Caterpillar with long legs
House Centipede Facts | House Centipede Control
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The house centipede (Scutigera coleoptrata) is probably the only centipede you’ll ever find in your house. These arthropods have thin legs and long antennae, which give them a fuzzy look. They are completely harmless. Unlike most centipedes, a house centipede can live its entire life indoors.
Appearance
The adult centipede has 15 pairs of legs, which equates to one set for each body segment. The body of a house centipede is about 1 to 1 ½ inches long, but it looks much bigger because its legs are so long.
Key physical characteristics of the house centipede include:
- Dirty yellow body color with three dark stripes
- Adults have 15 pairs of legs. Some legs can actually be longer than its body length
- Modified legs, called forcipules, grasp prey and inject venom
- Long antennae, often longer than its body length
- Adult length from 1 to 1 ½ inches
- Extremely fast movers
- Climbs on floors, walls and ceilings
Habitat
Inside, the house centipede prefers a cool, damp location, which often includes basements, bathrooms, kitchens, inside cement block walls and crawlspaces. Outside, they seek out the same conditions, and are often found in leaf litter, under large rocks and in compost piles.
You are most likely to see house centipedes in the spring, when prey is plentiful.
Geography
Scientists say the house centipede is native to the Mediterranean region, but it has since spread through most of the world and is extremely common in North America.
Diet
The house centipede is an insectivore, often targeting pest insects inside a home. Its prey includes:
- Ants
- Bedbugs
- Carpet beetles
- Cockroaches
- Firebrats
- Silverfish
- Spiders
- Termites
Threat
Other than being unsettling, house centipedes pose little threat to people or their pets. A house centipede will rarely bite a human, preferring to run away instead. Bites do not cause anything more than temporary, localized pain.
Control Options
The house centipede can be controlled by running dehumidifiers, exhaust fans, limiting clutter and taking care to eliminate food sources.
Additional measures include the following treatments:
- Dust - Outside, thoroughly spread TERRO® Ant Dust around the foundation of a structure to block centipedes and other insects from gaining access.
- Spray - Hit a house centipede with TERRO® Spider and Ant Killer with this fast knockdown formula.
- Traps - Catch centipedes with the sticky glue inside TERRO® Spider & Insect Traps.
House Centipede | Missouri Department of Conservation
Media
Scientific Name
Scutigera coleoptrata
Family
Scutigeridae (house centipedes) in the order Scutigeromorpha (house centipedes)
Description
The house centipede is a yellowish-brown, distinctively shaped centipede with up to 15 pairs of extremely long legs. As with all other centipedes, there is only one pair of legs per leg-bearing body segment. The legs of house centipedes are barbed to help hold prey. There are three dark stripes running along the top of the body. Unlike many other centipedes commonly encountered, house centipedes are not flattened top to bottom, and they can run startlingly quickly.
Size
Length: to about 1 inch (not including legs or other appendages)
Where To Find
Statewide.
House centipedes are usually found inside homes in damp areas like basements, crawl spaces, cellars, and bathrooms, especially in winter, when they move indoors. They patrol floors and walls in search of food, then scurry away when a person approaches. Outside you will find them under rocks and logs or in similar protected areas.
Native to the Mediterranean region; introduced to North America and other parts of the world.
House centipedes, like all centipedes, are predators of other arthropods: Their diet consists of cockroach nymphs, spiders, silverfish, crickets, bedbugs, flies, moths, and earwigs, many of which are considered household pests. House centipedes subdue their prey with venomous fangs. They cannot easily bite humans, but if they do, it is generally no worse than a bee sting.
Common. Introduced to North America and other parts of the world from the Mediterranean region.
Life Cycle
The female lays between 35 and 100 eggs. She does not guard them or provide for them in any way. The larvae are born with 4 pairs of legs; they add more pairs of legs as they molt and grow larger.
House centipedes are aggressive predators of small insects, many of which are considered pests by humans. However, you may not wish to have these fast-moving centipedes in your home, either. Try excluding them by sealing small cracks and other entryways, or consult a licensed pest controller.
Centipedes are predators that consume smaller invertebrates, particularly insects and other arthropods. They become food for other predators, such as birds, reptiles, and mammals. Their eggs and young are especially vulnerable to predation.
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Exceedingly fast, with zillions of wiggly legs! House centipedes seem that way. We usually see them in houses, where they prey on all the other insects and spiders you don't want around.
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Julianna Schroeder
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House Centipede
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Submitted by Shawn Ledbetter
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About Land Invertebrates in Missouri
Invertebrates are animals without backbones, including earthworms, slugs, snails, and arthropods.
Arthropods—invertebrates with “jointed legs” — are a group of invertebrates that includes crayfish, shrimp, millipedes, centipedes, mites, spiders, and insects. There may be as many as 10 million species of insects alive on earth today, and they probably constitute more than 90 percent all animal species.
