Centipedes are fascinating critters.

[MineralMan]

Today, while reading DU, my office area centipede showed up on the edge of my keyboard and appeared to be looking at me. I'm used to the critter scampering across the wall behind my desk and showing up here and there in the office, but this was the first time it climbed up on my keyboard. I mentioned it to my wife, who shuddered a bit.

And that got me thinking about things we look at only briefly and don't consider very long. There are a lot of those things. We see videos of people dying in a chemical weapons attack, but are distracted from them by our discontent with our country's penchant for interfering in other parts of the world. We deplore the use of the weapons, but our own discontent takes precedence and we shift our focus on what is easy to complain about.

So, I looked closely at the centipede that had perched on my keyboard. My understanding is that they can bite a person rather painfully, so I looked at it with a bit of trepidation. Still, it was there on my keyboard, seeming to look at me. It has stripes on its legs which line up neatly to give the entire creature a stripy look. It has antennae that look like another set of legs.

What to do? I could have crushed it easily with my coffee cup or picked it up and killed it with a paper towel from my desk. I did neither. After a minute or so, it scampered off under the platform my monitor sits on and I thought about other things. Still, I had an opportunity to take a close, somewhat apprehensive look at a creature most consider to be a species of vermin. I'm sure I'll see it again.

With that in mind, I went and looked again at the video of people dying in an attack of chemical weapons. I looked closely at the video. I decided that I want those weapons gone, and soon. If we don't destroy them with cruise missiles, I want them destroyed by other means. I don't consider their destruction to be optional. I looked closely at something that disturbed me a great deal, and I want something done to prevent such things. One way or another.

Here's a photo of my centipede species. It's worth a look. I think it's rather beautiful, now that I look at it. People dying from chemical weapons have no such beauty:

[mike_c]

1. who doesn't love a centipede?

I'm an entomologist, so I suppose it's a given. But DAMN-- remember those artist's conceptions of life in the Cambrian seas? All those crazy body forms? They never disappeared. They're the arthropods, today.

Anyway, I realize that's not really your point, but still. Centipedes are cool little predators.

[MineralMan]

2. They are pretty cool.

I'm not an entomologist, but I have read pretty deeply into that subject area. Arthropods, large and small, aquatic and terrestrial, have always fascinated me. As you say, they were once a pretty common class, and still are, at least in our oceans.

Mine is just a couple of inches long, but has many features that are interesting. Like you, I think of all those fossils I've seen of ancient arthropods, and marvel that we still have them with us. Smaller now, and less common, but still inhabiting the planet with us. It's a shame to see people just stomp on them or call the exterminator at the first sight of one. I can't see that they do any harm here in my basement office space. So, I leave them be. My best wishes go with them as they hunt.

Still, my favorite creatures remain intertidal marine flatworms. One of my great pleasures used to be going to the tidepools with someone and finding an electric blue-striped flatworm on the underside of a cobble to show my guest. I always found them. Less frequently, I'd find a Hopkins Rose nudibranch on the underside of a kelp leaf to display to my guest's wonderment.

A guy's gotta be a student of nature, I think.

[muriel_volestrangler]

12. Their prey?

[mike_c]

15. yeah, big ones are gnarly, LOL....

A student of mine almost lost his sight in one eye handling a southeast Asian species once, at a pet trade convention. It spit its poison into his eye from a couple of feet away.

[cpwm17]

3. Thanks for not destroying the centipede

I hope the US Government stops acting in a manner that destroys so many foreign lives. The military isn't the solution for much of anything in this world. It almost always causes more deaths and more suffering.

[JaneyVee]

4. Gah! Not one of those!

[MineralMan]

7. LOL!

Don't like them? I can't see much harm in them, and much of interest about them.

[JaneyVee]

10. I've had them in the apartment a couple of times, they make me freeze in fear like

A little girl. They run SO FAST. You have one chance at getting them, if you miss they're gone forever and are up all night freaking out. I always thought they bite, ?

[MineralMan]

11. They don't really bite, I've learned.

They have little poison glands on their legs, but the common house centipede really finds it difficult to sting humans. So harm is rare from them. We're not their prey, so they probably aren't even aware of us, really. The one on my keyboard didn't seem to react to my movements or anything. I suppose it was just checking for something to eat, and I'm too big for a meal.

[rwork]

14. They bite.

Here in Okla. they grow up to 8"long.They don't have a stinger. They are very hard to kill. Hard bodies.

Google centipede bites, it will shock you.

[Wait Wut]

5. Kill it.

The absolutely most painful bite I've ever gotten was from a centipede. My entire shoulder swelled up and just hurt like hell for weeks. We're getting them at the house due to the rain (yes, it's raining in Arizona) and it's damn near the only thing I'll kill. Spiders live comfortably in my home, even though I get spider bites frequently. Centipedes die.

[MineralMan]

8. Nah. I think I won't.

Too interesting, and it seems unlikely to bite me. I think I'll just enjoy its wall running. On doing a bit of research, it appears that my centipede is a common house centipede, Scutigera_coleoptrata, and not of much danger to humans. They eat spiders, bedbugs, and other noxious critters, as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scutigera_coleoptrata

[darkangel218]

6. Yikes!

[sufrommich]

9. I don't usually freak out about bugs

(I'm the spider killer in this house), but centipedes run so fast it freaks me out. I know your post wasn't really about centerpieces but I had to add that.

[MineralMan]

13. My post was about centipedes, too. It morphed into another topic,

as things often do, but it was about centipedes as well. Now scorpions are another matter entirely. They're fast, and it hurts when they sting you. I encountered one in my house on the Central California coast. I was unaware that there were any scorpions in that area, and had never seen one before in the 35 years I lived in that town.

I had been stung by a scorpion in Arizona, where my grandparents lived with I was a child, so I was wary of the little one in my house. Still, I assumed that they were quite rare in that area, so I caught it by putting a tumbler over it, and then slipped a magazine blow-in card under the glass. I took it out and released it in the garden. I never saw another one.

I'm not too much into killing small critters, even if they sting or bite. I'd rather move them.