Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Who can sleep with housemates like this?

Two nights ago I went into the laundry room to get my nightgown out of the dryer and as I reached for it, I saw something large running down the wall out of the corner of my eye. A huge centipede! Now, we've had little centipedes since we moved into this house two and a half years ago, but I haven't really seen many over the last two years. It was mostly when we first moved in because the lower level of the house wasn't in use with the other folks.


I've been doing some research online to try to find out what kind it could be since I don't think we have that many kinds of centipedes in Vermont. From everything I could find, it appears it was most likely a house centipede, but all the literature says they grow to only about 1.5 inches in length and the one I saw was at least 3 inches long and I really think it was closer to 4! I scared it with the light and it weaved back and fourth down the wall trying to fit it's big long body into the crack around the water drainage pipe for the washing machine, but it wouldn't fit because it was so big! A good inch or more was left out. I knew I wouldn't sleep if I didn't do something about it, so I grabbed a can of ant and roach spray and saturated all around the pipe. Ewww, it wiggled it's way out of sight and I have no idea if it found a way out or died. All I know is, I haven't slept much the past two nights. I'm trying to make myself feel better by telling myself that everything I've read says that they are a good pest to have because they eat other pests like spiders and such, but they also bite!


I tried to find a picture to show you all and found a website called "What's That Bug" http://www.whatsthatbug.com/cent.html I couldn't find any copywrite warnings on this website at all, so I hope it's okay to post a picture of the little monster.

I still don't know if it was a house centipede because of the size, but I guess it's possible that one could grow bigger, right?


Here it is....






I think it really looked more like this one though...a tropical centipede

If anyone knows if these live in Vermont, I'd love to know.


2 comments:

Angela said...

EWWWW Penny! Poor YOU!!! My freshman year in college, I lived in an apartment complex that had roaches positively everywhere. It was nauseating. I brought in an exterminator repeatedly, but he said there was not much he could do because it was like treating one room of a large house, and they'd keep coming back unless the whole building was treated. These roaches were the length of my fingers and I don't think I slept much that whole year. I swear I could hear them come out when the lights went out. Ew, ew!!!!

Hope you can get rid of your unwelcome visitors!

Reillybug said...

I second Angela's EWWWWWWWWWWW