A Field Guide to the North Side of Old Mill Hill, Atlantic Mine, MI
Archive for the ‘Centipedes’ Category.
Back on May 10, this is one of the things that Sam and I found under a rock. We didn’t spot it at first, because it looked a great deal like a small plant root - at least until it moved. It’s almost two centimeters long, but less than a millimeter wide.
If you turn over any given rock in Michigan, you are likely to find one of these:
This is a “stone centipede”, order Lithobiomorpha, so called because that’s what they live under[1]. They run like water, flowing around obstacles and into holes in a way that’s very much like the way a stream of water flows, and are kind of hard to catch. On top of the speed, they are slippery, and their dozens of legs are very good at forcing them through crevices, or out from between your fingers. Even their antennae have a disturbingly fluid nature, flowing over surfaces and contorting in a way that is more like what you would expect from tentacles than from antennae.