Anatomy of a Centipede

By Cordell Jacques
Cordell Jacques

Cordell Jacques has worked in the pet industry for more than 10 years. He is also a reptile hobbyist in one form or another. Jacques keeps more than 20 various reptiles, frogs, fish and inverts. He not only has a love of reptiles, but cats and dogs, as well. He currently works at Huron Pet Supply in Ann Arbor, Mich.

Centipedes are predatory arthropods with one pair of legs per body segment. See the anatomy of a centipede in this free video.

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Video transcription

What he's doing here for us is he's going to give us a little bit closer look at his anatomy. To get really close in and look these front legs here, these two big guys in the very front, kind of look like teeth, those are actually legs. Careful, don't want him to get me, not that he's being overly aggressive today, but those are the, they're called pedipals they're used to bite. And they do inject the venom into them, from them. The venom can quite have an effect, it can cause serious pain, not to mention the mechanical damage it can cause with those guys. As well as swelling, bone ache, and other things like that. So definitely you don't want to get bit by one. But it is impressive and definitely want to be respectful of what they've got going on. Also with centipedes you will notice is that a centipede is pretty much defined by the fact that it has a pair of legs per body segment, on the animal here. Unlike a millipede which has multiple body pairs, multiple leg pairs per segment. So, and you can see, these are what are called terminus legs on the very end. And you can see that it uses kind of like a grabbing, he's going to try to grab my paint brush a little bit with them, or he was. So really what you have here is a wonderful mechanism. The whole body's like a giant hand, and they really are just great at grabbing hold of things. You see they don't have fingers or any sort of sticky pads or anything on their feet, they just tiny little points and they just grab hold and their just amazing climbers. And you really have to respect what nature has given them because it is very astounding and they are amazing predators.