Ologies with Alie Ward - Diplopodology (MILLIPEDES & CENTIPEDES) with Dr. Derek Hennen

Episode Date: August 31, 2022

How many legs? Why so many legs? What's a millipede versus a centipede? And again WHY SO MANY LEGS. We have just the guy for that: Diplopodologist Dr. Derek Hennen. As a person who’s spent over a decade sorting through leaf litter and naming scores of new species, Derek is truly a champion for the multi-limbed little critters. If you liked what Casey Clapp brought to Dendrology, get ready to appreciate millipedes like you never thought you would. Also: mythology gossip, world records, Taylor Swift fandom, and sniffing bugs. Dr. Derek Hennen’s websiteFollow Dr. Derek Hennen on Instagram and Twitter and @dearmillipedeA donation was made to Lower Muskingum ConservancyMillipedes of Ohio Field Guide PDFYou may also enjoy: Dipterology (FLIES), Sparklebuttology (FIREFLIES), Forest Entomology (CREEPY CRAWLIES), Entomology (INSECTS), Scorpiology (SCORPIONS), Kinetic Salticidology (DANCING SPIDERS), Acarology (TICKS), Melittology (BEES)Sponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, masks, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam MediaTranscripts by Emily White of The WordaryWebsite by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Oh, hey, it's the room temperature, bubbly water that you're sipping like foam, alleyward. And we are back and your relationship with millipedes is about to change because I know you and you don't think about millipedes enough. So get ready for a new you, one that stops on hikes to sniff worm-looking things that were some of the first terrestrial animals.

There's 12,000 species of these. There might be five times that. Lurking and leaf litter around the world and you will love them and you will love this guest. So if you liked the vibe of the dendrology episode with Casey Klopp, get ready for a ride with this diplopodologist who studied biology for undergrad in Ohio,

got a master's in entomology at the University of Arkansas and his PhD in millipedes at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. You may have noticed he's lived in the South. When he says the word color, it sounds like color and if you hear it and it delights you, feel free to take a tiny sip of the nearest beverage in celebration of him.

He has been on my list for years to interview and just this weekend, we got a chance to connect and talk legs. But before we get into it, just a quick thank you to everyone who supports this show at patreon.com slash ologies and sent in such wonderfully astute questions. Thank you to everyone who recommends the show

to your friends and your enemies alike and to everyone who makes sure they're subscribed for fresh episodes and leaves reviews, which I honestly tearfully read every one of them. I'm not crying every time I read one, but I do read all of them and I pull a new one each week to prove it. Like this week's is from our grab man who wrote,

come for the interviews, stay for the asides and said that I was the human embodiment of a footnote, which is the highest form of compliment they said and I will take that also get well Ella. So thank you to your reviews. I read them all. Okay. On the episode in which you will upgrade your brain

with trivia such as where you will not find a millipede if they have toenails. The difference between a centipede and a millipede big question, which species has the most legs glow in the dark wormy bugs if Taylor Swift is on another astral plane with 300 legs sniffing these animals to impress others. Free field guides and why entomologists get to name critters after weird stuff with millipede enthusiast absolute human

gem and top notch Diplopodologist Dr. Derek Hennan. You've been on my list. I've had an index card with word millipedes and your email on it sitting on my desk for like two years. I'm glad we're finally able to work it out. My name is Derek Hennan and I use he him pronouns. And how long have you been?

Is it? Wait, help me out. Decapodologist Diplopodologist Diplopodologist. I said it wrong again. It's Diplopodologist. I don't even know what a decopod is. I think that's shrimps and crabs. Some crustacean.

Clearly the no card just said millipedes. That's all you need. Do you know what is the etymology of the ology? Do you have any idea? Yeah, so Diplo coming from I believe it's Greek for two and then poda foot so two foot because they have two pairs of legs on each segment. So Diplopoda.

Now do most arthropods have just one coming off of a segment? Yeah, mostly it's just you know that one segment gives you one pair of legs. Millipedes are interesting because somewhere in their evolution they've undergone this fusion of multiple segments into one. And so we call that the Diplo segment. Not all of the millipede segments are Diplo segments.

There are some segments that don't have any legs and there are a couple near the front of the body that only have one pair of legs on them. But then most of the rest are going to be Diplo segments. So are some arms and some legs? They're all legs. You know humans we're kind of weird because we do have arms and legs but when you get down to the majority of animals

you're just talking they're all legs. I have long, long argued that toads have arms. I feel like there's definitely like little hand and fingy situations happening. Yes. But what about okay millipede though comes from the word for thousand right? And then centipede for 100.

Yep. Is there any veracity to either of those names? Well there didn't used to be but only a couple months ago my former PhD advisor Paul Merrick he worked with some Australian scientists who had found this weird millipede deep underground from a borehole. I think it was found during some mining exploration or like environmental assessment of someplace they wanted to mine.

So they had this very, very deep tunnel to put a borehole down there and kind of collect whatever critters were down there. I forget exactly how deep it was but. I looked up the paper and it was about 60 meters deep or nearly 20 stories below the earth. The point of it is that they brought up this weird millipede and it is actually the first millipede that we know of

that has a thousand legs. And so the thousand leg nomer was a misnomer until very recently and now we know yes there are millipedes with a thousand legs and so most millipedes they'll have anywhere from maybe like a dozen or so leg pairs to one or 200 but we had not found one with a thousand before. Previous to this the millipede with the highest number of legs was from California.

Right. And it was around 700 legs. Still a shit ton of legs. I mean let's be honest. Yeah it's so many. If you round up it's like it's almost a thousand. Yeah you know I mean if you're sitting down looking at one of these millipedes and you're like oh man that's a bunch

of legs do I want to spend all this time counting them up or it's like one two three a thousand there we go. Yeah a thousand legs. What was it like in the millipede community when that leg number was counted and it was over a thousand like what was it like did people go out that night or their case. Oh yeah oh we were celebrating because finally you know we get that question a lot and we'd be like well technically no

so we sound like a bunch of nerds but now we can be like yeah they get a thousand legs you know it and so it was nice to finally be like yes this is like a true name for this animal we finally found it. It took us a little while but we got there. Does that specimen have a genus and species name yet. Yes so that is you millipedes is the genus and so that means millipede and then Persephone which is I'm not up to date on

my Greek mythology but I think Persephone was the one who went down to Hades for reasons. Just a side note so in Greek mythology Persephone was the daughter of Demeter and Seuss and one afternoon Persephone is just trying to have a chill day picking flowers in a field mining her goddamn beeswax and then Hades the king of the underworld rips a fissure in the earth and takes her to hell to be his bride her mom's pissed especially since Zeus gave

