ISSUE #15: Let Your House Centipedes in from the Chill

If you’re cold, they’re cold.

I’ve been thinking a lot about ecosystems lately, probably because, as always this time of year, we’re saying a temporary goodbye to the teeming vibrancy of summer. I’ve started using the public compost bin on the corner of my block to throw away my kitchen scraps, imagining them carted off to some immense mountain of rich soil out on Long Island somewhere. I check in daily on the volunteer gourd, possibly a pumpkin vine, that has set up shop in my local park. I’ve been watching Scavengers Reign on Max, a show about a group of marooned human astronauts navigating and disrupting the fungal interconnectedness of an alien planet. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass, which I finally read a few months ago, has stayed with me, offering an alternative to the hierarchical basis on which we study the natural world, suggesting that every living and nonliving thing is equal in purpose, serving a collective good. 

I’ve also been thinking about the weather, and the bugs. It’s no surprise to anyone that small creatures seeking shelter from adverse outside conditions usually end up in people’s homes, whether we welcome them or not. Human houses are, for the most part, clean, dry, and warm, with plenty of places to hide and plenty of rooms to roam. They’re also a pretty consistent source of food: kitchen crumbs and edible fibers attract hungry bugs, and those bugs in turn attract their predators. 

I had never seen a house centipede before moving to New York, where one morning I woke up sleepily brushing one off of my face. When I realized what had happened I jerked up from the bed fully awake, and saw a small, many-legged creature crouched on my bed, looking embarrassed. I don’t think it meant to bite me or crawl into my mouth or anything like that. Likely it was just stalking around on top of my bed, and unknowingly stepped from pillow to skin. 

I like bugs, but I did not like that. House centipedes are uniquely horrifying, a combination of everything people say makes insects freaky—crawly feet, too many legs, and a mouth that can give a solid, painful bite. On top of all that, they’re fast. They look like Satan himself rejected them from Hell. They are also master predators, and their prey is other bugs. 

Scutigera coleoptera is often found inside houses, hence the name. Human dwellings provide the perfect climate-controlled environment and reliable source of prey for them to hunt, usually at night. Adults have up to fifteen pairs of legs, much longer than the stubby limbs of their slow cousins, which give them the ability to run at incredible speeds, catching their prey either by jumping on top of it or by lassoing it with a pair of long, modified antennae-legs (similar to our friends the tailless whip scorpions). 

Here is C.L. Marlatt, an entomologist who worked at the Department of Agriculture in the 1900s, with a particularly vivid description: 

It may often be seen darting across floors with very great speed, occasionally stopping suddenly and remaining absolutely motionless, presently to resume its rapid movements, often darting directly at inmates of the house, particularly women, evidently with a desire to conceal itself beneath their dresses, and thus creating much consternation.

They also practice an evolutionary trait called automimicry, meaning that a species “mimics” itself. We see it in fish that have eye spots near their tails and caterpillars whose back ends look like their own heads. It’s a way to confuse predators attempting to sneak up from behind, making them unable to distinguish back from front. House centipedes have elongated pairs of legs on both ends, making it difficult to see which end is the front until they start moving again. (Residents of the Sundarbans, a giant mangrove forest spanning the dividing line between eastern India and western Bangladesh, once famously tried this technique, wearing masks on the backs of their heads to keep from being attacked by tigers.)

I am not the sort of person who actively encourages bugs to come into my home. The outdoors has more to offer them than my Brooklyn apartment, which I do manage to keep clean in spite of my cat’s best efforts. In my house, bugs are gently ushered back out either through an open window or inside a plastic container. But the house centipedes, when I see them, are a great sign. They freak me out, but I also think they’re fantastic. I love the way they run like little shadows across the floor, the racing stripes along their backs and the dark eyes that watch me from under my furniture. I welcome them mainly because they take care of invaders I don’t even know are here, and partially also because they are way too fast to catch. They are my unpaid, vermin-eating interns. 

It’s important to embrace the fact that your home is an ecosystem unto itself, with many residents besides the human ones. Living in the world means living alongside everything else in the world, whether that’s our human neighbors, or our pets, or the trees outside our windows, or the bacterial cultures inside our bodies. House centipedes are neither charismatic nor attractive, but they’ve evolved to live alongside us all the same. We are all trying to get through these long nights together. Hosting small, unseen houseguests makes the winters a little less lonely.

IN BUG NEWS:

Thanks to my mom, the number one Apple News fan, for sending me this huge bummer of an article from The Guardian, about a paper published this week indicating the number of species at risk of extinction is at least double than what we had previously thought—and the vast majority of them are insects. Lead researcher Axel Hochkirch of the Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle in Luxembourg sums it up: “Without insects, our planet will not be able to survive.”