The largest scorpion in mainland France !

My first scientific contribution was surprisingly symbolic.

Years of hiking and collecting in the French countryside gave me a reasonable idea of the places I should be looking for specific invertebrates. I was thus very surprised when I found Buthus scorpions on top of the Sainte Baume massif, just 15 kilometers away from my childhood home. This represented an abnormally high ( > 1000m a.s.l.) locality for this genus in France, and the peculiar biogeographic history of the mountain range prompted me to examine this population in detail.

I teamed up with French arachnologist Eric Ythier, who had published the description of a new, high altitude species (Buthus pyrenaeus) from Southwestern France just a few months prior. We concluded that my scorpions were also a new species, which we named after their native mountain range: Buthus balmensis sp. n.

The species was featured in TV5 Monde’s L’écologie en action show. I led filmmakers to the type locality of Buthus balmensis and commented on its ecology.