permission for all this bullshit and also Hades is Zeus's brother so do the math she now lives in hell with her sexual predator uncle as her husband so many flavors of gross happening here and so she's like get me out but Hades feeds her a pomegranate seed so now she can never escape because them's the rules so the family strikes a deal she has to be by coastal between hell and earth and while she's in the underworld with her gross naked uncle it's winter up here on

earth so anyway this millipede that looks kind of like a noodle with a previously mythical number of over 1,000 legs 1,306 to be exact lives 200 feet below the surface and is named you millipede Persephone got this hell so you know it's a true true deep millipede oh man what a fine did um did your PhD advisor get to classifying name it yeah yeah so he was on that paper when my former lab mates Jackson means he was also on that paper and so they got it shipped from Australia and my

advisor Paul Merrick he counted up the legs took a good photo of it and then kind of put a dot every five legs or so so you could count them more easily and then Jackson did the genetic stuff for it to see you know where it falls out on the evolutionary tree of millipedes and so it took them a while but they were able to put that together and work with some other scientists and really produce a really nice paper that got some great coverage in the media of which we're always

happy to see when millipedes are mentioned anywhere in the media and you know we were we're all just happy to see this thing finally come to fruition and get out there our millipedes mentioned in the media enough are there any pop cultural references to millipedes like when do you tend to see them when does your like Google alert for millipedes go off actually in the past like decade or so we're seeing more like coverage of millipedes in the media which is nice you know when we find

these super numeric like millipedes they'll get covered super numeric meaning hello legs I recently had described a bunch of millipedes stemming from my PhD work and I name one of those after Taylor Swift so that was a lot of that was a lot of media coverage I was kind of thinking okay either you know people will notice it or know what's going to see it or care but it just kind of exploded so I was happy to see that but you know a lot of coverage in the media about millipedes stems

from either oh you know how many legs do these things actually have because you know people make lists of oh superlative animals which has the most legs which has the fewest you know snakes and millipedes I guess. So appreciative of Ms. Swift's songs that Derek named the Tennessee millipede species Ninaria Swifty or the Swift Twisted Claw Millipede and it does have twisted claws just like the most bonkers nails you've ever seen so I went to

fact check all of this and one of the top related Google inquiries was why is Taylor Swift a millipede and while that is a question for an alternate and perhaps a superior multiverse the reason she is a millipede in this one is because of the chestnut hue of this 300 legged dirt eating tiny beast so who else gets a millipede named after them thanks for asking Derek's wife Marianne got a millipede on her too and for more on this kind of flavor of cuteness you can

listen to the recent dipterology episode with Dr. Brian Lissard who has named flies after Beyonce and RuPaul among others versus other people typically invertebrate biologists we have a lot of things to name because there's so many undescribed invertebrates out there and they're the majority of animal species so we have all these names to give to these critters and if I named all these millipedes after some morphological feature they probably be some pretty boring

names because their their body really looks the same except for their sexual structures well hello there and you know I feel kind of strange just naming them after the sexual structures so I like to include you know some more cultural names or other kind of stories behind the names for example I took some botany courses during my undergrad career and I really enjoyed those and so I like to know what kind of what the forest composition was like as I'm going through

and finding these species so I named probably four or five after just the tree species I was saying so there's Ninaria rhododendra suga which is hemlock, myriodendra which is after tulip tree which has one of the best scientific names I've ever read lyriodendron tulipifera just it's gorgeous just rolls off your tongue like okay there was this one millipede where I found it in northern Georgia and I was on my own I was collecting all by myself

I pulled up to this national forest site and it's got these beautiful hemlocks and rhododendron trees beautiful stream just flowing through it I'm like ah this is beautiful this is perfect for twisted claw millipedes so I sat down had a nice lunch I was thinking about ooh how easy it's going to be to find these millipedes and then I collected for about two hours did not find any I was like this makes no sense this is the perfect habitat for these things where they going to be

and so I got really angry but frustrated so just started I use a garden claw to dig up these millipedes because they're under the soil under the leaf litter and so I just got so frustrated I was hitting the ground with that and just digging a hole and lo and behold I just saw one of these things pop up from the soil it's like oh I finally found it and you know it just took two hours of frustration to finally find it and I named it in an area Spalax which means mole

and Greek because you know kind of digging under the soil now is that what it looks like is that what fieldwork looks like for you you have a garden spade maybe a sandwich and probably a hat and sunscreen and you just are turning over leaf litter to see what you find yeah pretty much I feel like I'm very lucky because from my fieldwork I got to go to all these just beautiful forests and like state parks national forest kind of whatever other places I could get into

and whereas I have some other friends who for their scientific work they would be like out in the middle of a cornfield or something in the blazing hot sun and just toiling whereas I'm you know having a nice little sandwich by the stream in a forest yeah and it really is just getting into these places that have a good amount of leaf litter and then flipping logs and rocks turning over a bunch of leaves maybe digging to the soil a little bit and that's how I would find my millipedes

sometimes I would collect a bunch of leaf litter and put it through something called a burlesi funnel it's essentially a bucket with a funnel in it you put all this dirt and soil and leaf litter into that and then put a light above it and then you put a cup of alcohol below the funnel can I get you a drink and then that'll drive all the millipedes and other bugs down into that cup of alcohol and then you sort through it later and it's a great way to get you know these tiny little

bugs you would never see otherwise it's you see the coolest things in the leaf litter like you know I've been doing this for about a decade or so now and I'm still finding species I've never seen before and they're just all under your feet as you're walking through the woods and you just never know otherwise unless you just stopped and like looked and so I loved the fieldwork I got to do a lot of the time it was with my lab mate Jackson and so we had a good time just driving

you know throughout the eastern U.S. listening to podcasts stopping at whatever little pull off we could if we saw some good trees and you know we just had a blast going through the forest and finding these little bugs. What were you like as a kid like how did you know that you were destined to become a dip a dipodologist dipodologist dipodologist how did you how did you figure out that's where your legs were taking you I mean it's it's random so if you

talk to a lot of entomologists you'll get these stories like oh I've been sticking bugs into my pocket since I was 4 years old I was not one of those kids I was inside playing Pokemon all the time. My dad used to get angry at me he was like just go outside you're always in your room playing video games and it wasn't until college that I really started to get more interested in biology and I had some professors who are entomologists

and so you know if we had a lab we'd go out into the woods and look for bugs and do all this other stuff and originally I'd started college wanting to go into marine biology but I also went to college in Ohio and we don't have much ocean out there but what we do have particularly in southeast Ohio where I was is a lot of forest and so once I discovered bugs it's like wow you know I can just kind of go anywhere and find these cool bugs and so it just kind of snowballed from there getting

