Animal · Germany, France, United Kingdom
Millipede
Diplopoda — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
A millipede looks like a small dark train of many rings, and along its sides a wave of tiny legs keeps rippling from back to front. Despite the name, no millipede has ever been found with exactly a thousand legs.
Picture credit: Rehman Abubakr (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Nwonwu Uchechukwu P (CC0) · Nativeplants garden (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the millipede live?
Home: damp leaf litter, dead wood and soil.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium.
The short profile
Fully grown: most 2 to 4 cm long. It weighs about 0 001 kilograms. On the menu: plants.
The story behind it
Almost every ring of a millipede carries two pairs of legs, which is the easiest way to tell it from a centipede with only one pair per ring. The legs do not move all at once but in a slow wave, and that wave pushes the animal through leaves and soft soil. Most European species stay between two and four centimetres long, while the giant African millipede grows more than twenty. A millipede is a tidier-upper: it eats rotting leaves, old wood and bits of soil and turns them into crumbs that plants can use. It grows by moulting, and with many moults it gains new rings and new pairs of legs, so an old animal has far more legs than a young one. If something frightens it, it curls up into a flat spiral with the legs safely on the inside. Some kinds also release a smelly liquid, which is why it is better to look than to pick one up, and to wash your hands afterwards.
Find it on the globe
Millipede 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 millipede really have a thousand legs?
No. Common species have roughly 34 to 400 legs. The record holder is Eumillipes persephone from Western Australia, described in 2021: one female was counted with 1 306 legs, beating the earlier record of 750 legs held by Illacme plenipes.
Where do millipedes live?
In damp, dark places on every continent except Antarctica: under leaves, stones and bark, in compost heaps and in the soil. The record species even lives up to sixty metres underground in dry mining country.
What does a millipede do when it is startled?
It curls up into a flat spiral so that its hard rings face outwards and its soft legs are hidden inside. Several species add a smelly liquid that makes beetles and birds lose interest.
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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