really? i've never heard of them being communal
Definitely. S. polymorpha is a great species to start with. If some of your spiders are OW Ts, you’ll be ready for centipedes. I’ve found my C. lividus to be much harder to work with than any centipede species I’ve ever kept.
lol my albopilosum has more of an attitude than the polymorphas i've
Most my Ts are OW only one I really get bother from is my big P Regalis got to tap the enclosure before you open it if she’s not in her cork or she just bolts lol
I put several of them together in a ten-gallon terrarium maybe a year and a half to two years ago. They are still doing well. I have seen interactions between them that were non-violent - they just rear back, check each other out briefly, then go on their own ways. But "communal" is not the correct word. "Communal" usually implies a degree of cooperative behavior, such as communal hunting or feeding. In this case they are merely tolerant of each other.
Interesting, have others tried keeping multiples of these or other centipede species together without losses?
S. mutilans is well known for living in groups. Someone posted a few months ago that they had kept a pair of S. dehaani together safely in a large terrarium for a long period of time, which inspired me to set up an experiment with three S. dehaani sharing a large terrarium. Mine are still doing well a couple months into it, but I'd still consider it very experimental. (On a different occasion I put two S. dehaani together for breeding, but the female immediately chose lunch instead.) I've heard of other non-Scolopendra species getting along in groups - maybe someone with experience in these will post.
Please keep us updated! I'd love to have a few S. dehaani in the same enclosure.....
I'll post if it is successful for a year.
Any update on the communal S.dehaani's ?
No changes that I know of. The only way I can verify that all three are still doing well would be to dig them up, which I did about a month ago. But I prefer not to do that very often. I do see one on surface at night every once in a while, but can't tell one from another so if I see one each night for several nights I can't tell if it's the same one all the time or a different one each time. I suspect if one killed another I'd see remains on the surface.
I know that scutigera and geophilomorpha can live together.
All is going well so far. I often go for several days at a time not seeing activity in the cage (they are definitely late-night animals), and when I do see one out - it's just one centipede. Since they look pretty much alike I can't tell whether I'm seeing the same one over and over again, or different ones. But yesterday we had thunderstorms here and that seemed to bring everyone to the surface. I watched nervously as they crawled close to each other, then over each other. And they otherwise ignored each other. I didn't record the date that I started the experiment, but it's at least five months ago.
