Animal · Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil
Giant centipede
Scolopendra gigantea — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The giant centipede is the largest centipede in the world, a hunter as long as your forearm that climbs cave ceilings and catches bats in mid-air. It has twenty-one or twenty-three pairs of legs, and the front pair are venom claws.
Picture credit: Katka Nemčoková (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Syrio (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Motokoka (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the giant centipede live?
Home: Leaf litter and caves in warm forests of South America.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, Trinidad and Tobago, Aruba, Curaçao.
The short profile
Fully grown: over 30 cm long, 21 or 23 pairs of legs. It weighs about 0.05 kilograms. On the menu: meat.
The story behind it
The first pair of legs on a centipede is not for walking. Over millions of years it turned into a pair of hooked claws that inject venom, and on this species they are strong enough to hold an animal much heavier than the hunter itself. In caves in Venezuela, giant centipedes climb to the ceiling, hook their back legs into the rock and hang down into the dark, grabbing bats as they fly past. They also eat large insects, spiders, frogs, mice and small snakes, mostly at night, feeling their way with long antennae. By day they stay under logs and leaves, because their body loses water quickly in the sun. A bite is extremely painful for a person, and in 2014 one killed a child in Venezuela, but that is a single known case.
Find it on the globe
Giant centipede is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Does a centipede really have a hundred legs?
No. This species has 21 or 23 pairs, so 42 or 46 legs in all. Centipedes always have an odd number of leg pairs, which means none of them can ever have exactly a hundred.
How does a centipede catch a bat?
It climbs to a cave ceiling, hooks its back legs into the rock and hangs down into the flight path. When a bat passes it grabs with its venom claws and holds on, using its own body strength rather than its weight.
Is a giant centipede dangerous to people?
A bite is very painful and causes swelling, but healthy adults recover. One death is known, a child in Venezuela in 2014 who was bitten by a centipede hidden in a drinks can.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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