The Arizona bark scorpion looks scary, but not to the southern grasshopper mouse Credit: Photo by Musides from en.wikipedia under CC BY-SA 3.0 license
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The desert scorpion protects itself from predators by injecting them with a very painful, paralyzing venom through a needle like tip on its curved tail. But the southern grasshopper mouse (Onychomys torridus) has evolved a way to take that venom and turn it into an painkiller. The video below shows these two desert dwellers in a fight to the death. After you watch you may never think about mice the same way again.
The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
Eliene Augenbraun is a multimedia science producer, formerly Nature Research's Multimedia Managing Editor and Scientific American's senior video producer. Before that, she founded and ran ScienCentral, an award-winning news service providing ABC and NBC with science news stories. She has a PhD in Biology. Follow Eliene Augenbraun on Twitter