Visit from a Predator: the Giant Centipede

IT TAKES SOME FANCY FOOTWORK TO BE A GIANT CENTIPEDE

Laissez-faire best describes the attitude at my d desert home toward most flying and crawling creatures that enter uninvited. I love the fragile beauty of moths and their instinct for camouflage. And no one kills a spider in my house, certainly not one of the crab or wolf spiders that perform yeoman's service each night intercepting and eating kissing bugs and other such noxious bloodsucking varmints before they can prey on us. Some creatures we stay out of the way of the black widow, for instance, whose scrambly web occupies a dark recess in an unused room. We don't go in there at night without flipping on a light. And then there are scorpions and a few other stinging arthropods that we capture and remove. Our motto, as you can see, is pretty much live and let live.

But there's one visitor, whose occasional appearance raises the hackles on my neck, not so much out of fear but in recognition of the presence of an arch predator, a model of hunting and killing efficiency.

Late one night, I glanced up from a book I was drowsing over and spotted a seven-inch many-jointed creature crawling swiftly -on more legs than I dared get close enough to count-across a narrow wall between two windows. To and fro it went, pausing from time to time to probe cracks beneath strips of framing, searching, it seemed, every square inch of brick. When it reached the ceiling, it searched the space above the windows in the same eerily methodical way, raising its bluish head now and then to wave a pair of orange antennae in the air.

Drowsy no more, I snatched from beside my chair a shoebox. I waited for the wall-crawler to come within reach, and scraped it off the stucco into the box. Then I put the box into the refrigerator. Several hours at 40° F. or so, and my cold-blooded specimen would be sufficiently immobilized for safe inspection. I pulled several field guides from my bookshelf. Insistently the word "myriapod" flashed through my mind, for although I had never before encountered anything as big as the monster in the box, I'd seen plenty of millipedes (thousand feet) and centipedes (hundred feet), and so figured my captive fell into the category of animals known collectively as myriapods (countless feet). Sure enough, in one of my guides to arthropods, there he was, Scolopendra heros, the giant desert centipede.

In the morning, I removed the shoebox from the fridge. Then, carefully, very carefully, I lifted a corner of the lid and peeked inside. There it was, stretched full length, not so much as a twitch from one of its many legs.

Its long flattened body consisted of 24 segments with a pair of jointed yellow legs attached to each a fraction under eight inches. Ringed in black where they connect, the segments of the giant desert centipede are amber to light brown over its entire length except for the head and tail, which have a dark-blue cast. At first it's hard to tell head from tail, and there's a reason for that. The tail of the giant centipede is a pseudohead that mimics the head in shape, movement, and color, though the head is slightly more rounded and its antennae longer and more delicate than the tail appendages. If a predator, such as a bird, reptile, or ringtail, mistakenly grabs the tail, the centipede's head is free to turn and bite its attacker.

Anyone bitten by a giant desert centipede should call the local poison control center or seek first aid. Although not lethal in hu-mans, the bite is toxic and can cause swelling, soreness, and slow healing.

By day the giant desert centipede hides under large rocks, in woodpiles, or beneath ground litter or loose bark, becoming active after dark. Although it has only a single pair of simple eyes, the giant centipede is a formidable night stalker, and most prey are no match for its speed.

Giant desert centipedes, which add body segments as they molt, are long-lived and take several years to mature.

Inside the box, my handsome specimen slowly came out of its torpor and crawled onto a small piece of wood I'd placed in the shoebox. Folding itself, it turned its head all the way down to its posterior segment, cleaned the legs on both sides, then moved on to the next segment, and the next, until it had covered its whole length. I won't say I felt kinship, but somehow that act of "grooming" made me feel tender toward the animal. Later, after dark, I took the shoebox into the desert and gently tipped it out into the night.

FOCUS NATURE