#greenhouse millipede

[onenicebugperday]

@dearest--gertrude submitted: Some faves from over the summer!

All really good but I'm especially a fan of the bee lost in the sauce and the very tiny baby house centipede :)

[alcnfr]

Greenhouse Millipede (Oxidus gracilis) crossing the driveway this morning....

[frostings-silly-little-art-blog]

Entomology Monday everyone! Greenhouse millipede

[fivetrench]

The mighty crawler spotted irl

[slasherz]

bug! bug! bug! bug! bug! bug! bug!

[cessnati]

Jul 10, 2023

[crevicedwelling]

Hiii don't want to be annoying, but I live in the Florida panhandle and I was wondering if you're able to identify this really small (and fast) millipede I found. I am pretty sure it's not a greenhouse millipede because I had an infestation of those a few months ago and this doesn't look like them. Thank you for the help either way! Great blog!

it’s a little julid millipede, in a different order than the polydesmidan greenhouse millipedes (round-backed vs. flat-backed). I am not skilled enough to take this one to a genus from these photos, and for species you’d need a dissection of an adult male, most likely.

[todaysbug]

December 2nd, 2023

Greenhouse Millipede (Oxidus gracilis)

Distribution: Likely native to Japan; introduced almost worldwide, from tropical to temperate areas.

Habitat: Prefer moist habitats, like flower beds and leaf piles. Also found on paved surfaces and inside homes; common in urban environments.

Diet: Detritivores; mainly feed off debris and leaf litter, but may also eat pet food, mulch, and occasionally plant roots and shoots.

Description: Greenhouse millipedes are often considered pests because they sometimes invade human structures like greenhouses. Despite this bad reputation, they're completely harmless to humans. When feeling threatened, these millipedes eject a foul-smelling liquid. This is just a warning, though, as they're also toxic when eaten, and so are rarely preyed upon.

Newly-hatched greenhouse millipedes have six legs; at every molt, these millipedes add a new segment to their body with a new pair of legs, growing continuously until adulthood. This species also has no eyes, instead using its antennae to navigate.

(Images by João Coelho and Ashley Bradford)

[asher-writes]

Welcome to Arcadia; Instalment Two; The Landscape of Blue Oak Forest (otherwise known as: Poison)

Prev instalment: | Government |

The Landscapes of Blue Oak Forest

Blue Oak forest is the setting of the first book of the series, the home village that the protagonist - April - returns to after many years away. Blue Oak is known by others in Arcadia as "poison" or "the poison forest" due to its unique ecosystem.

Blue Oak gets its name from the collection of large oak trees placed curiously at the centre of the forest. These trees are perhaps the oldest in the forest and stretch so far above the ground that from the base it’s hard to see the tops. At the base of these trees are blue flowers that convert radiation into carbon dioxide, they’re rare, symbiotic to local fungi, and very hard to get to.

There are very few grasslands within the forest, with one being close to the entrance, which is where the village was built – on fairly muddy and not so stable conditions. There are a couple to be found within the expansive forest itself, but few have ever made it all the way through the forest and back, alive.

There are some main things to consider of the landscape:

The deeper into the forest a person endeavours, the more poisonous the plants become. This is because many of the plants underwent forced evolutionary growth for scientific study before the radiation became a natural part of the plant's life-cycle. The flora, fauna, and fungi seem to live symbiotically, feeding into each other perpetually. Because their survival depended on it, the radiation is – instead of purified – has become part of the norm for some areas of the forest, depending on the plants and animals found there.

Some of the animals we’re familiar with exist within Blue Oak, deer, bears, foxes, squirrels – yet all are mutated by the radiation. Some of the animals are more predisposed to mutation genetically, so some seem utterly normal, others are depicted rabid, foaming at the mouth, dragging themselves along mindlessly with shattered back legs, or completely feral. This also extends to insects, with overgrown spiders, engorged millipedes, and flies that spew radioactive bile.

Blue Oak existed before the war broke out, Arcadia was built around it – with the forest initially serving as a greenhouse, complete with protective shield. The shield has since cracked, with pieces missing, but due to its size it still holds a slightly different climate to the rest of Arcadia.

The Sky

‘April watched the embers of the cigarette burn against the sky. The sky here was so clear, clear the way the smoke and heaviness of Obsolete never could be, clear in the way that felt – horribly – like home. The stars clustered so far from his grip, and he wondered had they been there before humanity had eaten itself alive, would they be there long after they were gone? Or was he staring at a graveyard, wondering why the place felt so haunted?’

