So, I was at Mana Pools in Zimbabwe, and as dusk fell we noticed a couple of centipedes, red and black and about six inches long, scurrying around the campfire. I decided to sleep in the bed of the pickup that night rather than in the tent, the tent being on the ground that, you know, was covered in poisonous centipedes. Instead, I got spiders dropping out of trees onto me all night, not to mention the hyenas sniffing around, so that didn’t go well.
That goddam place has to have set some sort of record for number of creatures of all sizes that wanted me personally dead.
I think Australia is probably worse. Supposedly nearly everything there can kill you except for the koalas (and I wouldn’t entirely rule them out).
Anyway, obligatory Ogden Nash reference:
I objurgate the centipede,
A bug we do not really need.
At sleepytime he beats a path
Straight to the bedroom or the bath.
You always wallop where he’s not
Or if he is, he makes a spot.
People ask me how I put up with the cold in Wisconsin. This is how. I know that our winter freezes keep these horrible giant bugs (well except mosquitos) away.
Godammit. I just did battle with a (harmless) stinkbug last night. I thought we were done with them. They don’t bite like a centipede (they don’t really bite at all allegedly), but I’ve developed a phobia of insects somehow (despite growing up with a lot of time in the woods - metro life will do that to you, I guess).
Now I’m going to have stink-centipede nightmares while the spiders chew me raw (as they actually did once).
Dammit, someone gimme’ a Red Bull (either raw or with an assload of vodka).
It was crawling over the living room floor in our rental house. We chased it until it hid inside my roommate’s shoe. Eventually we extricated it and cut off the head with the centipede-decapitation tool on a Leatherman (after trying a steak knife, which was too blunt). The body kept running. 24 hours later, the body still wriggles its legs if you poke it.
I hate the little fuckers and I think this guy is kind of cute, too.
We get the house centipedes up here, and yes, it is one of the reasons I don’t mind living in the extreme cold. Nothing can live through the winter long enough to get that big!
My favorite centipede story is, there was this time I got up after a very late night, staying up to 4 AM or so. The SO and I played Borderlands for a while, and I got up to go get a snack from the kitchen. Still a bit bleary-eyed, I fished the radishes out of the fridge, got the cutting board, put it on the counter, started cutting their heads and tails off…all this without noticing the centipede that was sitting six inches away from my hand. I had opened a bottle of creamer and had left the foil thingy on the counter, and it was either licking it or stuck to it. Generally I can be calm about bugs but this was so unexpected. I screamed, and in the other room I heard the controller hit the table and my SO came running in and he squashed it.
The thing is, I have no idea how long he was there. Could be he could have been there the whole time, in companionable silence, him licking his creamer and me cutting up the radishes, and suddenly I scream and he gets squashed. Poor little guy.
Oh, man. Right now, outside my house, the entire street is slicked with a half-inch thick layer of ice. I fell on my arse four times walking home from work today. In spite of that, I’ve never been so glad of Britain’s intemperate climate as I am now, having viewed MOIDALIZE’S link. That fucking thing…even though I know it’s a centipede, I don’t know what it is! All I know is that makes me want to recoil in horror and kill my computer. That fucking thing is fucked, seriously.
Oh those? We get those in Michigan. Y’know, where it might snow 6 inches anytime from October to May and those things come into your house to get warm. That’s why they call them house centipedes.
Seriously, they’re only about an inch long. That link makes it look MONSTROUS. The most awful thing about them really is that when you squish them, the little fuckers splash. Their corpses practically drip down your wall. Juicy little things, they are.
They don’t sting, they bite. Note the red-tipped, pincer-like fangs on MOIDALIZE’s close-up. And, like spiders, they are all venomous to some degree. Even the harmless little house centipedes have enough venom to subdue their insect prey.
The ones where you are are only about an inch long. The ones where I am grow to over 3 inches, and the legspan is the same as the length. And they move like greased lightning. I’ve seen these things run down and kill those big American cockroaches, which is slightly disturbing to watch.
Although since the geckos have moved in I haven’t seen any inside the house. Which is probably a good thing. At least geckos are cute.
