La Scutigère véloce

I had a bit of a bad night last night and had to get up twice with an attack of indigestion, so you can imagine that my stomach wasn’t exactly more settled when I awoke this morning to find this little chap sitting staring back at me in my kitchen sink.

He’s what’s known as ‘une Scutigère véloce’ and with his looks, only his mum could genuinely claim to love him unless, of course, you happen to be another scutigère of the opposite sex. He’s a warm-climate centipede with 15 pairs of legs and he’s called ‘véloce’ because when he sees you, he can run like the clappers. I’ve only found two others of this sort of size (approx 3cm) in my house before, one of which escaped into a hole in the wall in my bathroom never to be seen again (this one maybe?) and the other on my bedroom wall shortly after I moved in which, to my shame, I ended up killing.

I say ‘to my shame’ because depending on who you listen to, this little beastie poses no threat to humans at all and in fact uses it’s special talent for legging it at very high speed in order to beat a retreat as soon as it sees a human. At the same time it uses all sorts of ploys to evade capture – like hurling itself off high walls and hitting the ground (or floor) running, jumping down onto lower objects before disappearing into small gaps and generally displaying remarkable skill and intelligence in order to survive. Meanwhile it spends its time in your house ruthlessly and ravenously hunting down and devouring insects, like flies, mosquitoes, cockroaches and so on, all of which we humans thoroughly dislike but which drew him into your house in the first place.

So the French argue that if you find him in your house, either leave him alone or kill the insects that originally attracted him there. But we British and some other Northern European races who are not used to seeing such large insects in their houses, are unfortunately not quite so tolerant. We read scare stories on the Internet about these things dropping from walls onto the faces of sleeping people in the middle of the night and we shudder, which I confess is why, true or not, I chased and euthanised the one in my bedroom.

We are also a bit more squeamish of large, squiggly-looking insects, especially when they look like the scutigère, bristling with arms, legs and feelers, the more so when we’ve been told that at the business end they have a pair of fangs that they use to inject their own particular brand of venom into their insect victims in order to quickly despatch them, and which reputedly can affect humans much in the same way as a wasp sting.

So today I decided to do the decent but prudent thing, which was to chase the little scuttling creature around the bowl of my kitchen sink with a large rolled-up duster in my hand until I could plonk it down on top of him and pick him up. Then I took him a decent way away from my kitchen door and released him back into the wild. In the meantime, my house will probably begin to teem with all kinds of nasty bugs and insects, but if ‘la scutigère’ is half the insect that I believe he is, I reckon he’ll be back inside in half a shake of one of his 30 or so legs. And if he is, next time he’d better keep out of my kitchen sink because otherwise I might not be quite so easy on him 😉