Survivor

An early morning eviction. I know very little about them, so this picture was a good excuse to find out the basics and discover that they are worthy of some respect. This tiny specimen is, I suspect, quite young. He has not yet picked up that he is supposed to be nocturnal, secretive and hiding under things: he was rather obvious while walking up the clay-white living room wall. Nor did he curl himself into a protective ball or emit noxious secretions to deter me, as he might; we got on splendidly

Centi or milli? It's not really got much to do with the number of legs. Centipedes are venomous carnivores, built for speed over the surface of the ground. Millipedes like this one eat vegetable detritus - they are basically recyclers and soil improvers - built to push themselves through soil or leaf mould (not living room walls). Crucially, centipedes have one leg each side per body segment and millipedes have two

He has quite some heritage. Millipedes first appeared in the fossil record over 400 million years ago; they were among the earliest animals to live on land. That means they have survived four of earth's five mass extinctions. One of his ancestors was also the largest arthropods ever found on land: 1.8 metres long and 450cm diameter. I wonder how secretive that one was, and what it hid under

Three years ago, I could have ended by saying that of course none of them actually have 1,000 legs but, incredibly, somebody found one that does. It is not, sadly, 1.8 metres long - less than 10cm in fact - but it does have 330 segments and 1,306 legs. Best of all, it was found sixty metres below the surface of Australia when boring a drill hole! Just suviving