Stephanie Loria would like to set the record straight: "If you get stung by a scorpion and you are a healthy adult, you won't die." She paused and then added: "You may WISH you were dead. But they get such a bad rap."

Yes, pity the poor scorpions — so misunderstood. Fortunately, the oddball arachnids have Loria on their side. She is one of the world's few scorpion apologists.

This fall, Loria got her doctorate in scorpion studies from the American Museum of Natural History's Richard Gilder Graduate School. Other grads included a frog researcher, a bat specialist getting an honorary degree and a guy who has identified 70 new species of wasps.

Not sure I'd want to be at their Christmas party.

But having never seen an actual scorpion — or scorpion researcher — I did want to meet Loria. What kind of gal stands up for the least loved creature of all? So the other day, I went to the museum and was escorted past dozens of dinosaur-demanding school groups, up to the restricted fifth floor, past hundreds of lockers housing insect specimens and then through a hall lined with clear plastic boxes containing ... OMG.

Tarantulas. Live tarantulas, the size of chipmunks, waving their furry legs.

How did "Night at the Museum" miss these guys?

One floor up, I found Loria in her lab, scorpions at her side — dead. "We have some live stuff downstairs, but those are more like pets," she said. "These I actually collected during my trips to Southeast Asia."

And how does one collect a scorpion? Well, said Loria, 26, cheerful as a flight attendant, you just have to go into the jungle at night. Scorpions are black, so you can't see them except by using an ultraviolet flashlight, but then they phosphoresce like Jimi Hendrix posters. They also shed their exoskeletons. So you look for glowing bits of scorpion on the trail to lead you to them, and then, using foot-long tweezers, you try to grab them before they scurry into their burrow.

At that point, says Loria, you often have "moths swarming around your face and you're swallowing them, and sometimes you're also near ants and you're covered with them, and some of them are pretty nasty." Long story short, if you don't manage to grab a scorpion with the tweezers, sometimes you just dig it out.

That's right; you stick your hand into a scorpion den HOPING you'll find one. Really, she shrugs, it's not that scary. Of the 2,200 species of them, only 45 have poisonous venom. Plus they're so cool. Did you know they're older than the dinosaurs?

In her own prehistory, Loria grew up digging for millipedes and centipedes in her New York City backyard and bringing them inside, to her parents' non-delight. She had an ant farm, a moth farm and a grammar school teacher who showed her rubber replicas of bugs and encouraged her curiosity. One time, Loria wore a cicada shell on her nose to freak out her schoolmates.

It worked.

But Loria wasn't really trying to disgust anyone. She was just fascinated by the behind-the-scenes work that insects and arachnids do. "If you watch any nature shows on TV, it's always about big cats or other mammals we relate to." But the real heroes, she says, are the smaller creatures we rely on. Bees pollinate. Millipedes play a role in decomposing. Spiders and scorpions keep the insect population down.

By high school, she was taking after-school classes at the museum, and she did an internship studying flamingo behavior. Now that she has her Ph.D., she is heading to San Francisco to start studying the evolution of scorpion venom. Her future looks so bright she has to pinch herself.

Before anything else does.

Lenore Skenazy is author of the book and blog "Free-Range Kids" and a keynote speaker at conferences, companies and schools. Her TV show, "World's Worst Mom," airs on Discovery Life. To find out more about Lenore Skenazy ([email protected]) and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.