lightsinthedistance-modernlife

I was asked recently what my favorite millipede is. That's not an easy question, but I was forced to pick one, so I thought about it for a bit and then figured, why not share it with everyone? I find myself doing more tweeting than blogging lately, but Twitter is terrible for long form responses. There are about 12,000 described species of millipedes, and I've seen maybe 70 of them in life or in photos, so I'm drawing from a limited pool of millipede diversity. Even so, I know of many amazing species. Is my favorite something like the shocking pink dragon millipede, Desmotyxes purpurosea ? Desmotyxes purpurosea from Enghoff et al 2007 . Read the paper, it's really neat! Or maybe my favorite is another tropical millipede. After all, Psammodesmus bryophorus , a millipede I've blogged about before , has mosses that grow on its back! Photo from Martínez-Torres SD et al 2011. You won't be disappointed if you browse photos of millipedes from the tropics. There are ...

When I need to talk to someone about a facet of Entomology that blows my mind, I've taken to mentioning millipedes. I've been keeping millipedes as a labor of love over the past year, which is something that has taught me a lot. Probably the coolest thing I've learned about is some species' propensity to fluoresce under ultraviolet light. I've chronicled my previous experiences with a millipede species that fluoresces under ultraviolet light previously here and here , so if you want a primer about Semionellus placidus , check out those posts. I've established that this species fluoresces under UV light quite nicely, and I've found it in the field from spring until fall. It also appears to be quite abundant (in southeastern Ohio, at least) and lights up the leaf litter whenever I'm looking for it. UV fluorescence in arthropods isn't anything new: it's been reported most notably in scorpions, many insects, and some other millipede species. A few m...

Let's talk about millipedes! You may have read my entry on a millipede that fluoresces under ultraviolet light I found this past fall that grabbed my attention. I've since done some more research, and after working on a poster a few weeks ago for the Ohio Natural History Conference, I have more information and motivation to summarize what I've learned. How did I find out about these UV fluorescing millipedes in the first place? I was on a night hike with some friends last fall and had the foresight to bring a UV flashlight along, just in case there was anything neat to look at under UV. It was a bit chilly, and we weren't finding much. Then I turned the flashlight on. As we passed by areas with fallen leaves, I started catching glimpses of blue-green light: millipedes were fluorescing while milling about in the leaf litter. If you haven't seen this, you owe it to yourself to grab a UV flashlight and check it out. As it turns out, the millipedes I was seeing were o...