Mating in Scorpions

Courtship and Mating in the Buthid Scorpions

“…Recently Biicherl (1956) has given a description of the mating in the buthid genus Tityus, while a brief statement, added to a paper on scorpionid courtship and mating (Alexander, 1957), reported that mating in Parclbuthus planicauda POC. is similar to that which had been reported in other scorpion families, namely that there is uptake of sperm from a spermatophore deposited on the substratum by the male, a phenomenon which had been reported for the Chactidae (Angermann, 1955), the Scorpionidae (Alexander, 1956) and the Bothriuridae (de Zolessi, 1956). The present paper presents the evidence on which this earlier statement was based, together with an analysis of the behaviour patterns found in the courtship and observations on the formation and method of functioning of the spermatophore.…”

“…So far none of the observations reported here have shown any marked difference between the spermatophore of the scorpionid, 0. latimanus (Alexander, 1956) and that described above for the buthids. The major difference in the actual mating of the latter animals and of .a scorpionid lies in the method of taking the sperm up from the spermatophore : in the buthids this is done instantaneously during '( hooking ", but in 0. latimanus the female triggers off an '' explosion " of certain parts of spermatophore capsule into her body and these are held within her for about five minutes while the sperm pass through.…”

“…planicauda though it has occurred in every promenade of T. trinitatis which I have watched. It cannot be distinguished by anything but its context from the pattern of the same name in 0. latimanus (Alexander, 1956(Alexander, , 1957. A single bout of juddering consists of five to eight rapid forward and back movements of the whole body, while the feet are held still on the substratum.…”

Scorpions and life-history strategies: from evolutionary dynamics toward the scorpionism problem

“…Only by the middle of the 1950s, several researchers discovered, independently, that sperm transfer was accomplished by means of a spermatophore. The first reports were those by Angermann [15] and Alexander [16]. …”

“…Beginning in the mid-1950s, several accounts of various aspects of the reproductive biology, in some cases of the entire post-embryonic development of scorpions, have been published. These were mainly by biologists such as Alexander [16, 37, 38], Auber [39, 40], Matthiesen [25, 26], Maury [41, 42], Shulov and Amitai [43], Shulov et al [44], Varela [45] and Williams [46]. More recently other biological cycles of scorpions were studied [11, 47–53].…”