"Never loose the opportunity of seeing anything beautiful,

for beauty is God's handwriting."

    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

    Poet and essayist

Yellow-banded millipede, Anadenobolus monilicornis. Creque Dam, north-western Saint Croix, United States Virgin Islands.

    The miriapods are an assemblage that comprise several closely related classes of arthropods with bodily frames divided into many, very similar, segments. The two best-known classes of this group are the diplopods (millipedes), with two pairs of legs per somatic segment, and the chilopods (centipedes), with one pair of legs per segment. As an additional distinction between them, all centipedes are fast and fierce predators of other arthropods, while millipedes are herbivores or saprophages, with but a few species secondarily adapted to occasionally feed on slow-moving prey.

Undulating Patterns

CLASS DIPLOPODA: MILLIPEDES

    Together with scorpions, millipedes were perhaps the first arthropods to leave water and invade land, back in the Silurian period. They were part of terrestrial ecosystems even before insects had appeared on Earth. Generally, diplopods are herbivores or mycophages (they feed on fungi). Many can secrete toxic substances of repulsive flavor that keep predators at bay, and possess aposematic, "don't mess with me" color patterns in combinations of blacks, reds, and yellows that advertise their unpalatability (though some Antillean galliwasps - a group of anguid lizards - feed mainly on them).

    Aside from toxins, and given the fact that for all their legs millipedes are very slow, many species exhibit a defense mechanism consisting in curling into a tight spiral. This protects the more vulnerable belly and also brings attackers into closer contact with the toxin-ejecting pores on their sides.

    In spite of their name ("thousand feet") no species actually has that many legs. Indeed, some species (the "pill" millipedes), are very short, possessing rather few body segments and pairs of legs.