COUNTRY DIARY: Having more than 1300 legs is quite a feat… even for a millipede!
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With a profusion of legs – two pairs per body segment – millipedes gracefully progress their arrays of legs in rippling ‘waves’.
This powerful gait allows these probers and burrowers to proficiently push through soil and negotiate leaf litter.
As humble detritivores many of our millipedes have a taste for algae and decaying plants, their activities directly benefitting soil formation.
In 2021 it fell to someone investigating creatures deep in a mine shaft in Australia to discover a particularly amazing millipede.
This record setter, which some surmise may feed on fungi growing on tree roots, was named for science after Persephone the queen of the underworld.
Eumillipes (‘true thousand legs’) persephone has a super-elongated spindly body. This deep burrower is the first millipede to be discovered that, with an astonishing 1,306 legs, not only lives up to, but even surpasses the group’s name.
While down under the future of the world’s leggiest animal is a worry, we know too little about Scotland’s 43 or so millipedes to have much idea how they are faring.
Contrasting sorts met with locally are ‘snake’ and ‘flat-backed’ millipedes.
These last, found in leaf litter and compost, have 19 or 20 body segments with broad sideways extending flanges making them look flat-topped. One of the four most often recorded millipedes in Britain is the White-legged Millipede Tachypodoiulus niger.
Good numbers probably of this millipede (unless one of its less common lookalikes) have been out and about locally on damp nights this month.
In daytime, like other ‘snake millipedes’ they typically curve themselves into flat spirals and rest under bark or rocks.
Taking two or three years to mature adults of this millipede have about 100 very white legs and shiny black bodies that can reach a length of some four centimetres.
They may survive for several years after first mating, with big females possibly living for up to nine years.
Mating in the White–legged Millipede follows the pattern of other ‘snake millipedes’ with males using specially modified legs in what can be described as a head to head leggy embrace.
The young that hatch from eggs start with a small number of legs but go through a succession of moults until they reach adult size.
Millipedes can produce noxious chemicals against predators and in the case of the evocatively named Shongololo or African Giant Millipede these even deter the attacks of Driver Ants.
Despite pungent defence chemicals our millipedes are not off the menu for an assortment of predators including hedgehogs, amphibians like toads and birds such as starlings.
Along with having legs par excellence, another millipede hallmark is antiquity. Scotland can boast a remarkable 19th Century fossil discovery on the island of Kerrera near Oban.
With millipede affinities Kampecaris obanensis ranks a veritable pioneer of land animals, that around 425 million years ago lived, we suppose, on decaying parts of the earliest and now long extinct land plants.
Unusual wildlife sightings in Badenoch and Strathspey for the Country Diary can be reported by email to Dr Gus Jones at gus.jones00@gmail.com