into millipedes was completely random I had the opportunity to go to this millipede and centipede identification workshop at a little biological station when I was still an undergrad and they let me go for free I learned about millipedes and centipedes and that just kick started it because it was it was and remains a pretty wide open field there's a lot of work to still be done if you think of butterflies or dragonflies these are groups that are pretty well studied because

they're these big insects that are very charismatic and you know people like them they're pretty to look at but with millipedes and centipedes there's only been at any one time in North America at least you know maybe half a dozen people working on them so there's still a lot of species to be described a lot of behavior to look at and just you know figure out the basic stuff of this you know you go to your local bookstore you can probably find a great butterfly guide that tells you all the stuff you need

to know for your area and that just doesn't exist for millipedes and centipedes yeah yeah no one cares enough about them it's not they care exactly so we need to make them care and they're so cool there and there are so many beautiful ones too I got into these things and I was like oh you know maybe we'll see if I like them or not and they just continue to blow my mind they're so cool what type of color variation and leg variation I'm used to seeing the ones that look kind of like our dark brown hot dog

with like a million legs like those are the ones that are sometimes they're way into the garage and you're like oh what are you doing here and they're like nothing nothing and what other types are out there yeah so the one that most people are probably familiar with is kind of like you you know they've kind of come into your garage or your basement or something they're kind of brown they've got a bunch of legs and typically the ones that we see in our homes are introduced species oh there's one species called the greenhouse millipede it's native to East Asia

and it has since spread to every continent except Antarctica and oh whoa honestly I wouldn't be surprised if they find it in McMurdo sometime like it is it is the most successful millipede in the world like it's not very interesting to look at but you've got to respect the drive it has if there's anyone down at McMurdo the US research station on Antarctica listening to this please holler at Derrick if you see what looks to be a tiny deep brownish cuckooie nut necklace but with like 60 yellowish legs just scooting around being like hey I made it

but millipedes as a whole they come in every color under the rainbow there are green millipedes blue millipedes I've seen these just mind-numbingly beautiful like violet purple millipedes this is a species near Knoxville Tennessee and it's just this really interesting slate gray purple blue color to it it's just gorgeous so I'm based in Virginia and in the Appalachians we are just blessed to have a plethora of gorgeous millipedes they're like their base color is black and they can have spots and stripes of

yellow red orange bright colorful coloration and you know you show someone one of those millipedes and that starts to kind of turn the gears in their head like oh maybe I was wrong about these guys so they're just they're so cool some of them will fluoresce under UV light oh whoa and so that's how I really fell in love with them I learned about that and I was like I need to see this for myself so I got you know a cheapo UV light on the internet went out at night on a little night hike and just were shining on the ground and I saw just a couple dozen of these little

millipedes they were maybe an inch long and they're just glowing this ethereal bluish green color it was like all these little shining stars going under and out of the leaves like it was it was amazing once you've seen that it's it's hard to not appreciate them they're so just amazing that's what really made it all click for me and I was like yeah this is what I'm going to do for the rest of my life oh I love that do the six of you millipede scientists in the continental US have any idea why they might fluoresce under that UV light yeah it's it's a good question you know we know it's a chemical in their

exoskeleton that causes that fluorescence but we don't know an exact reason for it it might just be that it is a random byproduct of that chemical in exoskeleton but interestingly enough out in California there are true bioluminescent millipedes so kind of like lightning bugs they'll produce their own light no yeah and that has been found to be sort of a warning to predators and so their main predators are these little rodents I think some type of mouse out there and so by glowing producing that light that's sort of their aposemitism their warning coloration at night you know it's dark their colors

can't be shown with this you know don't eat me reds and yellows on blacks that type of color and so at night if they can at least advertise to these rodents hey I'm glowing this collar maybe think twice before you eat me because you either die or throw up and that helps neither of us that's what bioluminescence is thought to be for but the UV fluorescence we don't really know if there is even a reason for that and where in terms of the bioluminescent ones where are those found in California yeah so those are in the Sierra Nevada's I think that Sequoia National Park has some it's this really cool genus called

Motexia they're in the Sierra Nevada's of California and there's also one other bioluminescent millipede I believe it's in Japan and those southern Ryukyu Islands and so those are the only ones worldwide alley here in California so if you're lucky if you go at 3 a.m. up in the Sierra Nevada's you might be able to find some. For more on bioluminescent bugs you can see the Sparkle Botology episode about lightning bugs with the world's finest firefly expert and a self-proclaimed Sparkle Botologist that is her word Dr. Sarah Lewis in which I learned that

California has pink glow worms so Californians crush a can of monster and stay up till dawn looking for glowing bugs because there are worse ways to destroy your sleep cycle and I've done them. Also what is a millipede versus a centipede is it like how all cacti are succulents but not all succulents are cacti or like how all tortoises are turtles but not all turtles are tortoises nope it's not like that at all. But you also see a lot of people have trouble keeping in their heads what's a millipede versus what's a centipede because they just think oh you know it's

a little bug with a lot of legs it's you know one of these things and so a lot of times I'll be talking to people about millipedes and you know I'm thinking oh yeah cool I'm telling them all this good stuff they're really into it and they're like yeah so with these centipedes it's like oh man. But you know you just try to meet people where they are and you know before I started studying these things I didn't know the difference or maybe I didn't even know there was a difference so you know I don't try to focus on that but I do try to you know essentially centipedes are carnivores they have fewer legs

millipedes are vegetarians they have more legs and so that's kind of a good way to spoon them apart in your head. Well you know curious about what the millipedes are eating versus what the centipedes are eating and also do you study centipedes at all or how is your time swap between centipedes and millipedes? Yeah so let's see between millipedes and centipedes you know for my PhD work I was focused on millipedes I might grab some centipedes when I was out but since I finished that I've been getting a little more into centipedes there's this

group of centipedes called the stone centipedes and they are not very well studied in North America there are scientists and other parts of the world that do study them but here in North America there was only really one guy studying them for like 50 years he was kind of a jerk and some of his taxonomy is pretty bad so you know I don't feel bad for shaming him now. To give another tangent this guy when he died I think he died in like the 50s or the 60s and one of his former students when he learned of his death said ah his meanness must finally have gotten to him.

Sounds like a dick. Yeah but so for the longest time you know it was him there have been a couple other American scientists who worked on this group of centipedes but not too many so there's still a lot of work to be done so I've been trying to you know get into this group of centipedes more and kind of figure out you know where we are and try to pull together some identification resources for them so that you know we can actually get more people interested in them and working on them because there's so much work that still needs to be done.

