Bigelow's research went into hibernation; last fall, like the scorpion thawed out of the block of ice, he scuttled back to Tempe to clear up unfinished business.
@rule:
@body:The name "Barry Goldwater Bombing Range" has a decidedly 1960s sound to it. It stands for a desolate stretch of desert outside of Yuma, sandy creosote flats wasting off past the Mexican border 15 miles to the south, that the U.S. Air Force uses for target practice. Bigelow has chosen this stretch for tonight's collecting by default. He wanted to go down to the banks of the Colorado River to look for a new species he's been tracking, but the river is a popular entry point for illegal aliens from Mexico, and he knows he'll be stopped every half-hour by curious INS border patrols.
So he stops his old Japanese pickup truck aside a washboarded road on the bombing range, gets out, clicks on his black light and instantly scans a scorpion right at roadside. It's Smeringerus mesaensis again, the benign little fellow who predominates in the Yuma area.
Bigelow's 11-year-old daughter, Chandra, is ready with the tweezers, and when she catches the little scorpion by the tail, it squirms and arches up toward her hand. Unmoved, she drops it into the plastic bag that her father pulls from a jeans pocket.
The very first time that Bigelow took Chandra collecting, they walked down their block to where the street dead-ended into the desert. Bigelow snapped on his ultraviolet light, and when Chandra saw all the glowing, green critters around her feet, she screamed.
Now she hunts enthusiastically. Between her and her father, they catch 50 scorpions in as many minutes, one every ten feet or so.
For Bigelow, this is slim pickings, and he blames the bright moonlight. "Their lateral eyes can pick up spots of light as dim as starlight," he says. Though the scorpions are nearly invisible to the naked human eye--except under black light--they know instinctively that night predators can see them easily.
All of the specimens turn out to be Smeringerus mesaensis; Bigelow had at least hoped to find a species called Vaejovis confusas, which he's writing about in his dissertation. As its name implies, it's a confusing species, first studied and probably misidentified by Professor Stahnke. Bigelow hopes to make the definitive description.
Current research fashions tend toward DNA studies, ecology, species diversity, microbiological lab studies. What Bigelow's doing--taxonomy--is more in the 19th-century mold; it's the detailed cataloguing of species characteristics.
"It's old-fashioned, but scorpions are old-fashioned," he says, without the faintest hint of being defensive. "They're antiquities; that's what piques my interest. They're 450 million years old, and we still don't know very much about them." Even his language is old-fashioned. "The arachnologists dig on spiders," he says, "not on scorpions." The scorpion is not the kind of big, sexy creature that environmental-trust-funders are going to open their pocketbooks to fund study grants for. Scorpions are not threatened as species. To most of us, they're outright repulsive, even less welcome in our yards than are cockroaches. And so major studies are going to go toward venom analysis, not taxonomy.
But Bigelow's not the lab type. "Being out in the field like this is the best teacher," he says. "You can't get any appreciation for the animal in a lab. You have to see them in their natural habitat."
He tromps back to his truck, lowers the tailgate and sits down to light a cigarette. He exhales smoke into the evening air.
Somewhere up above, in the tangle of stars on this clear, July night, there's a constellation called Scorpio, named by the ancients. The scorpion was already ancient when the astrologer first looked up and imagined a resemblance. When we are all gone, the scorpion will still be stalking these sands.
