The house centipede (Scutigera coleoptrata). You may be looking at this thing and thinking that centipedes only have one set of legs per segment and ergo I’m a dirty liar. I do not blame you for thinking this. However, if you flip them over, you’ll see that those hard plate-looking things down its back don’t really correspond to the segments you can see on their ventral sides. So there.
Above: Suck on it.
You may also be looking at them going “House centipede? As in, my house?” and the answer to that is…maybe?
They don’t have to live in houses. They do, however, like to live in houses, because then they get to eat the vermin that we attract. They only get to be about an inch and a half, though, so they’re not usually big enough to notice.
Their little forcipules typically aren’t strong enough to break human skin, and their venom’s not much worse than a bee sting if you do manage to run afoul of the biggest of them. They’re not really aggressive toward large animals, and they have very good eyesight for centipedes, so mostly you’re in the clear. They like to just run straight up walls, though, so feel free to continue hating them for frightening you and being creepy.
They do exhibit courtship behavior, with the dude-centipedes going out, finding receptive ladies, and rolling out a silk carpet for her. Before you start thinking of this as too over the top, the silk carpet is promptly jizzed all over. They don’t exhibit much post-nuptial care, however. Lady-centipedes take the sperm, use it to fertilize her eggs, and then deposits the eggs in a suitable substrate location with their own little silk carpet and takes off.
Their last pair of legs look like antennae, but they have no special function except the confusion of predators. These little bastards can shed any of those ridiculously long legs with the greatest of ease, which lets them scuttle off more or less unharmed when something mistakes their ass for their face and pounces on the wrong end.
Did I mention that their legs aren’t the same length? Nope. That is not an optical illusion. Every pair of legs gets slightly longer the further you go from the head. This is ostensibly a mechanism to keep them from tripping themselves, but I’m pretty sure it’s actually just a byproduct of living in a world without mercy.
cucumber-s
