House Centipede
I honestly didn’t think I’d ever be running a picture of one of these, but on October 17, 2013, Joe (one of our graduate students) presented me with a jar containing this house centipede that he’d caught in his apartment:
These are fast-moving predators, and the sheer number of legs gives them a fluid running style that I’m told gives a lot of people the willies. The legs don’t seem to end in “feet” as such, they just taper away to nothing. And the legs break off easily, which helps it to get away from things trying to catch it.
In this next picture of the head, you can see the “poison claws”. These look superficially like mandibles, but they actually come from the first segment behind the head, not the head proper, so they are not actually part of the mouth.
There are several species of long-legged centipede like this, but the one that has most thoroughly adapted to living in houses is Scutigera coleoptrata. They originated in the region around the Mediterranean Sea, and are a generally warm-climate species. If you live somewhere warm, they can live either inside or outside of your house (and are likely to come indoors during cooler periods). Around here, I’m pretty sure that they are completely dependent on having a house to shelter in, otherwise they’d never have a chance in our harsh winters. Since they are actually able to live their entire lives indoors, I think that there are probably established populations of them in Houghton and Hancock, where there are a lot of apartments and University dormitories. Out in the countryside where we live, though, I don’t think they have much of a chance.
They tend to live in parts of a house that are a bit damp (like basements, kitchens, and bathrooms), and/or have lots of places to hide (like laundry rooms and offices). They don’t tolerate dry conditions very well, because like other centipedes they don’t have very good abilities to conserve moisture when they breathe. Even if you do have them, though, they are pretty harmless. Their poison claws are too weak to puncture human skin unless they hit a really thin spot, and even then the venom is only on a par with a small bee sting. They’re mainly around to prey on insects and spiders, so if you dry up the moisture they need to live and clean out the other small arthropods, then the centipedes will be gone too.
I tried keeping this one as a pet, and succeeded for a couple of months by keeping it in a jar with a periodically-moistened paper towel while feeding it cluster flies. Unfortunately, it died in early December 2013, which was right about the time I ran out of live cluster flies to feed it and had to switch to dead ones. Whether it died because dead flies simply didn’t have the necessary nutritional value, or because it was just at the end of its lifespan, I don’t know. But still, it is clear that with a proper environment and a good food supply, one could pretty easily cultivate house centipedes in a terrarium.
And now, let’s close with a song!
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They are especially charming when they drop from the ceiling into the bathroom sink when you’re brushing your teeth, or scamper out from under a laundry basket in the basement.
Three things.
1. The song was wonderful. How did you find it?
2. Here in San Diego, the weather must be too dry for them.
3. I never go for house centipedes. They give me headaches. I always go for top shelf centipedes.
Anyone who has ever read “Bloodchild,” a short story by Octavia Butler that won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for speculative fiction, will run shrieking into the void at the very thought of a terrarium full of these things!
Anne: Oh, yes, I remember “Bloodchild”. If I remember right, the cover art on that issue of “Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine” did look a great deal like a gigantic house centipede. And then she added in the whole “laying eggs in the still-living flesh of another creature” thing, too. It’s almost as if she had a checklist of all the creepiest features of certain insects, and rolled them all into one gigantic alien.
KT: I stumbled on the link to the song in the comments following this picture on BugGuide, and couldn’t resist including it here. Incidentally, that particular picture also drew a lot of people who were looking for house centipede specimens.
One point I forgot to mention: a friend of mine who lives in Minnesota tells me that the centipedes in his house have a fondness for peanut butter.