You hear that budding entomologists the world needs centipede and though they have tons of legs and kind of bitey jaws they're not as big of dicks as their human researchers so get in there. And they're cool little centipedes if you get bitten by one it's not really going to be a problem these ones in North America they only get to be about an inch long so it might be kind of like a wasp or a bee sting. I've never been bitten by one so far so you know if that happens I'll update you but a lot of them are pretty small so I do a lot of leafletters sampling and

then I'll see them in the little cups of alcohol after they come through the burlesi funnel and some of them have really cool modifications to their legs especially the last two pairs of legs on their body. There's one species around here in Southwest Virginia that I find pretty often and the males will have this weird like brush of hairs on one of their leg segments which is really enlarged and kind of bulbous and we don't really know what those hairs are for like are they secreting chemicals to like attract the female or secreting pheromones to kind of calm her down so they can mate

or something. Ways don't know it's a cool morphological feature but we don't know about the behavior of them so I've been trying to get a little bit more in the centipedes and sort of get a baseline of okay you know what's occurring around me that type of thing and so hopefully you know in the coming decades we'll get more and more information about these centipedes and there are more people getting interested in them I tell people you know right now is a great time to get into millipedes or centipedes because there's just so much more information

you can actually find good photographs of them online which wasn't really the case when I started. Well do centipedes because they're carnivorous do they have venom glands kind of like arachnids is that what's going on versus millipedes which are are millipedes out eating kind of dead leaf litter and dead organic material? Yeah yeah that's an excellent way of thinking about it actually so okay so when we're talking about centipedes and their poison glands and their jaws so a really cool thing about centipedes is their actual mouth parts are pretty

tiny they're not very large they have this really weird head morphology. What you see if you are looking at the underside of the centipede those venom jaws or forcipules those are actually modified legs and if you sort of dissect the head of the centipede it becomes really apparent like oh yeah these are just you know beefy venom legs essentially if you get it under a really good microscope you can actually look through the cuticle the exoskeleton of those venom legs and see the poison gland within that and it goes up to the very tip of the forcipule there and it's very sharp kind of like if you've

ever seen an up close image of a scorpion sting or something like that there's a little pore at the tip and that's where they secrete the venom into whatever critter they've caught and are currently terrifying. It's kind of like spiders how they'll also just kind of you know grab something in their jaws and check that venom and spiders they'll kind of suck out the juices they don't really have the mouth parts to tear things apart centipedes do they're kind of small mouth parts but they'll kind of you know after they've said dude something killed it with their venom they're just sort of

I don't know like you know if you're eating like a really frozen popsicle and you're just kind of gnawing on it trying to get stuff off that's kind of how they're eating their prey you know they just kind of have to gnaw on it and kind of get these chunks ripped off. What are they eating by the way? They're really eating whatever they can get their hands on and so well their legs on I suppose yeah so they're eating the small arthropods that are down on the leaf litter most of the time when you find centipedes they're going to be

either in the soil or kind of under logs under the leaves so depending on their size they're going after small bugs like springtails maybe juvenile insects that they're finding really anything like that as they get larger they'll feed on larger prey so I think it was planet Earth or one of these BBC documentaries maybe like a decade ago now it's been a while since I've seen it but they've got this amazing footage of this bat cave somewhere in Southeast Asia I think it was and they've got these huge tropical centipedes that can get up to about a foot long and they will hang from these ceilings to catch the bats as they fly out.

Holding on with its hind legs it reaches out into their flight path and almost immediately It has one. An injection of venom from its fangs kills the bat almost instantaneously. It will take it an hour or so but it will eat all the bats flesh. Oh shut up oh yeah and as an invertebrate scientist you know whenever we see these stories of invertebrates eating vertebrates we're kind of trained we're like yeah finally here's how it feels because you know usually the vertebrates that are feeding on the inverts so you know we get some pride from that. There's a recent paper looking at the ecology of this island somewhere in the

Pacific I think it was and it was looking at these nesting birds and what the purge of them were and it turns out that they're these large tropical centipedes on the island and they are the number one cause of mortality for these bird chicks. Look this up and this was on Phillip Island which is about 900 miles east of Australia. We're nearly 4,000 black winged petrol chicks a year get gobbled by foot long centipedes. There have been days where you are absent mindedly scrolling Twitter on the toilet at work and somewhere on a quiet island a centipede is eating a fucking bird. Oh my goodness he ate a bird. Michael he ate a bird.

You know when you get a large enough centipede it will start going after vertebrates. It will kind of eat again whatever they can kind of subdue and get their legs around. Oh my god the idea of a bug eating a bird is so mind-blowing like so backwards and weird and cool. It gives you pause and you know while we're on that topic I just want to you know blanket statement centipedes aren't trying to attack humans you know typically you're not going to have to worry if you're kind of around some of these larger tropical centipedes that's what the entire group of those centipedes is called but we do have them

in temperate regions as well. You know just don't grab these centipedes and you're probably going to be okay. They're not particularly aggressive towards us because we're just a lot bigger and they can't really eat us so they're going to leave us alone. Are there any species that can send you to the hospital like a black widow or something? Yeah you know if you're coming up against one of these like foot long centipedes and it bites you and you're if you're like immunocompromised or something like that then it could probably send you to the hospital. It would at least be pretty painful so you might go there

just for that but typically you're not going to have to worry about any that are you know really serious. Can I ask you questions from listeners? Yes please. Oh they have some good questions and I saved some of their good questions because I know it's on all of our minds but before your questions let's toss some money like leaf litter at a cause of the oligarchus choosing. And this week Derek asked that it go to the Lower Muskingum Conservancy which is a land trust in the Muskingum River watershed in Southeast Ohio and it is for conservation purposes and he said, I spend a lot of time on their lands collecting millipedes when I was

in college and they exemplify why caring about your local nature matters. You can visit muskingumriver.org which is linked in the show notes in case I am saying that wrong. Thank you to sponsors for making that donation possible. Okay your 1,000 questions including this one which was also asked by Justine Dahl, Jenna Catalano, Lauren Legg, Megan Ramirez, Asia Yeager, Elijah and first time question askers Anna Frazier and Leila Laco and Mia Manzer wrote in this question fucking why? That was the whole question. But Hannah Nooste, Eric Kaye, Hayley, Moe Casey, a lot of people want to know why? Why so many legs?

