Just evicted this "little" (about 2.5 inches long and faster than fsck) bugger from the living room of our new house.... <shiver>

Can't get the IMG tag to work.



Edit: Added image to post body
--_l0ser

Damn! What is that?!

A centipede of sorts? 30 legs and one pair of legs per segment.

http://www.mcn.org/1/mendoparks/insects.htm

Yup. It's called a House Centipede. The picture I posted is from the Harvard archives. We've just moved so my camera is still packed. But it looked just like that, only bigger and yuckier. Thank god for upside-down canned air: it was the only way I could slow it down enough to catch it. We do, however, have a catch and release program in effect at this house, so he (she / it) is now living happily (?) across the street.

I think it's kind of funny that a person with the screen name of Webroach would find association with other icky bugs difficult.


I'm just glad those slinky centipedes aren't common in California- but I've seen them in Ohio and that was enough.

Heh. Actually, the nickname was given to me years and years ago when I worked as a trainer for the Army Of Lunatics (AOL)... I had a reputation for finding anything on the web... one of my coworkers said "you're like a web roach, lurking around the baseboards of the internet..."

That said, I don't mind bugs in general. This one was just too big, too ugly, and too fast for my taste.

OH GOD I HATE THOSE THINGS SO MUCH!

They live in the pipes, mostly in older homes. They creep me out more than any other house bug I have come across. I used to live in a 100yo house a few years ago, I was doing some dishes, took a plate out of the sink and one of the biggest house centipedes flew into my face. I almost shit my pants.

Yeah, our new place was built in 1900 (and the rest of the houses in our neighborhood are of similar vintage), so that helps explain it.

AHHHHH! KILL KILL KILL KILL KILLKILLKILLKILLKILL!!!!!!11111oneoneone

Mind you, I respect the life of every living thing on this planet, except humans and THOSE things. I go out of my way to safely remove every flying, crawling, slinking insect I find in my house on an hourly basis (where DO they come from). Yet those things, I kill with extreme prejudice.

Actually, I go out of my way to kill them with haste. The best is knocking small ones off a wall into the nearest spider web for immediate devouring. Hey, those little spiders don't bother me and they kill roaming insects, so I'll feed them millionlegapedes any day.

Here's a picture of the biggest one I've ever seen (and was forced to evict alive because my sister saw it first). You're looking at it through the gap between the door and frame because I was too frightened to get much closer. To capture him, I had to use a 6" tupperware, and his legs/antennae barely fit. Ooh, to have squashed it and watched its dismembered legs continue to twitch and curl in an attempted lightning escape...

[img]http://empegbbs.com/ubbthreads/download.php?Number=284792[/img]

Next on my list below humans and millionlegapedes are cave/camel crickets. You know, those huge black crickets which can jump extremely high and far, are very unpredictable, and dwell in unkempt/dark/damp/dirtfloor basements. Though I properly evict them alive (if I can catch them), I simply refuse to enter a basement where I see more than one. Doesn't help that they love the basement ceiling, able to drop onto you with no notice what so ever.

Me? I like 'em all.

Of course, that's because they keep my cats entertained -- I frequently find cricket legs and other bug parts on the floors, or in the bathtub.

Well look on the bright side... if you let them get big enough then they can help keep your house free of mice.

Good lord! I didn't realize that was in a tank until later, thinking the camera operator is damn brave to get that close to a blood thirsty beast. Billy, quick, get one of the guns from your refrigerator and whack that thing!

Yeah Billy come on - we all know by now. Just change your name to 'd33zY' and make it official

Sure, it can eat tiny wimpy feeder mice. It wouldn't survive a day in a NYC sewer - I don't think it's legs are big enough to even clean the teeth of a sewer rat. Though there's probably all kinds of crap a rat would want to eat before getting on to a long cockroach.

Yeah, I was hardly cheering for the bug in that scenario. I'll take little white, furry, captively-bred mice over giant bugs any day.

I recently purchased two large potted plants from Home Depot and was thrilled to learn that they were both infested with centipedes..now every few days I'm finding dried up husks all over the hourse...Yay!!!