Millipedes, as we’ve recognized them, have been a lie. The Latin identify for the arthropods implies a powerful set of 1,000 ft. Yet no millipede with greater than 750 legs has ever been discovered, till now.
The first millipede that lives as much as its identify makes use of its 1,306 little legs to tunnel by way of soil deep beneath the semi-arid scrubland of Western Australia, researchers report December 16 in Scientific Reports. Dubbed Eumillipes persephone, it’s the leggiest creature ever recognized to crawl Earth.
Researchers nabbed the specimen and 7 different curiously lengthy, threadlike millipedes by dropping cups baited with leaf litter into drill holes used for mineral prospecting that have been as much as 60 meters deep. Eventually, the creatures have been despatched to entomologist Paul Marek at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg for a more in-depth look.
Eumillipes persephone has tons of of tiny legs on its underside, as revealed on this microscope picture of a male. The millipede’s many legs assist the creature tunnel by way of soil up deep under Earth’s floor.P.E. Marek et al/Scientific Reports 2021
The pale, cream-colored millipedes lack eyes, and big antennae protrude from their drill bit–formed heads — all indicators of a subterranean life-style, Marek says. While inspecting a 95-millimeter-long feminine below a microscope, Marek realized he beheld one thing particular. “I was like, Oh my god this has more than 1,000 legs,” he says. With 1,306 tiny ft in whole, the specimen has almost double that of the earlier record-holder (SN: 6/7/06). “It’s pretty astounding.”
The researchers suspect E. persephone’s elongate, leg-packed physique helps the creature maneuver by way of soil in as much as eight completely different instructions directly, like a tangled strand of cellular pasta. “We suspect it feeds on fungi,” Marek says, however the sorts of fungi residing in these deep, darkish habitats are unknown.
While E. persephone nonetheless holds many secrets and techniques, Marek is bound of 1 factor: “Textbooks are going to have to be changed,” he says. Paragraphs on millipedes will now not require the caveat that technically, the identify is a misnomer. “We finally have a real millipede.”
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