Well why not? I mean don't get me wrong I would like 700 to 1,000 legs also I mean more the better but from an evolutionary standpoint why so many legs? Yeah you know that's a good question that often comes up essentially the body of a plant of a millipede you've got head and then you got trunk and so trunk is just all the other segments after the head and so they have a segment right after the head called a column and it's kind of larger usually kind of quadrate. Quadrate just means square side note so their quadrate column is just a big

square ass neck. Think of it sort of like a bulldozer or something they have this plate that they can push against stuff and in their daily lives what they're mostly doing is kind of burrowing around and moving stuff and so having all those legs and that plate right at the front of their bodies all those extra legs give them a lot of power and so that helps them push away like soil particles pieces of wood things like that and helps them be able to burrow and tunnel around and so probably why they have all those legs is that it gives them a lot more power to be able to really push

through or wedge themselves into tight spaces. Some of these millipedes with many many legs like a U-millipedes Persephone that true thousand leg millipede it's probably also using all those legs because it's living deep down underground in the soil maybe that kind of helps them grab on the soil particles and be able to move around a lot. When you get that many legs it gets a little bit tricky to even walk you know on on the top of the ground and so typically when you see a lot of legs on a millipede they're going to be kind of down in the soil and able to move around grab on the soil particles and move their bodies around that way.

I've seen some of these millipedes just like on the countertop or just like kind of out of that very tight soil crevice space and they're not very good at moving the kind of wrap around they're just sort of looking for stuff that they can wrap their legs around to really propel them and move around with and so you know if you have all these legs and that pushing plate that gives you power to burrow around or just to grab onto soil particles so you can actually move through the substratum. So it makes much more sense to watch them walk through dirt than it does on your garage floor. Yeah yeah pretty much like if you ever see them on your garage floor they might

kind of slip or they they'll sort of start to climb along and fall over. It's kind of cute actually yeah I sometimes I keep them in these little cups when I'm working with them and they'll just kind of go around the edge and then try to go as high up as they can and then they kind of fall over and you know they're kind of embarrassed and try to right themselves but you know if they're just in the soil and kind of or like under a log or something that's where they like to be that's where they can really move around and show off how good they are at just moving and living. That makes me feel so much better for them because yes I think we're used to seeing

them looking awkward but they're like yeah I'm just out of my element dude. I also I love that for people that only have one to two legs maybe tops that just the idea of like why how could you possibly need those but if you are walking through a bunch of rocks and pebbles like you would want obviously more limbs to get them out of the way you know oh yeah how badass what one of the coolest things to it you can find this pretty easily online but if you look up just like a slow motion video of a millipede walking it's it's weirdly beautiful they have what's called a metacronal gate and so that's different from like a tripod gate of most insects

where they're moving three legs at once millipedes when they're moving this is another cool thing about the diplo segments that we talked about earlier how their most their segments are fused together within each of those diplo segments they have two ganglia so two tiny brains in their bodies and as they're moving you know their brains and sends a signal okay let's move forward that signal cascades down the body through each of these tiny brains which then tells those legs to move brains in its legs like a chain reaction of leg brains and for more on why people are horny about this you can see articles like the recent science piece titled

centipedes the envy of engineers inspire a new generation of robots leg brains hundreds of leg brains and so as it's moving you just see this like wave motion of the legs moving together and it is super cool to see and if you ever find a millipede out and about if you just kind of watch it you know kind of stop and maybe if you think that millipede has too many legs I'm freaked out maybe just kind of deep breaths calm down just watch it walk and it's strangely beautiful and hypnotizing do you find that people don't quite understand the work you do because we have a fear of so many legs but then again people are freaked out by

snakes because they don't have any legs have you in the 10 years you've been doing this seen patterns to what people are squicked out by yeah it's definitely if there are more legs that are longer than the freaked out factors hire so if you take something like a house centipede which people are familiar with yeah these aren't introduced species in North America and they're often found in basements or like bathrooms they like to hang out in your tub or your sink people don't like to see that at 2am you know number one here's something that shouldn't be here oh no it has a lot of legs oh no they're very long I'm

out of here so if you get that then people are more you know scared of it they don't really like to see that but with the smaller millipedes that have you know maybe their legs aren't so long even if they do have a lot of them if you if they're just not as a parent it doesn't freak people out as much which is good and so when I tell people if they're you know sort of scared or they don't like these millipedes and centipedes you know maybe look up a couple photos of some of the prettier ones so if you just search for like the family zisto desmity the cherry millipedes that's a great way in to overcome your fear

because these are beautiful these are the ferrari's of the millipede they are gorgeous they're the ones that they have the black on yellow coloration oranges and reds there's a species here around Blacksburg Ryan base and it just looks like you know the beautiful paint was just dripped down its body it is gorgeous and you know you see one of those you see it fluorescing under UV light you know how can you not love that they're just that they can compete with any butterfly that's out there easily and so it's it's sort of like this exposure therapy you know if you're kind of freaked out or scared of these things little by little

if you kind of look at the ones that are easiest to appreciate first that'll kind of help you overcome that fear and so that's what I try to suggest to people you know what let's try and mend offense here when it comes to how centipedes do you have any advice for people who do see them say in the sink or on a wall because I feel like how centipedes are the bug that gets texted to me the most by friends who are terrified being like what is this I think I've got a new species or maybe aliens have landed or something of that nature do you have any advice for people who encounter a house

centipede because they do look like feathery with legs it looks like a like an eyelash strip to eyelash strips fused with a worm in the middle you know yeah you know my so the first thing I would say which I recognize is not very helpful but have you thought about just accepting the new roommate because they play an important role in your house which is if you're seeing these house centipedes what you're not seeing are all the bugs that they're eating because they are voracious predators they are there oh my gosh their venom jaws are terrifying they have all these like spikes and spines

on them like they can catch prey very well and they're so fast you look at them you blink and they're gone and so they're great at eating all the other bugs that you don't want in your home and so you know typically they start stay out of the way but sometimes your paths cross but that is how they pay rent the other thing I would tell people if you know they've got enough roommates or they live with roommates for long enough if you can take like a Tupperware container or a large cup or something if you can kind of very carefully put that over the centipede slide a piece of paper onto there

and then you can just take it outside and throw it out and then you don't have to worry about it anymore but you know I try I am so excited whenever I find one of those in my home yes finally I've only found maybe one or two and I lived in the same place for you know like seven years at this point so I want more I want to send me your house and I will take them at least take a picture and posted online and let others know like these eat baby cockroaches they eat the things that you don't maybe want in your house so they're yeah they're doing good work they deserve to be there just as much

