In a comment, Mac C. spurred my memory about centipedes in
the house. Yes, there are some.
Centipedes are elongate, segmented creatures with little legs. They have one pair of legs per segment; the similar millipedes have two pair per segment. (Centipede = hundred legs; millipede = thousand legs. They don't have than many). Both kinds of animals are soil arthropods (arthropod = jointed leg), found in forest to desert soils and temperate to tropical places. Turn over a rock or two, or a spadefull of garden soil, and you're likely to unearth a centipede.
House centipedes are immigrants from Mexico, perhaps two inches in length. They scamper along on long, stilted legs, unlike those of its soil-living cousins. House centipedes were abundant in my ground-floor, humid apartment in Lawrence, Kansas, years ago. They are reputed to eat cockroach eggs. I welcomed them, and was never bitten. Maybe they couldn’t get hold of my skin?
Once, in a roadside park near the Devil’s River in Texas, I
turned over a rock and exposed the big, red-headed desert centipede, about six
inches long as I recall.
My father said, “Sonny, leave it alone. It can sting you with each of those legs!”
“No, Dad,” said I, wiser with my entomological training, “They can only bite you with their mouthparts – those jaws. See?”
Turns out, Dad was right. That big centipede is strong enough to puncture your skin with those sharp claws on each leg. And there is a poison gland located in the base of the leg. It’s never happened to me. I don’t intend to experiment with a big centipede.
And here's a strange one. A former student phoned me to ask if centipedes had hallucinogenic properties. She was volunteering in a half-way house, and found that the recovering addicts were eating centipedes.
That's one I never pursued.
Dac Crossley
1/24/2010
“There is no pleasure in having nothing to do; the fun is in having lots to do and not doing it.” – Writer Mary Wilson Little.