Household Wildlife

[urbpan]

It was nice of this House Centipede to hold still so I could measure it. (It may have just been the cold weather slowing it down, though.)

Comments

[richmackin]

I've gotten over my fear of spiders, but I'm still really creeped out by these!

[urbpan]

I finally got over my discomfort with them through repeated handling.

[vampyrusgirl]

How the heck can you handle them?? They're so quick! They always creep me out when I see them fly by out of the corner of my eye, but then I'm okay with them once I get over it.

[urbpan]

Sometimes our cat batters them senseless (or dead) and the one in my icon was trapped in the bathroom sink. Usually I just try to scoot them into a hole somewhere out of sight.

[urbpan]

kinda creeped me out, one of like, two bugs to do that

What't the other one?

[urbpan]

Earthworms scare you? Not just gross you out? Fascinating. (I'm very interested in different fears of specific animals.) You aren't afraid that they'll actually hurt you, right?

[_bazilisk_]

So that's what 'thousand leggers' are called. Hmm. As said by other people commenting, those are some creepy insects even for people used to insects like me. As a younger person I believed a rumor I heard that they were poisonous, so maybe that jsut stuck in my subconcious.

[urbpan]

Of course all centipedes (and all spiders) use venom to help capture their prey, but very few of them can penetrate human skin, and fewer are dangerous. One website suggested that house centipedes can rarely bite, and when they do it's no worse than a bee sting. Not very comforting to me, but I have handled house centipedes, and so far no bites.

AHHHHHHH!

[messy_wreck]

Re: AHHHHHHH!

[urbpan]

That's a beauty, all right!
If Haiti had a tourist board, they'd be smart not to use that picture.

kkbb caught a several inch long Scolopendra (similar to your picture) in her office in Austin! I have the picture in my archives somewhere...

[morrigandaughtr]

Never seen one of them before - only millipedes, which invaded my apartment in scores last summer.

That centipede pic reminds me (unpleasantly) of a great big silverfish (ugh). Do you have lots of them (centipedes)?

[urbpan]

They resemble silverfish when they are in a full-speed scuttle. I think certain animals bother people just by the way they move (silverfish are pretty innocuous, but they register high on the willies-meter).

We have a fair amount of them. Since they are the predators in their ecosystem, they don't swarm or cluster, they just suddenly appear every couple days or so.