You're listening to shortwave.

From NPR.

Night.

For many of us it's when the world is winding down.

That special time when the sun's long gone down and the world pauses.

Silences.

Or does it?

Scorpions prefer darker nights, moonless nights, and it's also much easier to see them with

a black light when there's not as much light from the moon because black lights, they're

not very bright.

As a scorpion researcher, Dr. Lauren Espacito scours the night landscape with black lights.

Because when it's exposed to the black light, a pigment in the scorpion's exoskeleton makes

it glow.

They look like toxic sludge, like really bright green.

And so you're like walking around and you're mostly tripping because it's hard to see

with the black light to walk.

But then you shine this little light around and you see a scorpion sitting off in the

distance, maybe under a busher on a rock and you come closer and there it is right in

front of you.

This kind of expedition is exactly what Lauren encouraged to northern California teenagers,

Procrete Jane and Harper Forbes to do.

They'd long been interested in the natural world and for years Procrete had been logging

...