Millipede

Millipedes belong together with their closely related and better known centipedes to arthropods. Characteristic and unique feature of their body are segments each bearing two pairs of walking legs (diplosegments). This unusual situation happened because each segment was originaly made of two independent segments that later fused together in one but the number of legs remained the same. There are only several segments right behing the head and at the end of body without any walking legs. Different species of millipedes have different number of leg pairs ranging from only a couple to real recordmans with 750 pairs! Millipedes spend their almost entire life underground where they feed mostly on decaying plant material. When they hatch from eggs they do not have the same number of legs as adults do. As they grow the number of legs is increasing and millipedes reach the full number of legs only when they become adults. They may seem to be defenceless creatures but they have two ways of protection against predators. Firstly, they can curl in a ball and if that is not enough they have chemical veapons. Millipedes can synthetise very poisonous, stinky and corrosive chemicals that can be released to an attacker if needed.