On the Alleged Tenderness of Scorpions

The photograph makes a tidy story: a female scorpion carrying her pale young on her back while a second scorpion clasps one of her pincers, as though holding her hand through the ordeal of parenthood. It is the sort of image that arrives with a caption already attached. Mom carries the babies. Dad holds her hand.

The caption is wrong in almost every particular, which is the interesting part.

Scorpions do not hold hands out of affection. When two of them grip claws, they are usually engaged in the promenade à deux — the "dance of two" — a mating ritual in which the male seizes the female's pedipalps and steers her back and forth across the ground, sometimes for hours. He is not being romantic. He is looking for a suitably firm surface on which to deposit a spermatophore, a small packet of sperm he glues down and then maneuvers the female directly over. The whole shuffling dance is essentially a search for good real estate.

And then there is the matter of who is likely to survive it. In many species the female is considerably larger, and once the transaction is complete the male's continued presence becomes, from her perspective, less "spouse" and more "opportunity." Sexual cannibalism is well documented across scorpions; the male's post-coital priority is a quick and dignified exit, which he does not always manage. The grip in the photo may not be tenderness at all but a male trying to disengage from a partner who has not finished with him.

The babies, meanwhile, are genuinely riding on their mother's back — this bit is true. Newborn scorpions, called scorplings, are born live rather than hatched, and they climb aboard the mother immediately, clinging there through their first molt. During this period she will not eat, and she becomes noticeably more aggressive, which does nothing to improve the odds for any lingering male.

So the scene is real, the arrangement is real, and the sentiment is entirely imported. What looks like a family portrait is closer to a negotiation, a nursery, and a possible crime scene, all held in a single grip. The scorpions, for their part, have been doing this for something like 430 million years, and have never once needed the story we keep telling about them.