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Centipedes are carnivorous and venomous. They sting and eat their prey, which typically consists of insects and worms. They're not aggressive towards humans, but may bite you if you provoke them. Centipede bites can be very painful to people.
Centipedes are easily recognized by their many legs and although their name means “100 legs”, centipedes have one set of legs per segment of their body and the number ranges somewhere from 15 to 177 legs total. Their segmented bodies are long and flat and can range from 1/8th of an inch to 6 inches in length. House centipedes are yellowish to dark brown and may have darker stripes or markings and are found throughout the entire United States.
Centipedes actually have the ability to bite and contain poisonous venom. The poison from their fangs, which are actually their first set of legs, is used to kill insects, which are their primary food. To a human, a bite feels like that of a bee sting and can be painful, but there are no long-lasting effects.
Centipedes actually prefer dark, damp places outdoors and can be found under stones, in rotting logs, in mulch or yard clippings. If the correct conditions exist indoors, they can be found in basements, closets, crawl spaces, or any area where other insects are found. They hide in cracks and crevices during the day and feed at night on silverfish, carpet beetle larvae, cockroaches, bed bugs, spiders or other small arthropods.
Millipedes are many segmented, wormlike arthropods found throughout Pennsylvania. They usually go unnoticed under leaves, rocks, boards and other locations that provide a cool, damp habitat. Occasionally, millipedes may enter structures in great numbers causing alarm. Fortunately, they do no damage (other than being a nuisance) and cannot long survive the dry atmosphere found within most buildings.
Millipedes can be easily identified by their two pairs of legs per body segment (except for the first three segments that have one pair each). Because of the many legs, they are often called ‘thousand-leggers’. Sometimes they are called ‘wire worms’ because of their cylindrical wire-like body shape. However, they should not be confused with the beetle larvae known as wireworms (family Elateridae: the click beetles) which have only six legs, feed on grass roots, are typically a dark yellow color and will not crawl about on the soil surface. Most of the millipedes that people come in contact with are a dark brown color, approximately an inch long and one sixteenth of an inch in diameter. Most have a hard outer skin and will curl into a spiral upon death.
Millipedes normally live in cool, damp places such as those found under stones, leaf mold, mulch, compost heaps, piles of grass clippings, and brick pathways. At certain times of the year millipedes become restless and migrate from their normal living places; they appear in window wells, basements, garages and other places where they become an annoyance. These migrations are often associated with cooler weather or following heavy rains, but may also be a function of mating behavior, especially if the millipedes are seen to climb trees, fences, buildings and the like to a height of approximately six feet.
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