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Who needs a backbone? Making Friends with the Invertebrates
‘If we and the rest of the back-boned animals were to disappear overnight, the rest of the world would get on pretty well. But if the invertebrates were to disappear, the world's ecosystems would collapse.’
Sir David Attenborough
Friday 24th June 2005, according to my diary from that day, "first day of Glastonbury festival, pouring with rain". I wasn't there, though, I was in the dry of my home discussing cladistics with my dad. Then some friends of his came round and I retreated upstairs to hide with my encyclopedia from the "3 MAD VIOLIN MAKERS". There in my room I learned that there were more than a million species of arthropods in the world. Wowed, I decided they could never be beaten, so I ought to join their side. I was going to make friends with the invertebrates.
As humans, we like things to be binary, we like to think in terms of things that are like us and not like us, so we divide into vertebrates ( more or less like us) and invertebrates (completely weird, not at all like us). We make this a moral divide too, killing a cat is ethically unsound, squishing a wasp is laudable. But, given that more than 90% of known animal species are invertebrates, if we are to insist on a two-way split, it would actually make more sense to divide the animal kingdom into arthropods and non-arthropds (Simon Barnes argues this point most eloquently in his excellent "Ten Million Aliens").
Scorpions are some of my favourite arthropods and one of my favourite facts about scorpions is that they glow green under UV light. One weekend, with a UV torch in one hand and a box of Ladurée macarons in the other, I tested this out in Sheerness, where the UK's only scorpion colony can be found living in a harbour wall. There are approximately 15 000 scorpions there. I saw one, it glowed green, my hat fell off and later that night I fell in love.