We have a short but macabre selection of photos today, taken by biologist Lou Jost in his Ecuadorian home (he lives in a national park).
My last submission featured spiders and scorpions from my house. Someone in the comments wrote “…basically I’m wondering, do you live in Hell?”. Well, this submission, like the last, could go either way, depending on the person.
Last night as I went into my bedroom I was surprised to see a fairly lengthy snake stretched out nonchalantly alongside my bed. First time I’ve had one in my house. It was vaguely like a coral snake, so I was cautious about it. Here in the tropics it is harder to tell real coral snakes from their mimics, because there are so many more kinds of both coral snakes and mimics. So I carefully caught it in a flower pot and kept it until today to photograph. It turns out to be a newly described species of false coral snake, Siphlophis ayauma, which was only described in 2014 and is endemic to a small area of the eastern Andes in southern Ecuador. Pretty exciting! See here.
A few weeks earlier I had another visitor, a blue-legged centipede. I do hate these things. This one walked between my feet while I was working at night. I’ve never yet been bit, but I suspect it will be just a matter of time before I roll over one in my bed, or get bit by one hiding in my shoe….
I remember giant centipedes way back when in Vietnam — nothing could clear out a tent or bunker faster! One of the reasons I returned to live in NY, where winter tempers the size of nasty wildlife….
ewwwwwww…icky!
Actually, snakes and bugs are cool. But they do need to learn some manners and not enter a room without knocking first.
Well, these guys were here first. 😉
Cool pictures. I love snakes and spiders and scorpions but must confess that centipedes are a bit scary. Is that centipede some Scolopendra species?
Otto, I don’t know the genus. I know very little about centipedes…
I do not wonder. You are in some kind of Hell. Analogous to what Bill Murray said in Groundhog day, not the Hell, but definitely a Hell.
I for one would love this environment. The snake reminds me of a king snake, but I am not sure of its affinity.
The centipede might be in the Scolopendra genus, but like you I do not know how to officially diagnose that. Years ago a visitor to my department dropped by to give me a member of that genus, which turned out to be a giant desert centipede. The beast was exceptionally aggressive, wanting to lunge at anything. After a couple days it managed to escape the container that it was in, and i never did find it…
It’s waiting…patiently waiting….
Yipes!
Dunno about centipedes, but do know that tarantulas can be recovered if you put out something moist after dark. I gather most of our temperate abodes are way too dry for some arthropods. Something to consider when your next gift centipede escapes…:D
(We first discovered this when a lost spider was recovered on a pile of cat barf…)
We see Scolopendra centipedes a lot while working on field crickets in Hawaii and elsewhere in the Pacific, and although usually a huge arthropod enthusiast, I really hate them. One of my proudest moments was boiling one to death in a sink in Rarotonga.
Are most Scolopendra aggressive as well as venomous?
“Aggressive” is hard to assess in something like a centipede — I don’t really want to know whether they harbor malice in their central ganglia, just that if our paths cross they are likely to not react favorably! But indeed, unlike, say, tarantulas, which can sometimes be handled perfectly safely, I wouldn’t risk it with one of those centipedes. (See aforementioned boiling.)
Ha, ha, thanks Marlene!
I didn’t mean to imply any “thought” with the word “aggression.” I know there are better scientific terms that are eluding me now for the sort of testiness I’m thinking about.
I’ve heard stories on tarantula boards of spider species (mostly old world) that chase their owners around the room. Made me all that more fond of my New World theraphosids, urticating hairs notwithstanding.
When an expert like you recounts such a boiling, I think that tells me all I need to know. 😀
Growing up in New Zealand, I saw the occasional centipede, but they were too large and were non-aggressive. But centipedes in Japan grow large (15 cm or more) and have a nasty bite.
“not too large”, not “too large”.
Yeah – as a NZer, I didn’t even know centipedes could be scary!
Centipedes are probably the most dangerous land species in the Cook Islands (they don’t have snakes, poisonous or otherwise). A few of the outer islands still have many thatched buildings and some live in the thatch. But the longest one I personally saw was only three inches long, sitting on a trail in Rarotonga. Fortunately I didn’t tread on it, since I was as usual barefoot.
However, the biggest one I’ve ever seen was caught by a friend’s kids in their garden in Titirangi, a suburb of Auckland. They had it in a coffee jar, and it was at least six inches long. Guarantee it would scare you, Heather!
cr
And of course I must pay tribute to Ian Fleming’s Dr No, where someone put a giant centipede in James Bond’s bed. The description of it crawling slowly up him while he tried not to move is one of the creepiest passages in literature.
(In the movie they changed it to a tarantula, which IMO was rather hackneyed and not nearly so shuddersome).
cr
Agreed on both counts.
I remember seeing and catching some quite big ones as kids in Gisborne, but they didn’t scare me. I used to try and count their legs to see if there were 100, and I always wondered why centipedes were bigger than millipedes, and why they didn’t have 1,000 legs. There’s only one insect we have in NZ that scares me, and I’m not telling what that is!
Hmmmm….wish I knew enough about NZ to guess.
Weta?
(P.S. Millipedes and centipedes aren’t insects, as I’m certain you know. I think all these things we’re discussing belong to the wider phylum of creepy-crawlies).
cr
No, not scared of weta. 🙂
And actually, I didn’t know they’re not insects – all that’s beyond my ken. If they’re creepy-crawlies, creepy-flyies, they’re insects to me. 🙂
Wetas are certainly insects. I believe one defining thing is that insects have 6 legs, so exempting spiders and *pedes.
A weta certainly startled the daylights out of me once. I was helping a surveyor in the bush, I chopped right through a inch-thick ti-tree trunk which turned out to be hollow and a big weta popped out of it six inches from my nose. The surveyor heard my scream and said he knew immediately what had happened.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Male_tree_weta-orig.jpg
cr
Ha ha! Yeah, that’d be a bit of a shock even if you weren’t scared of them! 🙂
The bite on the toes will teach you to knock your boots out before putting them on.
(Not that I’ve learned the lesson either. But I haven’t had the big bite either. Yet.)
I learned that lesson long ago. I was a resident biologist in a Costa Rican oceanside lodge, and as the next load of tourists approached in their boat, I put on my boots to greet them. In one of my boots was a giant five-inch black scorpion that stung me multiple times. It was intense. I had to give my “Welcome” talk to the new tourists while wondering if I was going to die right in front of them….
Juicy! Or as Rincewind was wont to scream (in 17 languages, all fading rapidly into the distance), “stercus stercus, stercus, this time I’m really going to moritorius sum!”
Aarrrgh!
Love the snake; have a bit cooler emotion toward the centipede…
I’m with you there.
I think those are both very cool finds! Easy to say at this remove… 🙂