Chapter III The World of Myriapods and a Single Land Crustacean
The World of Myriapods and a Land Crustacean
Every one who has turned over a rotten log has seen these thousand-legged worms, and yet I wonder if many of us have known that these weird wandering things resemble, and are the direct living descendants of some of the first animals which crept up out of the sea to live upon the land.
Long ages before the warm-blooded, lung-breathing beasts came into existence, they worked their way up out of their water life among the corals, sponges, worms, shellfish, and fishes, onto the dry land.
This was in the great transition time when all sorts of amphibian monsters came into existence, monsters which have long since passed away. These myriapods deserve respect if for no other reason than because their forefathers crept across the fresh footprints and mud wallows of the prehistoric monsters.
How comes it that these forms of life have changed so little in a million years?
A MILLIPEDE, ONE OF THE VEGETARIAN MYRIAPODS
Slow moving ringed creature with four legs to each ring or segment of its body! Watch its legs move in ripples as it finds its way over the ground! Unlike its distant relative, the centipede, which has but two legs to each body ring and darts about with most surprising rapidity, this millipede lives mainly on plant food and seldom eats, as does its savage relative, the bodies of small animals which make their home beneath old rotten logs.
A CENTIPEDE, ONE OF THE CARNIVEROUS MYRIAPODS
(Scolopendra sp.)
Perhaps no photograph in the collection serves better to illustrate the vastness of the back yard jungle than this one, for myriapods are the only representatives of a gigantic branch of the animal kingdom, the individuals of which are no more insects than they are lobsters. They live their lives altogether on or in the ground, they do not mind the cold as insects do. Some of them have poison fangs and are reputed to inflict fatal wounds. Their matrimonial habits are strange beyond belief.
They compose a vast neglected assemblage of creatures which some of their admirers believe have a value which we do not yet understand nor appreciate; just as we did not appreciate the role of the mosquito or the earth worm until the researches of modern science taught us of their importance.
A great untouched field for exploration lies here among the Myriapods.
TWO PILL BUGS
(Armadillidium vulgare, Fab.)
Down from the time of the prehistoric monsters comes the armadillidium, the last survivor of the great land crustaceans. As the serpents and the lizards are all that remain to remind us of the monsters which swarmed and fought in the tertiary swamps and oceans, so this strange creature, no larger than a pea, which rolls itself into a ball when you startle it as you turn over a stone in the meadow, is the survivor of the land crustacea which at one time, in countless forms, abounded everywhere in the then young world.
It is not an insect, but a last survivor, related to the crabs more closely than to any other branch of the animal kingdom.
INDEX TO LATIN NAMES