What Kind Of Pede Is This? 8
Feb182010
Okay, Tai-haku requested more photos of the centipede/millipede to try and figure out the strange id of the Panama bug we saw on one of our bird walks:
Here it is with the toe of my Keens as a size comparison.
Here it is with my reluctant hand model.
It didn’t move nearly as fast as North American centipedes do but maybe the move slower in Central America. Whatever it was, it was huge.
Yep. That’s a centipede.
He probably moves slower because he’s bigger. 
the centipedes where I grew up (hawaii) were relatively slow, though they could move fast when they needed too. This guy looks like he’s just truckin’ along.
of course, I’ve never seen a house centipede before, so.. maybe those guys really zoom around.
(I’m really glad of that too. Centipedes are intimidating… but house centipedes are Scary Beyond All Reason)
They’re scary, and justifiably so. If they’re like any other centipedes, they bite and it hurts like a bastard. I’ve been stung by lots o’ bees, wasps, hornets, bitten by spiders, but the centipede is the current record keeper. I’m willing to let it have the record, frankly, because the alternative is more testing…
It looks like it could crawl right into one of the open spots in your Keens…
We have lots of centipedes here in the summertime (among the leaf and wood debris). This one looks a little different though.
Can’t see anything too sharp looking on the front end whatever it is. I was talking to someone over the summer who used to have a scolpendra centipede that he would feed pinkies (yep – frozen baby mice) to which, you know, totally creeped me out as a concept.
ColbyWolf – Thank you so much for the information! One of the best things about this blog is the education I get from the readers.
On one my trips to Costa Rica we were taking a night hike in the forest and found 2 large millipedes copulating on the path. It was at that moment that I coined the phrase “arthropod erotica”.
It is actually a millipede – two sets of legs per segment, as opposed to one in centipede. I cannot remember the exact taxon name, but these (flat-backed millipedes) are fairly common, albeit in smaller form, all around New England, and probably alot of the country.