What is a centipede?
Some centipedes have more than 100 legs,so we are not surprised to learn that these small animals are speedy fellows. But some of the millepedes have more than 400 legs, and all the millepedes are slowpokes. In the animal world,speed does not depend on the number of legs. The little centipede is a hunter and he must be fast to catch his dinner. The millepede feeds on plants and decaying matter. He can dawdle through life because this kind of food is not going to run away from him.
Centipedes and millepedes are insect sized creatures, though they do not belong to the animal class Insecta. The centipede's name means the hundred footed one, but some centipedes have 356 feet, The millepedes name means the thousand footed one, but he rarely has more than 400 feet.
All these little crawlers look alike. They are long, flat fellows fringed with whiskery legs. However, there are outstanding differences between them. For this reason, the centipedes and millepedes belong in different classes. But all of them belong in the huge phylum Arthropoda, the joined footed ones. They are very distant cousins of the lobsters, the shrimps and the insects.
The centipede starts life as a tiny egg, wrapped in a wad of spit and mud along with a hundred or so other eggs. He hatches into a tiny copy of his parents, though at first he has only six pairs of legs. He scoots around under the damp rocks, or perhaps in a dark corner of your cellar, looking for bitsy bugs to eat.
As he eats, he grows. Soon he gets too big for his skin. Then he molts and comes forth in a bigger skin, plus an extra pair of legs. He molts again and again, each time adding an extra pair of legs.
He may finally get as many as 173 pairs of legs. His little body is divided into round segments and a pair of legs is fixed to each segment.
The young centipede soon learns to use his front pair of legs as weapons. They are fit ed with claws and a mild poison, just strong enough to stun his tiny victims. The foot long centipede of the tropics can harm a human being, though not seriously. If he walks across your bare skin, he leaves a long, red, itchy welt, but this is not from his poison claws. It is caused by his hundred or more scratchy feet, which are fitted with tiny scales.
The millepede needs no poisonous claws and he can dawdle through life. His diet is decaying debris, plus a few plant roots which means he is not so useful to us as the centipede who devours flies, mosquitoes and countless other pesky insects. Unlike the scrappy little centipede, the millepede is no fighter. When threatened, he rolls his long body into a round ball with the soft underside safely tucked away in the middle.