Giant Desert Centipede

About the Giant Desert Centipede

The Giant Desert Centipede is the largest centipede in North America - a spectacular, unmistakable creature up to eight inches long, with a bright red-orange head, a long body of glossy black or olive segments, and 21 pairs of yellow legs. Some populations are banded in orange and black from end to end. Nothing else in the Southwest looks like it.

It is a fast, aggressive nocturnal predator, hunting insects, spiders, and lizards - even small rodents and roosting bats - and subduing them with venom delivered through a pair of modified front legs. The bite is intensely painful to people, though rarely dangerous, and the centipede's warning colors are honest advertising. It spends the daytime under rocks and in burrows, emerging on warm, humid nights.

In Texas the Giant Desert Centipede ranges across the western half of the state, from the Edwards Plateau through the Trans-Pecos, and it is a genuine highlight of the desert mountains after summer rains - a photo subject best approached with a long lens and real respect.