Okay. I’m sitting here chatting, minding my own business, when I happen to glance over and see something rather large scamper under my TV stand. Alarmed, I go over to investigate, and said large critter runs straight at me, and I smash it with the bottle of Mountain Dew I happened to be holding at the time.
Upon examination, it appears to be a centipede.
I still haven’t quite gotten over the last time I discovered a centipede in my old apartment, over a year ago. They seriously freak me out.
As I understand it, they prefer dark, damp places, like basements and such. As far as I can tell, there are no dark, damp places in my apartment. I live on the second floor, so I’m nowhere near the basement. I’ve examined my cupboards under my bathroom and kitchen sinks, they don’t appear particularly damp. There are, however, pipes coming up through the floor leading to the radiators. There appears to be some space in between the pipe and the floor where a centipede could crawl through.
Could it have come from there? What can I do to prevent seeing another of these horrid creatures? If I see one, is there a chance there’s a whole colony camped out somewhere in my apartment? Will they come for me in my sleep?
I think I know the things you’re talking about, and I don’t think they’re really centipedes. Did it look kind of like a …fuzzy centipede? I’ve seen these around my house as well; they look kind of like centipedes, but they have long legs and antennae-like things. I’m not sure if they have pinschers, either.
Was it a proper centipede or a thousand legger (that’s what my wife calls them…no idea of the proper term).
The thousand legger is tan in color and its legs extend sideways from its body and constitute maybe 2/3 of the width of the whole creature. If you smash one but partly miss the other half of the body will still run away.
They give my wife major heebie-jeebies. I’m not too fond of them either but I can cope (spiders are what do it to me…rule in my house is the wife gets the spiders and I chase down everything else).
Anyway, I have no idea if the thousand legger is related to the centipede but we’ve had them in lots of apartments and I assume that they do not have the same preferred habitat as centipedes.
My first thought was, “Oh, yeah, Down South they got them things runnin’ around loose”, but you’re speaking to us from Minnesota, yes? Hmm. Here in the Midwest (Illinois) I’ve honestly never heard of either centipedes or millipedes running loose in someone’s apartment. They’re always out in the garden. Off the top of my head, centipedes are predators on other bugs, and millipedes eat dead vegetation.
If it was up on the second floor, my WAG would be that it was probably a centipede in pursuit of its lunch (Read: cockroaches ) which happen to live in the dark wet places you describe.
Solution? Bug spray, I guess. I have good luck with Ortho Home Defense, with “bifenthrin”. Doesn’t stink so bad, and has a real good long-acting power. Buy it in the handy 1-gallon size with built-in sprayer (sigh :rolleyes: ) and spray every 3 months or so.
Kill what the centipedes are eating and they’ll go somewhere else.
Whatever it was, it most likely came up through a pipe opening, or the cracks and crevices around a window or door frame. Is there excessive moisture and/or shade on the outside? That and shrubbery which touches the building draws insects.
Since it doesn’t sound like you’re infested with the critters, you might try some preventive treatment every so often, especially now that the warmer weather is upon us.
Just about any over-the-counter ant/roach spray will do. Most of them contain pyrethrin or a synthetic form of same. They’re all good on crawling insects. Try to find one with a straw-type applicator tip if you can. Then stick the tip into the pipe access holes in the floors, walls, wherever. And find any cracks and crevices around window and door frames and treat there too. Just a short 1-second spritz should do. Top with a garnish and you’ll have a side dish your guests will talk about for weeks to come. Serves 8.
I feel really creepy reading and responding to this…I’ve only seen a centipede once in my life, and it is much more horrific than just a fuzzy caterpillar! This one came out of the drain in our kitchen sink and prompted the now-family-famous comment from my Mom on the phone, “I’m going to have to call you back; there’s a centipede in my sink.” It must have sounded silly to the person on the other end, but those things are creepy and take away your sense of proportion and reason. Antennae-like protrusions all down the body, and those things are BIG. eeewww…
My parents’ house is infested with centipedes. They like my old bathroom and the cellar most. Nasty ole things. Did you know that they have fangy, pincer-y mandible things and can bite you and that some people are allergic to their bite? I don’t know if I am, because I never let one get that close. I can’t tell you how many times I roused my mother from a sound sleep to kill one that I found in the bathroom late at night. My mother is pretty fearless.
Additionally, I suspect that those centipedes used to torture my cat while she was alive.
I’m getting the creepy crawlies just reading this thread.
I had a basement apartment with centipedes so big they wore bandannas and flea collars. The little bastards would come up the drainpipes and appear in the sinks and the bathtub, but sometimes they’d be on the floors, too. You’d smash one and ten minutes later they’d rally and come out in force. I killed them with extreme prejudice but finally I got another place because I couldn’t stand the damned things. I never figured out a surefire solution, but after reading Cecil’s column on Total Insect Warfare against the roaches I am betting Borax is a major part of any effective strategy.
