I also thought about mentioning flagging for ticks. But that article about it was dreadful! They put a person in front of their dragging cloth, so the person got ticks on them first. I’ve had lyme disease, was blind and partly paralyzed from it for awhile. You want the tick flag in front of you! And a pyrethrin on your clothes. Make a flag with white fuzzy cloth on a short stick and wave it in front of you. You can gather loads of ticks in a very short time. I carry a roll of masking tape and gather the ticks onto that. This is useful for clearing trails especially.
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Different scorpions glow in different colors under UV. Here in Mendocino county ours glow lime green. But then if you shine a flashlight on them at the same time, but from a 90 degree angle, they glow a beautiful ice blue.
We used to take kids (and adults) on scorpion hunts.
Also, going to the river and finding all the beautiful jewels of little uv glowing rocks was fun. But then the next morning when the children look at their treasures of the night, they’re just dull looking stones. Still, it was lots of fun.
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Interesting question, I don’t know.
Scorpions can use UV to see each other at night? Glow in the dark serves a useful purpose to them?
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Sorry to hear you had to deal with lyme disease! Yeah, Wikipedia is maybe not the most reliable of sources (something I tell my students all the time) so I really appreciate your insights and suggestions for tick flagging vs dragging. It sounds prudent to try to avoid getting ticks on yourself.
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Glow in the dark is (UV induced) visible light.
But it usually indicates good UV absorbtion. So animals that do see UV will likely see them as dark black.
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UV shining at night is awesome and we do it as a family activity on trips sometimes. I forget my black lights this past trip or I would have done it there too.
I’ll admit to being surprised at what does and doesn’t glow; whip scorpions and solfugids don’t seem to (or if it is it’s really faint), but some mosses/lichens shine really bright, and some rocks just light up.
My kids both love it but now my younger one wants a pet scorpion; my wife is a little upset about that.
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I have scorpions in my yard, and occasionally take a black light out to say “hello” to them. I recently learned of another use for black lights. The distinction between subspecies of big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) is ecologically important but can be morphologically ambiguous. It turns out wetting the leaves with either water or ethanol and then seeing what they look like under a black light is one of the more reliable methods of telling them apart.
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Everyone talks about scorpions but actually very few people know that many caterpillar species also glow under UV light.
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so is the scorpion …
Back in the day, I had a UV light class I developed for our after school science and summer science camp curriculum. It was fascinating to see all the things we could do with black lights.
We had scorpions in the nature center, so that was a hit. We also had some glowing minerals in the collections. Shed snakeskins and fingernails glow, not brightly but enough. Erik’s Deli pickles glowed, as do some spices.
A jar of tonic water glows in strong sunlight (UV), but it’s not too noticeable unless you place it next to a jar of plain water against a black background. (This showed kids that UV occurs in real sunlight, not just a lamp).
I had an experiment where they discovered the chlorophyll in plants. We blended greens (usually tender weeds I had kids gather or spinach if I had a time crunch) with alcohol and then filtered the liquid through a coffee filter into little jars (or test tubes, if we were being fancy). In a dark closet, the green liquid (chlorophyll) glowed blood red in UV light. The kids loved that one.
US$ have a UV strip to foil counterfeiters (not single dollars, I think only higher denominations.)
I was surprised to discover dermatologists use a specific wavelength of UV light to diagnose ringworm (picked up volunteering for a pet rescue).
Urine glows under a black light; pest control sometimes use black lights to discover mouse or rat trails. I used black lights to see where my pets had accidents. (I lent my lights to a friend who said she almost fainted when she saw all the stains low on the wall where her cats sprayed).
Note: shortwave UV light is pretty dangerous to look at and can burn skin, but different stuff reacts more to shortwave length lights. I believe most regular consumer UV lights are the safer longwave lights - but it’s worth observing the wavelength and recommended safety precautions if you you buy one.
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This brings up a question I have - can anyone here recommend a UV light they use for naturalist purposes? I wasn’t even sure how much they cost so I went looking and between not really knowing the quality of different lights, I wasn’t sure if there were different types of UV lights that work better for different applications. I’m kind of interested in trying this out. (Although, not only do I not do a lot of night hiking, I live in a fairly light polluted area so I’d have to be away – way away – from home to even give it a try.) So I’d love some recommendations or suggested cautions for buying one. I’ll definitely try to determine shortwave vs longwave.
also, thanks for those fun science experiments! :-)
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I used to record nocturnal flight calls of birds migrating over my house at night. I live in a forested area but have recorded rails, bitterns, night-herons, Common Terns, Common Goldeneye, and other neat stuff. I have a few recordings on eBird:
https://ebird.org/checklist/S68150734
https://ebird.org/checklist/S68150959
The basic idea around a NFC setup is very simple. A microphone, a weatherproof housing, something surrounding the mic to add directionality (reducing background noise), and something to record sounds, like a computer or other recorder.
My first setup was the mic from a pair of earbuds on a plate with plastic wrap over it inside a plastic flower pot, routed to my computer. It wasn’t very sensitive but it picked some stuff up. Bill Evans sells a kit on his website oldbird.org that is good quality and is a reasonable price for what it is but still costs a few hundred bucks. A MacGyver I am not so that’s what I went with for my second setup.
His website also has an extensive library of NFCs for North American songbirds which is really useful in helping with identification (it’s basically a NFC field guide):
http://oldbird.org/pubs/fcmb/start.htm
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I do a few things. My one Cyanobacteria observation and freshwater Green Algae observation was made by collecting creek water in a jar and growing out an ecosphere (inspired by the Jartopia YouTube channel) until I could see that there was some. Then I put it under a digital microscope.
But what I have been doing even longer than that is “fish watching” by putting on a mask and snorkel and lying belly down in a shallow stream, where the water is just deep enough to cover my mask in that prone position. If the stream is somewhat deeper, it is actually more challenging, because then I can’t maintain my position as well – I’m either drifting on the current or swimming. Still, that’s how I got my Mountain Mullet observation and my Yellow Nose Shrimp observation.
When I was a graduate student, I needed frog and toad eggs for my experiment. In the Chalcraft lab, the technique for that was that when a rainy night came on, we grad students would drive the country roads with the car windows open, listening for the calls.
Oh, yes, I almost forgot: this is what you might observe if you put on a mask and snorkel and submerge yourself in a neglected Jacuzzi: https://www.facebook.com/jason.hernandez.33234/videos/10216543522564726
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This is or is at least similar to what i bought several years ago - https://www.amazon.com/Flashlight-Blacklight-Flashlights-Scorpions-Batteries/dp/B09K7N3KMN/ref=sr_1_6?crid=2SKQ301JI5S30&keywords=uv%2Bflashlight&qid=1649291470&sprefix=uv%2Bflashlight%2Caps%2C166&sr=8-6&th=1
For $8 bucks can’t really go wrong.
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fantastic. Thanks.
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