I came in to my third-floor Los Angeles apartment this afternoon to find this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/7995433@N02/. It was about two inches long, with (as near as I could tell) 14 pairs of legs, one pair of pincers, one pair of antennae, and one pair of extra legs / tail / back antenna or something. You can’t tell from the photo, but it had a single vertical black stripe down the middle and around the edges of the body, and was otherwise sort of greyish-clear. And terrifying.
What is it? Are there more? How can I make sure I never see one again (short of blinding myself)?
That is a centipede. They are good if you can tolerate the creepiness. They eat ants, roaches and other crawlies that might be after your hard gotten food. They will also try to eat spiders, sometimes that backfires though. They are very respectful of humans and will generally run off if you turn on the lights and make your presence known. There are 15’ versions that live in South America and eat mice and bats.
Thank you; that’s exactly what it is. I guess I’m lucky to have been ignorant as long as I have. More alarming is that it eats arthropods… what kind of arthropods is it finding in my apartment?
I really don’t think they do need a citation for that!
Cool insect! But I know the feeling of coming across some bug and going, WTF is THAT? :eek:
Not to hyjack your thread (but since it’s been pretty firmly established wtf yours is), when we were living in SE Texas we got these really weird bugs one year. They were like mutant mosquitos, HUGE even compared to the typical monsters. They looked like fucking hummingbirds (ok, I exaggerate the tiniest bit wrt size, but their shape was very like a hummingbird and they were roughly twice the size of even the largest varieties we got…and I’m from the region and have lived there off and on many years. Nothing I had ever encountered before and only that once year)
And they bit like mosquitos, except that it HURT like hell, like a needle jab, and left a small bloody hole (I kid you not; the proboscis on these puppies was like a hypodermic needle)
I killed a few and saved them in a bottle, thinking I could maybe take one somewhere and say, WTF is THIS? But never got around to it. I probably didn’t want to know anyway. Some weird Mexican import maybe? Possibly carrying who knows what sort of funky infection? Or some mutated bug due to the pertrochemical plants?
Ok, I ran into one of those a couple of years ago IN MY HOUSE and thought “WTF SQUEAL” although I’m perfectly used to the sort of compact, normal orange millipedes I grew up with but had never seem one this. . . Baroque and extravagant. Ugh. Good to know what the hell this is now.
If we had these where I grew up (Green Bay), I never saw one.
A few weeks after leaving grad school and moving to Chicago, I saw one of these, about 2" long, walking across my floor. “HOLY CRAP!” I stomped it!
Now, I know better, and try to tolerate them…we always seem to have a few in our house. (Personally, I always hope that they’re eating the silverfish.)
Nope, sorry. Not a Crane Fly. I wish I had a picture. It looked like a large, slightly fat mosquito, similar wing and body structure, with a head/proboscis like a hummingbird. Was black. The first few times I encountered one, I thought it was a mosquito, but it was much “beefier” and once it bit you, you knew it was not the run of the mill mosquito.
Thanks for the suggestion. I will have to do some research and see if I can find anything like it.
