predators. But since their anus is in their tail, it means they can't poop anymore, and they obviously can't sting. However, they can still kill small prey with their pincers and eat, and they can still breed (the important part), and can live for several months after they lose their tail. That doesn't have anything to do with sight, but it was so morbidly fascinating.