New Paper Out – Incidental observation of Lychas armillatus in a fire-maintained pine tree community

🌲🦂MS Conservation and Restoration students and faculty published a paper about a Scorpion in a fire-maintained habitat!

While scouring for tiny plants, growing under a dense cover of tall grasses in a recently burnt pine forest community at their Central Cordillera site, the team was surprised to find a scorpion hiding among the thin ground litter. The first thing that came to their mind: how are animals surviving fire in a fire-maintained community?

The scorpion was an adult female Lychas armillatus (Gervais, 1841) (Scorpiones: Buthidae). The individual was carrying a juvenile on its back, a first-instar aggregation-molting behavior among scorpions.

This incidental observation of a scorpion in a fire-maintained pine community raises more interesting questions about the lives of animals in such communities.

The team was part of a project that studies the vegetation structure of Philippine ecosystems suspected to be tropical pine savannas. The University of the Philippines Baguio-Cordillera Studies Center and the College of Science supported the project.

Published in Arthropods, 2026, 15(4): 207–212
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.24067294

Great job for advancing Philippine arachnology and fire ecology!👏🎉

𝗪𝗲 𝘀𝘂𝗽𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗶𝗻𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗗𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗽𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗚𝗼𝗮𝗹𝘀