as you do but we had a lot of listeners Victoria Edding HPG Chris curious first-time question ask her Lila man cad wanted to know about the smell Chris asked why do they smell weird when you pick them up Lila or Lila asked I heard they don't sting but produce hydrogen cyanide Victoria wants to know does a millipede have to be crushed to release its smelly toxin or do they just farted out when they're scared so what is it yeah I'm I'm I'm sorry if you're hearing a crunching noise my cat is chewing on plastic for some of that hopefully that doesn't come through Chloe stop it anyway I'm surprised

that is taking a so long ticket to the smell yeah so they have they are a just you know flower field of varying smells you do not need to crush them to get them to admit their smell it is kind of like they're farting because they're scared you know don't hug me I'm scared that's what the millipedes are telling you all and they have we have a wide variety of which millipede smell and don't smell so not all millipede smell some of them don't have chemical defenses so their main defense is going to run away or just not be seen in the first place so you know we don't have to worry about those right now so to

answer your question about self-defense Brooke Williams they bolt or they stay the ones that do smell there's some that I call them chapstick millipedes the common name is slug millipedes because it kind of look like a little slug their legs are kind of hidden under their body so if you're freaked out by legs won't be freaked out by these ones to elicit any millipede to really release its chemical defenses you have to pick it up and kind of gently move it around your hand and then smell and these ones they smell like camphor or chapstick or something with the chemical it's super cool and so if you

uncover these you actually smell them before you see them sometimes like that is my cue and I'm in the field I'll be like oh there's a smell where's the millipede there are others that smell just like just the worst there's this group called the Preston millipedes and they look really cool when they secrete the chemical defenses because typically they're going to be this nice chocolate brown collar like oh hey that's a pretty cool millipede check that out and the chemicals come out in these little liquid droplets and they kind of look like these little milky latex droplets all along the sides of the

body like oh cool it's chocolate milk millipede but then you smell it oh no and it's just like spoiled milk over decaying carcass like it is really that it smells so bad like I try my best not to ever pick these up because then you just don't want to eat anything for like a day because anytime you bring anything close to your face you get that smell it's awful oh yeah but you know that's that's what you want when you're trying to deter predators all these chemical defenses are to make sure that any predators will smell that and then maybe stop before they try to eat you because you know the smell

that tells them they're poisonous so it's like hey just so you know before you try to bite me I will taste bad like whatever I don't believe you and then the predator bites them like oh wow you were poisonous and then they either throw up or die and so it's in the best interest of the millipede to make sure the predator knows before it even gets that far hey I don't taste good I'm poisonous leave my leave me alone and then the predator can tell them okay I respect your distance that's cool I respect your distance that's a good thing to say in general just whatever anyone want I respect your distance

yes yes I think that all the time whenever I come across you know anything mildly wild yeah do any smell good now the best the best smell that you can ever get with millipedes one of the listeners asked about hydrogen cyanide and yes some millipedes do release hydrogen cyanide this is only in the group called the flatback millipedes the poly desmitter this is the most diverse group of millipedes worldwide and they release a couple chemicals and so they have benzaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide and so the hydrogen cyanide you know it's a very potent poison you don't want any cyanide

going into your body the benzaldehyde makes it smell like cherries or almonds so that's why one particular group the sister desmity gets their common name of the cherry millipedes from that smell and you know if you see a pretty relatively large for a millipede maybe inch inch and a half or so and it's black with these great yellow or orange spots that's probably a cherry millipede you pick that up and shake it around and then smell your hands it smells like cherries like it's I I can't I can't really eat many cherry flavored things anymore because it reminds me of the millipedes now but

it's just it's amazing and like if you see that and you're on a hike with your friends pick that up and show them and they're they will think you're the coolest well they won't think you're the coolest but they'll think it's interesting I love to do that especially if I'm like on a hike with a bunch of kids and it's like hey smell this bug and they're like well it smells like candy it's like yes don't eat it because you know you don't want to ingest that hydrogen cyanide and there have been some studies done where the typical one of the most common of these is the Virginia cherry

millipede it's black with yellow stripes typically and it has enough hydrogen cyanide in its body to kill 18 pigeon sized birds oh wow that's specific also yeah if a human were to eat one of these I don't think it would have major harm to you you might like throw up or something you don't want to eat these things you'll probably be okay just because we're in much more massive than even 18 pigeon sized birds you want more info you can saunter over on your sad amount of legs to the 2009 study Mularian mimicry ring in Appalachian millipedes so far stuff

Mularian mimicry is when different species have a similar warning signal and both will kick your ass so like the bright colors of different millipedes which don't even have eyes to see each other but have evolved to have similar coloring and warning systems for their sighted enemies now there's also baits in mimicry which is when a species evolves to be a knockoff of another's warning colors but it's actually just a harmless dupe can you believe it but the millipedes in Appalachia that look like squirt this noxious stuff from an opening called an ozapore so go

wonky it Stephanie Lesky as long as we're talking about the output of millipedes wants to know what's their poop like is it long like them this is such a specific question oftentimes it's liquidy and gritty because they're mostly feeding on leaf litter and the way they do that they're not very picky so they just sort of go through the dirt and the leaf litter and just kind of like have their mouths open they're just kind of gnawing at whatever so their guts are typically filled with a lot of soil leaf particles dead leaf particles and so I picked up enough millipedes

up and pooped on by a lot of millipedes at this point and usually it's kind of liquidy and brown and you know you clean it off or wipe it off and it just kind of leaves some mud because of all that dirt that they've ingested so typically you know it's pretty dirty and liquidy but there are some millipedes the best example which here in North America is Narcius Americanus the giant American millipede or the iron worm and it's one of our largest millipedes at least here in the eastern U.S. it can grow to be about four or five inches long so you know pretty big sucker and the mother she is a great

mother what she does she will lay her eggs typically we're used to something like a bird oh it lays its egg out where near work but is with millipedes their reproductive organs are closer to their neck the progoniates and so that's a lot different than where you used to so that took me a while to get used to too yeah so what they'll do the mother Narcius millipede she will take an egg out from by her neck fertilize it as it exits her over duct and then she'll take that egg pass it all the way down her body and she's got like probably around 150 pairs of legs so you know it's like an assembly line passing all

the way down through then take that egg and just take it a little bit upper but to then encase it in her poop and really squeeze that to get any excess water out and then place that in this nice little poop ball and so if you were to open up one of those poop balls it has a nice little egg in it oh my god and that poop ball protects the egg you know from desiccation other elements something coming up to eat it and then when that tiny little baby millipede hatches will eat its way out of that fecal pellet as it does and ingest some of that fecal matter and it gets some of the microorganisms from its mother so

that it can then digest those dead leaves thanks mom so it is just you know a perfect example of a loving mother doing everything she can to set her children up to have a successful life you'll sometimes come across these little piles of poop and if you open them up you can find these little eggs imagine just getting smear just like a mud mask like bye bye baby and then you just leave them you leave a batch of the of your babies you keep walking and she will lay you know multiple batches really she'll lay like over 200 eggs maybe even more at different points in her life I'm glad we're addressing this because Leah E

