Invasion on campus (of geniuses?)

With the rains, soil on campus is wet and the large amount of foliage creates an explosion of Millipedes, the red long variety, with no stripes or any other colours. They are everwhere, especially if you happen live on the ground floor. A careful walk on the campus can often reveal small clutches of fresh hatchlings where there are groups of around 50-100 of them clumped together.

Millipedes belong to the class "Diplopoda", of the arthropod phylum, which represents one of the largest animal classes with about 80,000 species in it! Yet despite this there is not much known about this class and zoologists find that even their knoweldge about his class is limited.

By the way, did you know that milliepeds have sections on their body and each section has two pairs of feet? Someone once told me that people come to be known as geniuses, by the same process that people call millipedes by that name, not because millipedes have a thousand legs, but because most people cant count beyond 50! In fact the record holder, Illacme plenipes has 750 legs!


Here is a fun article on millipedes!
http://www.earthlife.net/insects/diplopoda.html

If you are considering keeping millipedes as pets, you should try this link.
http://www.earthlife.net/insects/milipede.html

Prof. Dr. Kubra Bano, from the Department of Zoology, University of Agricultural Sciences, G.K.V.K., Bangalore-560 065 has written a rather scholarly article on Millipedes (diplopods) and you can read it here.
http://www.wii.gov.in/envis/rain_forest/chapter5.htm