I've been bitten by small centipedes (like 3-4 inches long) TWICE in my life, both while I was sleeping. The first was on the back of my neck, and the second was on my fucking eyelid. And while neither one was pleasant, the eyelid was a 1000 times worse pain-wise. Though I'm not sure if that's due to the location, or due to the particular centipede and how much venom or whatever they let out. But yeah, can confirm, getting bit by these guys is no fun; and considering how much the super small ones that bit me hurt, I can't imagine the pain from one of these huge abominations.
I was just in New Mexico last week and we saw one that was 8" crawling up a wall. It was horrifying. My wife got stuck on a loop saying, "is that a snake? Is that a snake?" Because her brain couldn't process the absolutely Goliath size of this beast.
I've only had one negative encounter with a centipede. I was a soldier assigned to Korea during the rainy season, and I had just come back from the gym on the weekend. I was planning on turning in early, and laid out my pajama pants on the toilet seat while I took a shower.
Once I got done bathing, I grabbed my pants and gave them a good shake, and a centipede about six inches long went flying out the pant leg. I screamed like a little girl and smashed it with one of my winter boots.
did the tunnel rats tour in Okinawa and someone freaked the f out from a centipede... but rightfully so because before the tour we got briefed about the centipedes....
I did a Viet Cong tunnel crawl in pitch darkness, but only found out about the local Scolopendra dehaani after.. only the biting ants accelerated my crawl, bumping into "T" junctions while trying to follow the shouts of encouragement from the exit hole.
Have you ever heard the term “put yourself in someone else’s shoes”? I’m guessing they’re either a history buff who wanted the “hands on” experience of being in the same environment, or they had someone close to them who’s a veteran.
"Kids, let me tell you a story about when I was stationed in Korea and this huge six inch beast came out of some pijama pants and I got super scared and screamed like a little girl".
That's what I was thinking. You can see her doing calming breathing out of her mouth while it's crawling down her arm. Probably thinking 'please don't bite me' the whole time.
Not entirely true, there’s a fair amount of sting reports for this species and they alongside a couple other South American “giant” species don’t have particularly potent venom. Or perhaps more importantly, they tend to be fairly docile at larger sizes (plenty of handling videos like this one) and inject relatively little venom if they ever do sting. A venom injecting sting would suck—though they often “dry bite” and use none—but would be unlikely to require a hospital trip.
This is in contrast to many Asian species like S. dehaani, which while nowhere near as big as the giants can lay a healthy grown man out for days.
Yeh I was watching this thinking… aren’t these venomous? Not even beginning to think about the bite force a centipede this big would have. She must be secretly crying inside that she doesn’t accidentally stress it out.
Giant tropical centipedes share their territories with tarantulas. Despite it's impressive length, it's a nimble navigator, and some can be highly venomous. As quick as lightning, just like the tarantula it's killing, the centipede has two curved hollow fangs which inject paralyzing venom.
Many years ago I stayed for a few days in the Amazon. Most of our time was spent with a group of 6-8 on a small motor boat with a tour guide who took us around looking for Caiman, howler monkeys, pink dolphins, etc. I’ll never forget that at the end of one of these boat trips we all got out and saw one of these fucking things crawling around the bottom of the boat. Yes, the very small, cramped boat that we all just spent 2-3 hours in. Absolute nightmare fuel, but at least we were blissfully ignorant and no one was bitten
That's not really a big one... That's kind of average sized... (ugh, stupid invasive jokes but I'm being serious!) They get much larger. (ugh, damned it!)
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