Anderson and Morgan both want to know about congregations of them Leah says this summer I was at a state park in Wisconsin during a hike I came upon thousands of millipedes on the ground crawling up trees and rocks and even in the creek and Morgan says I went camping last weekend and found many millipede friends in the bathrooms why are they congregating in a relatively clean building do they all hatch at once I am so jealous of these people though I don't know if they hatch exactly at once but they do hatch pretty close to one another and so you know if you've come across a hatch of millipedes maybe you'll

see a bunch of them though they are very tiny and they only hatch with three pairs of legs which is kind of cool they add more legs as they grow and but when we're talking about these congregations of millipedes like especially if people are seeing them kind of roaming across the landscape I still have never seen that I've never seen this just mass of millipedes migrating and so we still don't have a good idea of exactly why this is happening it seems to happen oftentimes when it's kind of drier in the summer so maybe part of this these migrating masses of millipedes they've been reported the thousands of

individuals at once typically their juveniles maybe a couple adults with them but it might be that they're all moving to sort of find places with better resources maybe where they've been it's too dry so during the summer that makes sense but millipedes are in it's dangerous for them to be in these very dry areas because unlike insects which have a nice waxy coating on their exoskeleton to protect them from drying out millipedes typically don't have that and so they need to be able to be in these moist humid habitats so that they don't just you know dry up into a husk and die so it might be when there's a

big mass of them they're just trying to find a better place to kind of hang out and eat some dirt leaves but we don't have a great idea of exactly why it happens but you'll see images pop up on like iNaturalist or social media where people are freaked out by why all these millipedes are here sometimes it'll come into people's basements I had a friend send me a photo of her parents basement they were removing buckets of millipedes bring the greenhouse millipede and they like these you know humid wetter areas and so they like to really go to these places that have a lot of water available for them buckets of millipedes that

sounds like a genre film just like a horror film also I think that you should know that according to the 2020 paper titled genital morphology and the mechanics of copulation in the millipede genus pseudopolydesmus published by researchers at the field museum when engaged in love making male millipedes will jizz behind their second side of legs and then they'll goop it up on their own legs just sending it down the line to the seventh set of legs before they handed off to a female's neck vagina and all of this business really just makes our sci-fi aliens seem boring and I was sitting there pouring

through the studies to CT images of boning millipedes and these electron scanning arthropod genitals and it just became apparent that we're the aliens abducting creatures to study their junk it's us first-time question asker Amy Zucker Morgan Stern wants to know they grow by adding segments right so how does that work if you look closely at an adolescent millipede will you see a lot of partly formed segments or segments that haven't let their legs down yet or what and Greg Wallach wants to know do millipedes actually keep growing if they get caught in half or lose limbs does that happen oh so if a millipede

loses some limbs generally it'll be fine if you cut a millipede in half it's gonna die so avoid doing that you don't do that okay yeah but they do add more segments throughout their life and so if you look at a baby millipede it's got six legs like okay cool it's gonna have a couple of segments at the end of the body that are legless and so as it molts it'll add legs to those legless segments and when those legs you added adds a couple more rings without legs and so it'll keep doing that and that's how it adds the legs you know it's just kind of the slow growth during each molt they'll be able to add more legs to

them some millipedes they will keep doing this throughout their life until they die just keep adding more and more legs most other millipedes though they'll reach a certain point and then be like okay that's enough and you know that's where they'll end with their legs a lot of millipedes like the flatback millipedes that we've talked about before those will have about 20 pairs of legs and then they're like okay you know that's good enough for me but some of these longer cylindrical millipedes they'll keep adding for a little while you're not going to see these kind of half-form legs jutting out but you will

see these legless segments at the end of the body it kind of it almost looks like it has a weird tail there you're like oh why are there no legs here is it injured no it's still just growing it's adding them as it goes along it's just awkward yeah it's just an awkward teenager a little bit more of a slug like look you know I'm just waiting for my legs to come in it's fine Anna Handlund's a first-time question asker and said they asked their grandma if she had any questions about millipedes and their grandma asked do they have toenails do they have toenails um kind of I guess they have little

claws and so if you look very closely at the end of a millipede leg they got these various leg segments called potomiers and they'll get all the way to the end where you've got a tarsus and then attached to that last tarsus they got a little claw jutting out and so you know I'd consider that a toenail and amazing yeah yeah and so they'll have you know kind of that main claw one of the groups of millipedes that I studied were the twisted claw millipedes and they're called that because the males on some of their into anterior legs they have these really weird they're twisted and kind of spatulate claws we don't

know what exactly they use them for maybe it's to hold on to the females during mating but the females don't have them only the males have those twisted claws they're super cool to see if you like Google twisted claw millipede you'll be able to see what that looks like so yeah they do have toenails that's so good to know I I would have thought that that was a definite no and now we know if you let them walk on on your hand like if you see when there's giant American millipede put it on your hand as it's walking along and almost feels like little velcro kind of moving along and that's the little claws going into

your skin and just trying to get a hold on it kind of tickles it's fun Megan Duffy first-time question asker wants to know if you've seen the Charlie the unicorn episode with the giant space millipede of course yes I saw that when it came out I am a millipede I am amazing I command you to gaze upon my face I sometimes that that song gets stuck in my head for sure and finally Will Clark first-time question asker wants to know do they make good pets or better left outside munch and poop and stuff what do you think

personally I think they're better left outside they can be relatively easy to keep us pets in the pet trade you might see like the desert millipede or the American giant millipede those are often kept in captivity and you know I kept one of those giant American millipedes for like a year and a half or so and they're fine you just need to give them some leaves maybe some lettuce spray the container so that it stays nice and moist for them they just don't really do a lot like it's kind of nice to have them around to show people what a big millipede looks like but you're not going to get too much back and forth with

it like you would with a cat or dog so I prefer my cat but you know generally millipedes are pretty easy to keep though some groups are more difficult than others but you know these big cylindrical ones you know if you're kind of interested and just want to keep one for a little while yeah that's a fine thing to do imagine if Chloe one had 720 legs so what about the worst thing about millipedes there's got to be something that sucks or about the job there's got to be something you don't like about millipedes yeah I think the worst thing is just you know I'll be out sometimes looking for some of these millipedes and