For the first time seeing a scooter running in the bathroom, even a person with strong nerves is prone to hard-hitting exclamations. What can we say about insectophobes and just people with a weak psyche! The sight of a multi-legged creature that looks like a mutant caterpillar and runs unusually fast causes an immediate reaction - slam it with a slipper! You can clap, and even then tell your friends what monsters run around the apartment, scaring kids and faint-hearted ladies. But it is better to understand the situation, because a scooter is, firstly, an assistant in the household, and secondly, a signal that there are some problems in the home.
There will be an article about who scootygers are, what they are trying to inform us about, whether it is necessary to beat them with a slipper, or is it better to welcome them, and there will be an article.
Who are scootigers and what do they look like?
Scutigers (Scutigera coleoptrata) , otherwise called common flycatchers are centipedes belonging to the interesting class of barnacles. Classmates are centipedes, but just neighbors.
Scootigers look like a hybrid of a caterpillar with a spider: a long gray-beige jointed body with longitudinal brown stripes and striated multi-jointed legs.
Unlike most centipedes, including centipedes, scootigers have rather long legs (there are not enough problems with the number of legs!). At the same time, the last legs on the body are longer than all the others, and females are distinguished by a special "long-legged" last pair of legs.
They may have hind legs twice as long as their torso. Due to the length of the hind legs and their similarity to the antennae, it is not immediately possible to determine where the flycatcher has a head and where the tail is. Moreover, with its hind legs, as well as antennae, the flycatcher can feel the road. That is, to run, on occasion, maybe backwards too.
If you overcome disgust and manage to catch a scooter, for example, with a glass jar, you can examine it, and definitely find the head. Fortunately, her body is divided into segments for ease of determining the structure. On the head there are antennae, very long, whip-like, consisting of 500-600 (!) segments, and complex clusters of eyes, similar to the compound eyes of insects, with which she sees very well. After the head are segments of the body, each of which houses a pair of legs. A close look will allow you to see that the legs of the flycatchers are consistently lengthened from the head to the back (this helps them not to get tangled in the legs when moving).
Read also our article Harvest spider and kosinochka - can they harm?
The number of body segments in two scootigers caught at the same time can be different - it depends on age: with each molt, the number of segments with legs increases. Young flycatchers have 4 pairs of legs, adults have fifteen of them. The last segment is without legs, it has its own tasks: it is anal-genital, and itself consists of three parts, telescopically retracting into each other.
Front pair of legs modified into mandibles used by scootigers to grab prey, they have claws and venom gland ducts to kill prey. For a person, the poison, of course, is quite weak - we are not included in the menu of flycatchers. Yes, and very rarely and not everyone can pierce the skin with the claws of a scooter. It depends both on the age of the scooter (older - bigger and stronger), and on the age of the person (older - the skin is thicker and rougher). In addition, flycatchers prefer not to mess with a person - they have already tortured them with their experiments.
With all other legs, except for the modified front legs, the centipede walks, runs quite fast, and can even jump on them. By the way, the paws on the feet of the scooter are springy, elastic and multi-segmented, allowing them not only to quickly move along vertical and horizontal surfaces, but also to move carefully along the web, without getting tangled and sticking to get to the spiders.
Just like in pigtails, the torn off leg twitches for another two minutes, with subsequent molting of the scooter, the legs are restored. But this is no reason to tear off her limbs.
The class Labiapoda is so named because of the mandibles, that is, the legs fused into a plate similar to the lower lip with sickle-shaped grasping hooks-claws. In addition, there are also upper jaws - mandibles or mandibles and two pairs of lower jaws - maxilla. In general, the dream of horror filmmakers, if you show them in close-up.
Scutigera coleoptrata. © Mark SturtevantWhere did they come from and why do we need them?
In the original version, common flycatchers lived (and still live) in nature, in warm regions (Southern Europe, North Africa, India), in Russia - in the Caucasus and in the Crimea.
The general appearance, unequivocally, makes it clear that these are terrestrial creatures. It is unrealistic to dig a passage in the ground with such graceful legs. But it is convenient to run on stones and trees. Therefore, they live in fallen leaves under trees, among stones and hunt for everyone who is smaller and weaker. It's in nature.
Over time, scootigers become more and more synanthropic, that is, they live next to humans. These are domestic (but not domesticated) animals. In southern countries, they have long settled down in houses. And now they can be found in dwellings in many regions of Russia - from the western borders to the eastern ones.
Most often, they are found in private households, country houses, on the first floors of high-rise buildings, they are very fond of basements. But every year more and more new floors are being developed, as well as production and storage facilities, public buildings and garages.
Unlike most of their many-legged counterparts living in damp places, flycatchers are more adapted to dry air, which allows them to live in human habitations.
