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Scorpion Intelligence
Topic Started: Aug 9 2010, 04:00 AM (3,931 Views)
Holben
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Rumbo a la Victoria

Just how clever are scorpions?

They can- clean themselves
show sophisticated memory abilities, remembering dig sites and locations for years.
hunt intelligently, showing strategic ability

But their nervous sytem is comparatively simple compared to a vertebrate.
The are more intelligent than 99% of arthjropods, but not as intelligent as Portia.

They have fused ganglia, and an extensive sensory system.

Their mushroom bodies are far less rich than those of spiders.

They have highly sophisticated 'gene libraries' and reflexes. They can also adapt to new environments and situations.

Google hasn't enlightened me, can anyone here help me reach a conclusion?
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colddigger
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Depends on which kind you are talking about.

Don't forget that they are motherly, but like the gerbil true scorpions will consume their young in starvation situations and understress.

Tailless Whipscorpions can recognize their young and the young their mothers (at least when they are young, unless I am mistaken) and mothers will soothe their offspring by stroking them with their front legs.
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Dean
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I think that while scorpions do present complex behavior sometimes, their small and underdeveloped nervous system will ultimately limit them to an "automatic" kind of "intelligence" versus one in which they will "think" somehow.

The intelligence of other invertebrates like Portia and Cephalopods is more similar to that of vertebrates:

Instead of relying on very complex automatic reflexes, they somehow form thoughts and have a kind of independent thinking that is very different from the way scorpions present complex behavior.


The kind of intelligence demonstrated by scorpions is even present in beings like Paramecium, where if during locomotion they bump into a solid object, their cilia automatically switch into reverse, they swim backwards a bit, turn slightly and start swimming forward again.

I'm afraid that in the future of scorpion evolution they will simply fine-tune their complex reflex-based behavior more and more, but ultimately they will never start "thinking".
Edited by Dean, Aug 9 2010, 04:09 PM.
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Holben
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Rumbo a la Victoria

Ah.

Well, they do exhibit primitive self-awareness by cleaning themselves.

And they can adapt to new prey.

But perhaps that's it.
Time flows like a river. Which is to say, downhill. We can tell this because everything is going downhill rapidly. It would seem prudent to be somewhere else when we reach the sea.

"It is the old wound my king. It has never healed."
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Dean
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The main thing which limits them appears to be their nervous system.

Simply said, the ancestor of scorpions had a nervous system that is constructed more primitively than that of the ancestor of spiders, and now, that they have specialized into scorpions and spiders, they are too specialized for a complete reconstruction of their nervous system, which could make richer mushroom bodies, similar to those of spiders, evolve.

It appears that while the nervous system of Portia is complex enough to permit a primitive level of thinking, and from that it could evolve further and make the spiders of the future smarter, scorpions failed to reach this stage of complexity, and because of that, the future evolution of their nervous system will be limited to fine-tuning automatic reflexes.
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DeadAccount
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Based on what you guys are saying about how scorpions care for their young, remember things after years, groom themselves, and even live in groups, I have to ask if maybe we are underestimating how complex the scorpion's nervous system truly is. I mean, we have underestimated the abilities of so called "simple" nervous systems every step of the way only to discover that birds, cephlapods, ants, bees, and even some reptiles, fish, crustaceans, and spiders are quite intelligent-even on par with higher level mammals in some cases (especially birds and octopuses). So I have to ask, are scorpion brains truly as "automatic" as some people are saying-or do we just not understand how they think yet?
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IIGSY
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DeadAccount
Dec 31 2017, 03:23 AM
Based on what you guys are saying about how scorpions care for their young, remember things after years, groom themselves, and even live in groups, I have to ask if maybe we are underestimating how complex the scorpion's nervous system truly is. I mean, we have underestimated the abilities of so called "simple" nervous systems every step of the way only to discover that birds, cephlapods, ants, bees, and even some reptiles, fish, crustaceans, and spiders are quite intelligent-even on par with higher level mammals in some cases (especially birds and octopuses). So I have to ask, are scorpion brains truly as "automatic" as some people are saying-or do we just not understand how they think yet?
This right here could apply to a large number of animals
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Yiqi15
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I presume there could be workarounds for having more basal nervous systems. Alternatively, the automatic reflexes, in optimal conditions, could develop into more advanced nervous systems over millions of years.
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