Use whatever you must to exterminate them. Use poison gas, borax, Raid, landmines. Burn your apartment down. No quarter must be given in the Holy War Against the Centipedes.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I think I saw one of these mutants one morning when I was tripping - not just kinda tripping, but really tripping balls - and until now - was never really sure I hadn’t just hallucinated some extra legs and general weirdness onto an otherwise normal centipede. Of course - there were a few of us home so it would have been a group hallucination but you never know.
We tried to catch the beastie by putting a coffee can over it, but it was really fast - we ended up bisecting it, and yeah - the front 2/3 ran off - and the legs on the back 1/3 waved goodbye to it for several minutes after …eeewwww. Horrible creepy.
If anyone knows what they’re called - please share. Thousand legger sounds about right though.
I honestly don’t think it was a millipede - of course I wouldn’t rule it out - but it didn’t have the rounded segmented exoskeleton, nor was it wide bodied with the legs underneath. I’ve seen milipedes at The Butterfly Pavillion and Insect Center and it looked nothing like ones they keep there.
It was the color of dirt, had a very narrow twiggish body and the rest was all legs - but they came off the sides of the body in an upward direction and the legs each had 2 segments - jointed or whatever the insect equivelent is - kind of like daddy long legs or skinny spider legs but way way too many of them - none much wider than a coarse human hair. It was approximately 4-5 inches long and as it moved it looked like a undulating dustbunny - or a piece of carpet fluff blowing across the floor. It had a tiny undiscernable head instead of a distict head.
Looking at DDG’s link - it most closely resembles the lower photo of a centipede (ish - those legs) but with a much narrower body - completely disproportionate to the rest of the bug - at the time - it seemed to be all legs somehow stuck together at the middle - very thin body. I’ll chalk a couple degrees of the super extra length of the legs up to the drugs, but they were each ~1.5" long, conservatively - and there were over 100 just on the back 1/3 that we amputated. That same picture of the centipede shows the leg segmentation I mentioned above.
It probably was a centipede of some type - but a mutant. (We aren’t that far from Rocky Flats and the Rocky Mountain Arsenal - this would have been in 1986 -summer) In 16 years here, I have never seen a centipede or millipede out of captivity. I’m in Boulder, CO - not exactly moist here - not many creepy crawlies.
I’m with you, RickJay – I have a deep-seated and irrational fear/hatred of Things With Lots of Big Spindly Legs – centipedes (and variants), larger breeds of spider, those flying things that I always think are mosquitos but aren’t that just fly around the walls of your room until you squash them, etc. Oog. <shudder>
Millipedes and caterpillars, which have lots of tiny legs, don’t bother me at all. But those other things… I recommend napalm.
The animal you are describing is unquestionably a centipede, a common house centipede, actually. House centipedes can take the splayed appearance you describe; millipedes look like caterpillars. If it looks like the lower photo in DDG’s link it’s a centipede. If the body was thinner it might just have been a young one; they vary a lot in size.
As disgusting and horrible as centipedes are, be warned that if you wipe them out you may then get an infestation of spiders or insects. Centipedes are voracious predators so they may be fending off some other nasty bugs. I say get the whole damned house fumigated with something really deadly. Maybe twice. Kill them all.
Commander Fortune describes the thousand legger I was thinking of perfectly. The jointed legs (or crimped) are a dead giveaway. Definitely not a millipede. (actually I shouldn’t say that since I really don’t know but it’s not any millipede I’ve ever seen if it is).
Commander Fortune is also right in that the things are damn fast. I get the creepy-crawlies just thinking about them.
I don’t want to think about coming across one while tripping although I did have an experience with a Wolf spider in Phoenix while tripping (also in 1986). Talk abaout creepy! Huge, hairy, toothy, superfast spider! I swear that thing teleported itself rather than merely running from place to place. I finally got it with a blowtorch made from a can of Lysol and a lighter…the spider exploded (I think) and I left a black spot on my parent’s ceiling (it’s a wonder I never burned that place down). Like Commander Fortune I understand my state of mind might have embellished my story but I’m still sticking to most of it.
And I just now realized what happened in the OP: Mishell, cool as some cucumbers, got up out of her chair and squashed a centipede with a bottle of Mountain Dew!! :eek: WTG!
[sub]me, i’d have pretended like i just didn’t see it…[/sub]
About fifteen years ago I went canoeing down the Rio Grande with a friend and his family. It had been a wet year; the river was really running.
Our first campsite was about a hundred feet above the river, on the Texas side. This was very much a desert- no grass, just hard packed dirt and pebbles.
And centipedes. Millions of the damn things. Literally one or two every square foot. And not those tiny little “house centipedes”- no, we’re talking six-to-eight-inch long, yellow and brown monstrosities.
Everywhere.
The only way we managed to get sleep that night was by building a really big fire, and then spreading the coals into a circle around us. The coals stayed hot enough through the night to keep the damn things away.
I’ve never seen anything like that before or since. I can only imagine that they were swarming because it was such a wet summer…
) which happen to live in the dark wet places you describe.