[stuckinabucket]

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.

[stuckinabucket]

Scolopendra centipedes!

Scolopendra morsitans (brightly colored and being all maternal) and Scolopendra gigantea (darker colored, looks like the fucking devil) are the only two centipedes left in this genus, after it was discovered that all the other centipedes assigned to it secretly belonged to other, different genuses. 

This actually happens a lot, thanks to the invention of things like “microscopes” and “cheap genetic testing” and “people giving a damn.”

Scolopendra giganteae, or the Amazonian giant centipede, doesn’t just look like the devil, though.  It pretty much is the devil.  These guys get up to a foot long, and they’re the ones you’ve probably seen on those terrifying nature documentaries about centipedes hanging from the ceiling and snatching bats out of the air.  I mean, good news: it’s not “centipedes” doing this, it’s just one species.  Bad news: The species exists and it’s fucking horrible.

Above: The doom of mankind.

Centipedes in general are arthropods with clearly distinguishable segments, one pair of legs per section, and a penchant for flesh. They’ve also got a pair of modified legs up front called forcipules (think “forceps”) that they use to fuck shit up and inject venom.

Above: For once, the horrible-looking things on that bug’s face are exactly as horrible as they look.

S. gigantea is a particularly dickish specimen, given that it will legit try to eat anything it’s got a shot at taking down, and it’s got an outsized idea of what it has a shot of taking down.  I mean, it takes some series invertebrate gonads to climb a fucking cave wall, hang on by four or five pairs of legs, and then wave yourself around head-down trying to grab something bigger than you out of the goddamned air.  I mean, this is like if you climbed a tree, dangled from your knees, and started a three-way fight with a sloth and a harpy eagle.

Only the centipede gets away with it, while you would probably die.

Centipedes are generally just sort of weird, even when they’re not being horrifically, death-defyingly weird.  Even in species with compound eyes, their vision usually sucks balls.  Some of them have evolved so that they can use that last terminal pair of legs (yes, those are legs, they’re not like pincers or a stinger or anything) like another set of antennae.  A fair number of them also have glands along or near that last pair of legs that can secrete chemical defenses, which is less weird than turning them into butt-antennae but still pretty weird.  Most of them don’t mate.  The dudes just sort of jizz on the substrate, and females find their jizz-packs and use them to fertilize their eggs, which they then take weirdly good care of for invertebrates.  Even the ones that don’t care for their eggs directly tend to lay them one at a time in egg cells in the substrate.  I mean, seriously.  Weird fucking order of arthropods.