Tag: centipedes

Forty Legged Shower Mate

Timothy Price17 Comments

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This six inch long centipede which may be everything that nightmares are made of scurried out of the drain when I got in the shower this morning.  But I think the art was me, completely naked, doing macro shots of a wet centipede in the bathtub. Since he couldn’t scurry around as much because he was wet, he made defensive gestures by raising his rear prongs into striking position as I got the lens close to him. After I finished photographing him, I scooped him up and put him outside where he can find roly poly bugs and other pests to eat.

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Lithobius forficatus

Timothy Price4 Comments

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It’s the time of year the sugar ants start prowling the kitchen for anything we have left unsealed. With the reemergence of sugar ants comes a lot of other insects, arthropods, myriapods and arachnids — what most people refer to as creepy crawlers — and with this reawakening of the “creepy crawlers” out comes my macro lens.

Today’s photo is of a Lithobius forficatus, commonly known as the stone centipede. We have lots of these 30 legged centipedes in the garden where they stir around in the soil mostly under rocks and wood eating lots of pests. One pest that centipedes eat are roly-polys or pill bugs, which are actually crustaceans. I don’t know of other predators in the garden that eat roly-polys. For those of you who are herpetophobic or ophidiophobic, larger centipedes will kill and eat small snakes and lizards. Centipedes also eat spiders and insects.

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