I’m not alone in my fascination with scorpions. His description brought to mind what it’s like for me in the presence of my family, how excruciatingly sensitive we all are to the subtlest emotional disturbances in one another. But he’s also observing how exquisitely sensitive scorpions are. He’s describing his own predation, of course. “They can register the movement of a single grain of sand from ten yards away,” he tells Lorena. Yet this illumination-the act of becoming visible-has terrible consequences for her and her undocumented relatives.īy the time I finished drafting the novel, I had come to see scorpions in a manner I never expected: as animals who offer a powerful reflection of the human arrangement.Īt one point, Marcus notes that scorpions hunt by using the tiny hairs along their legs as sensory devices. She is set aglow by the attention that Marcus lavishes upon her. Lorena operates like a scorpion, in her own way. Like the animals that fascinate him, Marcus Stallworth is a predator who regards himself as prey, a creature whose shy manner conceals his aggressive impulses. The more I learned about scorpions, the more central they became to my understanding of both characters, as well as the nature of their troubling relationship. As they discuss potential experiments to test it, the two develop a powerful and increasingly illicit bond. Marcus is struck by the elegance of this theory. The glow researchers used to find them was, in fact, intended to help them hide.” Because the animal uses its exoskeleton to detect light, the moment it stops glowing, she believes, a scorpion knows it has found shelter from predators overhead. She eventually hypothesizes that the scorpion’s fluorescence “was a protective mechanism, a kind of alarm system. Instead, she races to the library and reads everything she can find about scorpions. The book is set in 1981, so there is no Internet to scour. Before long, the mystery of the scorpion’s glow consumes her. She’s voraciously curious and eager for the regard Marcus directs at her. The scene I’d experienced as a cub reporter suddenly leaped into the novel.īut unlike me, Lorena Saenz has a brilliant scientific mind. Jenny’s father, Marcus, is a research zoologist who is tasked with helping the girls.Īs I pondered how he might do this, it suddenly came to me: Marcus was a scorpiologist! He would help the girls by taking them out into the desert and showing them how scorpions glow. It certainly wasn’t my conscious intention.Įarly in the book, my heroine, a Honduran American girl named Lorena Saenz, is paired with a wealthy classmate named Jenny Stallworth for the eighth grade science fair. In fact, it would end up as the engine of my plot. Three decades later, when I sat down to write my new novel, All the Secrets of the World, I found the mystery had lingered. Surely, the scientific community had figured out why these nocturnal animals exhibited such a striking trait. Scorpions had been roaming Earth for more than 400 million years. But I wanted to know why scorpions glow, what evolutionary advantage this garish trait bestowed. The scientists began to detail the mechanisms of this fluorescence, how the animal’s cuticle, or exoskeleton, absorbs longer wavelengths of ultraviolet light. What I remember most vividly from that night was asking a simple question: “What’s with the glow?” I remember this detail, in particular, because I would later share the back seat of their research vehicle with approximately a hundred such specimens, all of them thrashing against their plastic prisons. The scorpiologists immediately began plucking up specimens with slender silver tongs and placing them in small, clear canisters. It took me a few seconds to figure it out: these were the scorpions we’d come to see. All of a sudden, I saw dozens of tiny, glow-in-the-dark toys that began to move. Beams of ultraviolet light washed across the sand. One of them lugged a giant metal lamp, which he set down on a small rise. They strapped snake chaps onto my legs and led me to an empty clearing. One of my first assignments as a young reporter at the El Paso Times was to follow a couple of scorpion experts into the desert after dark.
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