House centipede
The house centipede is a yellowish-grey creature with three dark stripes on its back and up to 30 very long, thin legs. It zooms across floors, walls and even ceilings. It is a speedy little hunter that catches bugs in our houses.
How big is it?
How long is it?
How big is House centipede compared to YOU?
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How fast is it?
Fun facts
It can run up to 40 centimetres in one second.
Its long back legs look like feelers, so it is hard to tell which end is the head.
A baby has only 8 legs when it hatches and gets more each time it sheds its skin, until it has 30.
If an enemy grabs one of its legs, it can let that leg go and run away.
Unlike most centipedes, it has good eyes, but it hunts mostly with its feelers.
Most asked questions about House centipede
?How many legs does a house centipede have?
A grown-up has 15 pairs of legs, so 30 legs in all.
?What does a house centipede eat?
Other little house creatures like spiders, cockroaches, silverfish, ants and termites.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Scutigera coleoptrata
- Named by
- Linnaeus, 1758
- Group
- Centipedes and millipedes
- Family
- Scutigeridae
- Classification
- Chilopoda > Scutigeromorpha > Scutigeridae
- Lives on
- Europe, Africa, Asia, North America
Where the facts come from
- Scutigera coleoptrata (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by Didier Descouens. CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.
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