it'll be beautiful habitat and just you're not finding anything it'll be you know hot and humid I sometimes tell people that looking for millipedes extracts a blood tax because the best millipedes like to be around poison ivy or stinging nettle or ticks and mosquitoes and so whenever it's warm outside during the season I just get more bug bites and weird scabs and stuff and it's like well that's nature for you you need to give something equivalent exchange so I don't enjoy that part so much but you know there's a lot to like about millipedes so I I can't really complain too much what's your favorite I

always have to end on what your favorite thing about them is I can't even imagine how are you how are you even gonna pick one yeah my favorite thing is just when before I got really into millipedes I wasn't really like into nature so much and you know really appreciative of the local nature and ecology around me but with millipedes there's a lot of endemic species which means that there's some that only occur in a small area and nowhere else in the world some of these ranges we have for millipedes is less than a square meter because the species that's only been found once and particularly here in North America and

here in the Appalachians where I am we have so many endemic millipedes species that don't occur anywhere else they're rarely found because people aren't looking for them and so as I've gotten more into millipedes and finding these different species and you know learning more about them it just really makes me appreciate the nature all around me and that local connection to you know this random patch of woods near where you live and I think that's a really powerful connection because you'll see nature documentaries and they're deep in jungles of Borneo or you know off the coast of Brazil these very far flung

places from where we are in the United States at least and by really getting into my local bugs and millipedes it's really made me appreciate where I live that gives you perspective and I think it's a really powerful way to connect with the nature all around you and not just kind of you know to make sure you care and kind of think about okay here's a patch of trees should we make it a parking lot or leave it as a natural area I hope that you know even if you kind of look at a millipede or a bug or any part of nature that you can find that way to really connect with the place where you live and not just kind of

think oh all the cool stuff is far away so why does this even matter and that perspective I've really enjoyed kind of learning more about my local nature and especially millipedes and there's always something new like these millipedes and centipedes and we didn't even talk about these other related myriapods called poropods they look like little twinkie potatoes that are maybe two millimeters long and I go crazy whenever I find one they're so cool they're so neat and no one knows about them the the world expert on this was a guy who lived in Sweden I believe and he was in his 90s he died a couple years

ago and so there's just no one really working on these things anymore and so you know we need ambassadors for these little bugs it doesn't have to be millipedes or poropods though I hope it is you can contact me and I'll talk to you about them whatever nature is around you I think it's important to be an ambassador for these cool parts of nature that you might not think about otherwise well keep up the amazing work it's really wonderful to follow you on social media because I feel like if ever there's gonna be any millipede news you're gonna be the one breaking it and disseminating the information so I got

very excited well thank you where can people find you and find more of your work yeah you can follow me on Twitter I'm at Derek Hennan I also have if you just want the millipede and centipede news and nothing else you can follow my millipede specific account which is at dear millipede so you know if you have a question about millipedes or centipedes or want to send me some or just a cool photo of one you can send to me on Twitter you can find my emails out there but yeah Twitter's probably the best way to contact me what about books any future books oh yeah oh gosh I completely forgot future books but I

finally did do something that I've been wanting to do for a decade now since right when I got into millipedes so I grew up in Ohio that's where I learned millipedes and as I was trying to pull together you know just a basic oh what millipedes are around me it was very difficult to do because there weren't any field guides for any millipedes in North America so I fixed that I worked with my colleague Jeff Brown and people at the Ohio Division of Wildlife and we put out a free guide to Ohio's millipedes and it's got beautiful photos mostly from other people who very graciously let me use their photographs but if you just

Google Ohio millipede guide you can find a PDF of it online for free it's very specific to Ohio they can use it to kind of get an idea of what groups of millipedes might be around you wherever you are in the US and Canada and so you can also get a printed copy if you contact the Ohio Division of Wildlife and it's gorgeous I got mine a couple months ago and I was just just it was so nice to see it and so hopefully you know now when people are like oh you know I'd like to know more about millipedes they have something they can take with them on a hike and kind of get down to maybe the species or if not the

species then the order of family of the millipede they might be seeing and so excited for that. Congratulations that's a big deal that's so cool I will link the PDF in the show notes so people can click on it and just kind of peruse and see these different types of millipedes to get their eyeballs around them you know wrap their brain and eyes around them. Yeah we need more eyeballs on millipedes and I also want to say that the flatback millipedes and many other millipedes don't have any eyes at all so it's our job to appreciate their beauty because they just can't do it so we need to make sure they are affirmed that they

are doing great they are beautiful and magnificent so please join me and join that. Thank you Dr. Millipedes this has been amazing. Thank you for having me. You had a lot of fun. So ask millipede people millions of questions because honestly they want you to know and Derek's social media handle or LinkedIn the show notes follow him and so is the PDF field guide to millipedes and the charity that we donated to more links will be up at alleyward.com slash oligies slash Diplopodology which is linked in the show notes so you don't have to spell it. I'm at alleyward on

Instagram and Twitter and where oligies on both oligies merch is available at oligiesmerch.com in case you need a shirt or a hat or a tote or a gift or a bathing suit to put on your body. Thank you to Susan Hale for taking care of merch and so much so much else for the show. Thank you Noel Dilworth who does the scheduling and is driving me to the airport at 6 a.m. tomorrow to see family in Montana. Thank you to Aaron Talvert, Shannon Feltas and Bonnie Dutch who admin the oligies podcast Facebook group. The order he makes professional transcripts and Caleb Patton bleeps them. Those are up for free at alleyward.com

slash oligies dash extras. Thank you Kelly or Dwyer who does the website. We also have short episodes called Smologies that are condensed. They have no swears in them and those are in our feed. You can just scroll through or you can find them all at alleyward.com slash Smologies that's linked in the show notes. Mercedes Maitland and Zeke Rodriguez-Thomas of Mind Gem Media make those with assist from Stephen Ray Morris and the man who I would name a millipede for hands down, legs down, Jared Sleeper, lead editor and puts this all together every week and Nick Thorborn wrote the music. If you stick around until the end of the week I

tell you a secret and this week I would like you to know that I got Invisalign in October 2018 and it was I was supposed to be done March 2019. I think, is that right? Okay, yeah, but because of the pandemic and the fact that I can only seem to remember to wear them at night, it will be four years of my having Invisalign. It was supposed to be six months. I can't even begin to process that and I think that my orthodontist wonders how I'm a member of regular society. I think he's concerned for me. Anyway, whatever you're doing, you're doing great. All right, bye-bye. Why look at those legs?