Centipede Intelligence

[dehaani]

Hi,

As some of you may know, I got my first 'pede the other day. I also have two Tanzanian Red Claw scorpions and I've kept emperors, forest scorpions and desert hairys in the past.

I love the 'pede, it's a De Haani "Mau Chau" about 7" BL. I was observing it eating a cricket a few minutes ago and I was quite impressed at it's apparent level of awareness. It was chewing the cricket from a perch I've provided and half of it's meal fell to the ground. When it finished the remaining half, it went straight down to retrieve the fallen part, backed up and continued eating.

To me, this seems to demonstrate a higher level of awareness and memory capacity than I've seen in other inverts. Whilst admittedly, scorps don't tend to drop their food too far from their mouth; they do seem to live "in the moment" as it were. They seem much more reactive, than proactive within their environment than the 'pede.

Of course, it's entirely possible that it "smells" the carcus below it somehow but I'm not convinced; the manner of it's movements just seemed so purposeful.

Does anyone have any interested anecdotes about these fascinating creatures? Especially some sort of heightened awareness that might surprise us!

 

[Steven Gielis]

Read my reaction here: http://www.arachnoboards.com/ab/showthread.php?t=75504

They smell the food also but they are intelligent!

 

[Twilight]

I got a few stories like that, some not bug related.

-One time while feeding my monitor, he flicked piece of meat which broke off and flew behind a bush a few feet away. I was thinking how wastful it was because it was a rather big chunk. However, after he finished his meat, he went directly behind the bush and retrived the piece of meat.

-I once had a giant white knee that would be really really greedy. I'd throw in crickets because I thought he ate them all. However, the whole time, what he did was killed the cricket and rolled their mushy bodies into a giant ball of "death". Afterwards, for awhile, he would sort of roll it around and whenever he felt hungry, he would eat some bit off of it. Of course this grossed the crap out of me and I eventually stole his ball of "death" and discarded it in about 2 days.

-One thing I noticed about centipedes is their ability to be very neat/tidy eaters. They are some of the best scavengers around from what I see, because they really really try to eat EVERYTHING. One of my pedes killed a cricket and one of the legs were left behind, so what it did was walked around the tank after it finished eating the cricket in order to pick up the limbs.

-Funniest thing ever that I saw was when I had my Thai Zebra...was it? It was a burrower and was a freebie from petcenterusa.com which has, from what I heard, gone bad. One time it pulled down a cricket, but the cricket got away from its grasp. I had the T. in a small clear pill bottle and I can see everything. Its burrow is around the bottom of the bottle and leads up. SO anyway, here I am watching my turantula chase a cricket around in circles around its burrow, I laughed my ass off...

I think somewhere here I lost my point lol. Hopefully I'll be studying this as I enter zoology and ecology. We'll see, I'll come back smarterer than all of you

 

[dehaani]

One of my pedes killed a cricket and one of the legs were left behind, so what it did was walked around the tank after it finished eating the cricket in order to pick up the limbs.

That's funny because my pede's tank is full of cricket drumsticks!

 

[Twilight]

Lol, you probably have a lazy centipede. Like owner like centipede I'd always say jk jk. You better take those cricket parts out of there before you get some mites lol.

 

[dehaani]

Thanks for the tip! Time to get a pair of forceps methinks!

 

[Twilight]

Come on, be a man and use your hands!

 

[Geography Guy]

Come on, be a man and use your hands!

lol

Cheers,

 

[236260]

That's funny because my pede's tank is full of cricket drumsticks!

Mine is not so fond of the dark meat either.