I have three talks to present next week so today’s edition of Sunday Spinelessness will be short and sharp. In fact, here’s an animal I can’t say very much about at all, it’s err… a millipede:
For an invertebrate evangelist being able to identify an animal only as far as ‘millipede’ is sort of like a being a cheerleader for the cute and cuddly and identifying a fury creature as “definitely being some sort of mammal” – faintly depressing. It’s only thanks to the arrangement of feet that I can even get that far – centipedes have one pair legs per segment while this guy, and all millipedes have two. Interestingly*, despite the Latin roots of their names no millipede has as many as a thousand legs and, because they always have an odd number of leg bearing segments, no centipede has exactly a hundred.
Be sure to click on the image to see it in higher resolution.
*for certain values of interesting…
I have to be annoying and tell you a centipede story…
Earlier this year I was in Tonga. One night I heard something scuttling around on the floor of the place I was staying, got up and looked. I found a centipede ~50cm long in the living area. Remembering there are some dodgy centipedes in Tonga, I swept it out of the house with a broom. (Couldn’t think of anything better at the time.)
Thing is, a brief search on the WWW suggests that at 50cm, it’d be longer than what is supposed to be the longest centipede. (There are apparently anecdotal accounts of equally long, or longer, ones in the Galapagos Islands.)
If you have any thoughts, that’d be fun.