In many southern countries, flycatchers are valued, not frightened by heart-rending cries and protected, because they are very clever at exterminating a wide variety of insects that have entered the house or live in it.
The diet of flycatchers includes, in addition to flies and mosquitoes, also ants, cockroaches, termites, spiders, fleas, moths, bedbugs, silverfish and other arthropods and insects no larger than themselves. Scootigers are active both day and night, therefore they are extremely valuable home orderlies. They do not eat anything but harmful living creatures and do not spoil anything. By the way, there is an opinion that the decrease in the number of red cockroaches is associated precisely with the spread of scootiger. Controversial, however, the assertion.
Unlike most spiders, which are localized in some corner with their web, which, as a rule, does not fit into the design of the room, scootigers run everywhere, quickly, and are able to catch up with even the most nimble cockroaches.
It is easy to catch flies, moths and other flying ones in a jump. Cautious crawlers are able not only to be seen with their numerous eyes gathered in heaps, but also to be detected by multi-joint “sensors” sensitive to smells and air vibrations. Nearly perfect killers.
For all their adaptability to relatively dry habitats, in winter they are not particularly comfortable in heated rooms with dry air. They still need moisture, so most often they are found in the bathroom or in the sink, from where they cannot get out. In all other places, scootigers are not an eyesore, quickly running from one secluded place to another where there is food. Moreover, they move mainly in the dark, since food at this time often gets out of its shelters.
A logical conclusion follows from this: if flycatchers began to come across often, then somewhere in the apartment there was a lot of food for them. This is the first signal. And the second - the appearance of flycatchers in uncharacteristic places may mean that something is getting damp there.
Worth checking out.
As soon as the food is gone, the flycatchers will leave on their own, to the neighbors, for example. Or in the basement - there is always something to profit from. That is, they do not need to be beaten with a slipper. Let them protect.
If flycatchers began to come across often, then somewhere in the apartment there was a lot of food for them. © Roberto GuerraRead also our article Are bed bugs harmful and how to get rid of them?
Why centipede?
Traditionally in Russia all centipedes are called centipedes. The most interesting thing, perhaps, is that entomologists have not yet found a single non-crippled adult centipede with 40 legs. All centipedes have an odd number of pairs of legs. As already mentioned, scootigers in adulthood have 15 pairs, that is, 30 legs.
At the end of the last century, however, stubborn biologists did find a centipede with 96 legs, that is 48 pairs. Unique. The rest, no matter how counted, get from 15 to 191 pairs.
In Rus', the number 40 has always meant “a large number”, and even the “forty forty” found in old texts is, in general, countless. In this case, the name was logical: there are many legs, and who will count them there!
But, of course, it is correct to call centipedes. And these are the ones to welcome.
Centipede, wood lice, flycatcher, centipede. What do you know about these insects? – Felitsyn Museum
Centipede, wood lice, flycatcher, centipede. What do you know about these insects?
Felitsyn Museum > News > Museum news > Centipede, wood lice, flycatcher, centipede. What do you know about these insects?
0 Comments 57
2 Sep 2020
In fact, these are the names of the same animal.
The exhibition "Insects of the Jungle" continues its work in the Felitsyn Museum. And we continue to acquaint you with “live exhibits”. And today our hero is a centipede.
Centipedes are insects, or to be more precise, arthropods. They live in all climatic regions, but the giant centipede can only be found in the tropics. Its length is up to 30 cm - agree, impressive! These creatures inhabit forests, mountain peaks, dry hot deserts, rocky caves. I must say these centipedes are capricious, they don’t like the heat, and they don’t like rainy days either, so for their comfortable stay they choose dark cool basements. The structure of the scolopendra is quite interesting. The body is visually divided into main parts - the head and body. The body of the insect, covered with a hard shell, is divided into segments, which are usually 21-23. It is interesting that the legs are absent on the first segments, and, in addition, the color of this part is noticeably different from all the others. On the head of a scolopendra, the first pair of legs also includes the functions of the jaws.
Ringed centipedes are recognized as the largest representatives living on the European plain; they can often be found in the Crimea.
The head of the insect, which looks more like a creepy monster from a horror movie, is equipped with strong jaws full of poison. Such a device is an excellent weapon and helps the centipede to hunt not only small insects, but also attack bats, which are much larger in size than the centipede itself.
As for coloring, here nature did not stint on shades and painted the centipede in a variety of bright colors. Insects are reddish, copper, greenish, rich purple, cherry, yellow. However, coloration may vary depending on the habitat and age of the insect.
Scolopendra is not known for its friendly nature, rather it can be attributed to a vicious, dangerous and incredibly nervous species of insects. Increased nervousness in centipedes is due to the fact that they are not endowed with visual acuity and color perception of the picture - the eyes of centipedes can only distinguish between bright light and complete darkness. That is why the centipede behaves extremely cautiously and is ready to attack anyone who disturbs it.
