Every other Friday, the Outside/In team at NHPR answers a listener question about the natural world. This week's question comes from Sabrina in Portland, Oregon.
“I found out a fun fact where you can't send scorpions through the mail unless they’re for medical reasons. So I just didn’t know if there’s any other fun or strange rules that the mail had that you just didn’t know about, until you find out."
Producer Felix Poon dug through the mail to find out.
Transcript
This has been lightly edited for clarity.
Felix Poon: Most live animals can’t be sent by the US postal service. That includes cats, dogs, and flying squirrels. But there are some animals that make the cut. Live scorpions are one of them, but just for medical purposes. The reason why actually dates back to the mid-20th century. In 1951, a scientist in Arizona by the name of Herbert L. Stahnke had been working for decades to create a cure for deadly scorpion stings. He would inject diluted scorpion venom into cats, wait for them to build up an immunity to it, and then draw their blood to extract the antibodies required for anti-venom. But to make a single dose of his serum Stahnke needed about 150 live scorpions, and he wanted to stock the serum in every hospital in Arizona. So he put a call out to the public: “I need 10,000 deadly scorpions—alive.”
In 1955, an Arizona senator brought a bill to the senate floor in order to help Stahnke out. He proposed a change to the US Postal Service rules that would allow live scorpions in the mail for the first time. The bill passed. So that’s why, to this day, more than seventy years later, you can send live scorpions in the mail. And they’re not the only live animals you can send by the way. You can send baby alligators, chicks, and snails. But to find out how to actually mail a live scorpion, I talked to a scorpion scientist.
Carlos Santibanez Lopez: So you can imagine a plastic container that is wrapped up in a lot of bubble wrapper.
Felix Poon: This is Carlos Santibanez Lopez. He’s a biology professor at Western Connecticut State University. He explained to me that as scary as these eight legged creatures can be, the rules aren’t just to keep people safe, it’s also to keep the scorpions safe.
Carlos Santibanez Lopez: They are quite docile animals. As soon as they find themselves in a confined space they will limit their movement and they will do nothing.
Felix Poon: Carlos actually gets most of his scorpions himself, in the deserts of the American Southwest, in the middle of the night. That's when scorpions are most active and when Carlos can take advantage of the fact that under UV light, scorpions glow in the dark.
Carlos Santibanez Lopez: Imagine that you are in a remote place where there are no lights. And then, when you're shining the light on the ground, you see all these green creatures walking on the ground.
Felix Poon: Then Carlos grabs these glowing scorpions with tweezers, or sometimes with his bare hands.
Carlos Santibanez Lopez: And of course, this is when you get stung.
Felix Poon: Please don’t try this at home by the way. Carlos is trained to recognize which scorpions can kill you, and which just really hurt. His research tends to benefit most from non-living samples though, so on the off chance Carlos does get a specimen in the mail it’s usually already dead.
Carlos Santibanez Lopez: As soon as I get it, I extract the DNA right away or put it in the freezer to make sure the DNA is not degraded.
Felix Poon: Dead or alive, the fact that scorpions can be sent by mail at all is a big reason why we have life-saving anti-venom today.
If you’d like to submit a question to the Outside/In team, you can record it as a voice memo on your smartphone and send it to outsidein@nhpr.org. You can also leave a message on our hotline, 1-844-GO-OTTER.
