design: The scorpions were dissected in a biosafety  hood in petri dishes. The stinger and legs were removed using a sterile scalpel and then the abdomen was dissected to obtain the scorpion's internal organs which were placed in sterile 1.5ml bead beater tubes and homogenized in 400ul of SM buffer. After homogenization, 600ul of SM buffer was added to the beat beater tubes and the tubes were placed in a centrifuge for 4 minutes at 10,000 rpm to pellet tissue and cellular debris. After this, 600-800ul of the SM buffer from the beat beater tubes was added to a 0.45 um filter followed by a 0.22 um filter. Viral DNA was then recovered using the Roche High Pure Viral Nucleic Acid kit (Roche, USA) and the circular DNA was enriched by rolling circle amplification (RCA) using TempliPhi (GE Healthcare, USA). A 50:50 30ul aliquot of viral nucleic acid with the RCA product was utilized for generating high-throughput sequencing (HTS) libraries using Illumina DNA prep (M) tagmentation kit (Illumina, USA). These libraries were sequenced on an Illumina NovaSeq X plus sequencer platform at Psomagen Inc. (USA).