Ruud Kleinpaste: New Zealand's venomous giant centipede

A few weeks ago, we discussed the story of one of those beautiful centipedes captured by a young lady (Raine). A lovely 5 centimetre long body with long legs and fast movement – a beauty!   I thought it might be prudent to tell the story of our native giant centipede, often found at night in the North Island. In Latin the name means “one hundred legs”, but they ain’t got that many!   Usually, they have somewhere around 23 pairs of legs... or 21 pairs, or 25 pairs, or 27 pairs – always an odd number of pairs of legs (never an even number – why? Who knows!).  The front pair of legs is modified into hollow fangs with which they bite and administer poison to subdue or kill prey.   That poison also acts as a digestive juice: they inject it into prey, and it starts to dissolve the inner structure of the insect/prey so that after half an hour all the centipede needs to do is suck the dissolved innards of the prey up like a soup!   So in reality, the centipede has an external stomach in the form of that poison that pre-digests the food in the prey’s own body!   The poison is a nasty neurotoxin that really causes quite a bit of damage to humans too – I'd know! I’ve been bitten and it caused a 2.5-hour paralysis in my right arm and hand – I couldn’t write for a few hours! Then there was an itch for weeks and weeks and weeks. Some big centipedes can be really dangerous, but I don’t think there are any cases of fatalities…   But it must have been close, every now and then…   Centipedes are really fast hunters; they have amazing long rear legs that grab anything that annoys them – I can show you how to “stroke” a centipede and in which direction so you don’t end up caught in those hind legs, which means an almost certain bite!   Each body segment has its own set of “brains” or neurological centre. That regulates the leg movement and coordinates the magical motion they display.   They usually crawl into nice dark and moist places, because their skin is relatively thin and they dry out very quickly.   When a mother has eggs, she is very dedicated and looks after them for weeks and weeks – almost like an incubating mother hen. She also licks the eggs constantly to keep them moist and clean of bacteria. There is evidence that her excretion has some very powerful anti-bacterial and anti-microbial compounds in it, that could be very useful for future human medicine!  Even these scary centipedes need protection, because they may contribute to our future techniques in human medicine.   Look after all these creatures on our (Animal) Planet!  LISTEN ABOVE  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.