>ask me questions, so I can develop it further.

[halltastic]

Greenhouse millipede

[critterchitters-closedcaptions]

okay i was gona rant in the tags, but ive too many feelings about this.

i didnt fully. notice? this until i sat and thought about it for a minute, but. yeah. theres a LOT less bugs, and that's horrifying.

a couple years ago we had a lot of wasp nests in our yard, and all the plants were buzzing with life and activity. we had a massive aphid problem on our hollyhocks and corn that invited a load of ants and a bunch of wasps to all hang around them, i even managed to befriend 3 whole colonies of wasps all in my front yard, thats not even touching the colonies that were nestled away in the back

and even before then wed always, ALWAYS have wasps buzzing all over our yard going from flower to flower and taking out the pests that would try to destroy our broccoli or brussel sprouts or anything else in the greenhouse or our little garden beds.

you'd walk through our grass and you'd see thousands of tiny little leafhoppers launching out in all directions.

this year? bees. thats it. literally just bees around the clover. and only the clover.

some ants here and there, but not as many as before. ive not seen a single paper wasp this year and that crushes my soul. i adored when theyd make nests in our yard, but theyre just nowhere to be seen anywhere.

we used to go out at night and scoot things to see the bugs underneath, but now? youre lucky if you see a single spider or centipede, instead of the nearly hundreds of isopods or worms or millipedes youd see in the soil under a box thats not been moved all summer.

we have this old truck body in our front yard as decoration this year, and its the PERFECT spot to be filled with bugs, and i was so, so excited when we put it up. you know how many bugs ive found in and around it?

two spiders. JUST two spiders.

and that's just in my front yard!!

over the summers i work with my local pest control place to count mosquitos to test for west nile virus and send to the CDC.

two years before [we dont count last year. my at-the-time boss ruined all of the traps so i couldn't get any proper counts] wed regularly get traps FULL, packed to the brim with misc bugs - and that barely put a dent on any of their populations, the traps were put in dense and bug filled areas. thered always be at least a couple moths, usually some grasshoppers, and i even found 4 or 5 whole ten lined june beetles in the traps. id regularly find dragonflies and damsel flies, wasps, various species of flies, multiple craneflies, butterflies, and even bees and beeflies and so many spiders. my favorite part about this job has been the diversity of bugs i get to see and the specimens i get to keep and take home (all of them are dead, so im allowed to take anything that isnt a culex mosquito)

this year? ive found one damselfly, one moth that isnt the most populated species here, 3 or 4 craneflies, barely any miscellaneous fly species, and only 3 or 4 spiders. no wasps, no bees, no grasshoppers, no butterflies. nothing at all thats particularly unique or diverse. im not even finding any regular june beetles - those things were EVERYWHERE just a few years ago.

if i go through my notes, i keep note of anything particularly interesting i find, i can make list of those later.

but the part that concerns me the absolute most? the mosquito count is drastically lower than ive ever seen it. people have been praising that theyve been bitten so little this year, but that's because theres barely any mosquitos to bite.

just two years ago wed get traps that counted in the thousands. id regularly have to sift through and count up to 3k mosquitos *per trap.*

now id be lucky if i even found 6k in a whole days worth of traps.

thats scary. we usually pick up 12 or so traps per day to cover the whole town outskirts, so the other year thatd be 36k mosquitos in a totally full day (3k x 12 traps). thats a shitload, and we barely altered the population collecting that many. this years possible 6k (about 500 x 12 traps) in a full day is abysmally low. its terrifying. im worried about what collecting this many is doing to their population.

ive been working here since 2020, so thats not a *long* time, but its long enough to see a sudden and terrifying drop in mosquitos.

this year a full trap is id assume about 500 mosquitos. we havent even gotten a single trap with 1k in there. im gona be honest, we havent even capped 300 mosquitos yet!!! 500 is just a guesstimated high with how few there have been this year! thats a whole 700 fewer mosquitos per full trap! what the fuck!!!

weve not even done any spraying or pest control this year. that 36k number regularly happened during spraying and pest control.

and that 300 per trap? isnt even for every trap this year! theres usually only been about 3 traps that have been regularly really full of bugs. the other traps used to be about a half to a quarter full. but this year theres barely even anything in the less full traps cause theres no bugs to enter them! so the more proper estimate of an average day this year is about 1k mosquitos total.

the other year an average day would be at least 10k total, because while the less-full traps were, well. less full, there were still mosquitos in there, at least 50-100 in there.

