TEHRAN — Misleading advertisements about breeding scorpion for venom extraction and introducing it as a lucrative business is a lie and also endangering these species, arachnologist Alireza Zamani has said.

Exporting scorpion venom is illegal and also threatens the country’s biodiversity, Mehr news agency quoted Zamani as saying. 

Over the past two and a half years some opportunists have encouraged people to breed scorpion for milking its venom and have made people believe that it is the most expensive liquid worldwide saying that it costs 40 to 80 billion rials (nearly $1 to $2 million) per gram, Zamani regretted. 

“People have also called me asking me about scorpion breeding, people with no expertise in arachnology, who thought they could breed scorpions and milk its venom and sell it to God knows who.

“This is not real. Actually scorpion Venom can be an expensive liquid but not as much.

“Moreover, it is not easy to distinguish different species of scorpions from each other, even scorpions’ venom differ from one another depending on their habitats and people cannot become experts by merely taking courses in scorpion breeding. 

“Another issue is that scorpion breeding take years, even their mating and their living situations can differ from one another and all this would make scorpion breeding a complex process. 

“But some non-experts are now running courses teaching people about scorpion breeding.

“Arachnologists might have not discovered some species of scorpions yet, but people may haunt them and sell them which could result in the extinction of some species of the scorpions which are not even discovered by scientists yet.

“Department of environment should intervene promptly or this will lead to irreversible consequences for these species,” he concluded.
According to viralmega.com scorpion Venom, is the most expensive liquid in the world and costs a staggering 39 million dollars per gallon.

Scorpions use their venom to kill or paralyze their prey, and as a defense against predators. But it is believed that the venom can be used it to treat diseases like arthritis and to make anti-venom’s.

But the reasons behind its extremely high price is that it is incredibly hard to obtain, one yield only produces on average 0.5mgs of venom. Three grams of venom, or 0.000792516 gallons (assuming density of water here), doesn’t sound like much. Basically if you could somehow extract that much in a day you would have to extract it from way more than a quarter of a million scorpions.

MQ/MG