It all started with a lively discussion at the Year 2 snack table… were the critters that we were finding all over the playground centipedes or millipedes?
“They’re centipede because millipedes are bigger!”
“I think they’re millipede because they have so many legs!”
“Centipedes are brown and this is grey with yellow strips. It must be a millipede!”
“Yeah, but this one is reddish brown so is this one a centipede. It looks the same as your stripey one?”
With no foreseeable definitive decision being reached, it was time for me to intervene. This then led on to a whole big project of discovery that dominated the next few days of playtime and lunchtime activities!
Beware, the squeamish amongst you may not wish to look at our close-up photos of the critters!
We started our research by sharing and recording our current thoughts and knowledge. Then looked at books in the library and discovered one major difference between centipedes and millipedes that would allow us to identify which one our critters actually were…
It all depends on how many pairs of legs are attached to each body part. Centipedes have one pair of legs for each body part and millipedes have two pairs of legs for each body part.
All well and good we thought, but how would we be able to count them when their legs are so small and they are moving around so much! Fortunately, a specimen of each were located that had died of natural causes.
Looking under the microscope we could clearly see that there were two pairs of legs on our reddish brown critter – it was a millipede (Here is a close-up photograph). The grey and yellow stripey critters also were millipedes.
So we had discovered our answer.
Millipedes were then the talk of the school. We certainly did seem to have a large colony that seemed to be inching along the school walkways and up the walls! Even more were around the next day after it had rained!
Taking our investigations further, discussions then led on to the children wanting to create homes for the millipedes and to keep them as pets. Collecting them in baggies and plastic tubs certainly didn’t seem very kind. What kind of an environment would they like best? Did they like the dark? Did they like the wet… as they had come out when it was wet? Or did they come out because they didn’t like it? What did they like to eat?
Discovering more about their ideal habitat was needed so we researched more about millipedes. Click on this Millipede PowerPoint Presentation to find out what we learnt (Thank you to all the photographers from around the world who shared their photos on the Internet).
Early one morning, we then set about designing millipede habitats. Working in pairs and threes, we drew plans and then created them. With rocks to climb, soil and sand to burrow in, water bowls and decaying leaves and twigs to eat, they did look like a millipede’s dream home! We put all of our habitat homes together to make a millipede town. We introduced some millipedes and excitedly observed them in their new environments.
All was good at first. It seemed like our millipedes were having fun exploring and settling in. By lunchtime, however, there seemed to be a few less millipedes and by the next day, they all seemed to have moved out. What was wrong? We had done our research. We had included all of the things we thought they would like.
We never for sure did really discovered the reason for their mass exodus. The children certainly had a variety of different theories. Was it that they like to burrow deep in the ground, and our homes were too shallow? Do they only come out when it’s raining? Were we missing something that they liked? Some millipedes had died and thoughts were that they had fallen ill from the bacteria from our hands as we handled them. Had the year ones stolen them!?! Our most popular theory was that millipedes like to roam free and that our whole playground was in fact an ideal habitat waiting to be explored.
So our final conclusion was that, although we had built wonderful habitats, including everything our research had told us that millipede like, millipedes are nomadic and like to be free to explore. They certainly do like to move and unless fearful of danger (when they curl up in to a tight spiral), they never seem to stay still. So in the end we decided that trying to collect and keep millipedes as pets was probably not in the best interest of the millipedes. We don’t need to create a home for our millipedes, our playground is their best habitat and we are now happy to observe them within this and let them be free!
I wonder if they’ll come out again when it next rains – which is not that often here in the Turks and Caicos!
One question was… which grows to be the longest? Here on Provo the centipede grows longer than the Millipede, but what about in the whole world?
Well, according to the Guinness book of Records, the largest millipede in the world is a full grown African giant black millipede which is owned by man in Texas, USA. It measures 38.7 cm (15.2 in) in length, 6.7 cm (2.6 in) in circumference and has 256 legs. The average length for this type of millipede is between 16-28 cm (6-11 in).
The giant centipede of Central and South America called the Peruvian giant yellowleg can grow to 26-cm-long (10-in). There is also a report of a white-legged morph centipede from South America who was measured at 33cm long (13-in).
So as the record stands right now the millipede grows to be the longest!