theres a nine thousand mosquito average difference within two years.

you used to be able to see them in thick, almost looked suffocating swarms above the more still waters here. now? you can barely see any.

and the fruit flies and gnats!! i used to hate them, there were always so many to sift through to find mosquitos in the traps, but now theres not even enough to be an annoyance.

i used to hate finding moths in traps cuz thered regularly be HUGE moths that, when theyd die, would curl up and grasp mosquitos in their legs and wings and itd be a whole ordeal getting them separated. this year ive not found a single moth big enough to do that. all the moths are tiny.

i have pictures hold on

^ this was an average trap in 2022. look at all those moths. most of that pile was gnats and other small bugs. but there were still a little over 400 mosquitos in there. this was IN JUNE. THIS WAS LATE JUNE. and you can see if you zoom in on my notes there, just three traps before this one i got 2,089 mosquitos in a trap.

^ that one is this year. thats the fullest trap ive gotten all year. there were 259 mosquitos in that trap. that was last week. all the others i get anywhere between 1 and 50 mosquitos.

this time 2022 the traps would look like that first example, if not fuller.

why the hell arent people scared of this. this is terrifying and all i can really do is sit and watch it happen directly in front of me.

also!!! i sometimes work with my mom cleaning up a campground. there used to be a huge issue of gnats all over the bathrooms for the past couple years, but this year theres been so few. and theres been so few bugs just around in general. im just glad the buggy (lol) we drive around the camp ground is still full of spiders like usual though. i love them.

bugs are the whole reason i go to either of these jobs.

sorry for going off, just. this scares me. and seeing the numbers so different, so dramatically lower, is terrifying.

(i know rhis was posted last year. but it applies to this year too. i didnt have the right scale of this last year due my old boss causing. Problems. but. god. its getting so bad.)

(note #2, i know spraying for pest control isnt a good thing. but its what my bosses at my job do, and its what the cdc expects us to do. im not for it, but i need some reliable way to make money over the summers. i and my family avoid spraying around our houses at all. we dont use any personal pesticides or weed killers. the only spraying thats done that im at all involved in is at my work, and i dont do the spraying myself. all i do is count mosquitos at a desk inside)

I think one of the absolute most frustrating things for me personally about the current climate crisis / late stage capitalism hell is that ontop of people just outright denying it and acting like the rising temperatures are normal- there’s been like. A VERY noticeable decline in the amount of insects yearly. As someone who goes out of my way to see bugs, every single year for the past decade there has been a sharp decline in bugs. What used to be fun filled summer months running around, catching grasshoppers and petting caterpillars… there’s nothing. I’ve seen one grasshopper this year. I’ve not seen a single caterpillar! It’s currently the ant nuptial flight season in my area and I’ve seen 0 winged ants. They used to all but infest my home during flight season

I remember as a kid, I used to excitedly find ladybug larvae, and I’d relocate them to plants covered in aphids. But I’ve seen one ladybug in the past 5 years, and 0 larvae. I’ve not even seen any aphids. It’s so tangible, it’s so noticeable to me as someone who considered this my absolute favourite season to do my favourite activity in. And I know if the bugs are dying off, other things that eat those bugs are to.

And the absolute worst part? When I tell people about this, the average reaction is ‘good!’. A lot of people will express joy over there being less bugs in the world. Most will express how they’re glad they’ve been experiencing less mosquitos and I want to just grab by the shoulders and shake them and yell TONS OF BUGS JUST DISAPPEARING SHARPLY OVER THE YEARS IS NOT A GOOD THING !!

Anyways. Fellow entomology nerds, have any of you also noticed a drastic decrease in bugs you’re finding yearly or is my area just in a bug deficit.

[onenicebugperday]

Some bug friends from work! A greenhouse millipede, two skippers and a sweat bee!

I love them all but I have a spiritual connection with the millipede...

[alcnfr]

A Greenhouse Millipede (Oxidus gracilis) crawling over the chicken coop this afternoon...

[psorrell]

Greenhouse Millipedes, Ring-necked Snakes, & Long-Tailed Salamanders, all of a short creek loop on a 90°+ afternoon. Crouse Run, 7.16.24.

[life-around-me-yura15cbx]

The greenhouse millipede (Oxidus gracilis), also known as the hothouse millipede, short-flange millipede, or garden millipede.

[open-society-news]

The greenhouse millipede (Oxidus gracilis), also known as the hothouse millipede, short-flange millipede, or garden millipede.