The scorpions live in the deserts of Central and Southern California.
One of the newly described scorpion species. Named Paruroctonus soda, the scorpion is featured here carrying young on its back. formally recognized two new scorpion species in the Golden State.
P. soda and P. conclusus have adapted so specifically to the dry, salty and high-pH habitats of Soda Lake and Koehn Lake, that the scorpions can only be found in those lakebeds and nowhere else.The scorpions’ journey out of obscurity is largely due to two high school students, Harper Forbes and Prakrit Jain, using the nature app iNaturalist.
The first species Forbes and Jain learned about was the one that would later be known as P. conclusis. They initially learned about one of those species in 2019, based on an observation uploaded to iNaturalist near Koehn Lake."We weren’t entirely sure what we were looking at," Jain said in the press release. "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.