Amazonian Giant Centipede

• It can reach 28 to 30 cm long, making it the largest centipede in the world.
• It eats large arthropods, spiders, amphibians, lizards and occasionally small mammals such as bats.
• The mother actively tends her young for about three months after they hatch, coiling her body around them.
• It is the largest centipede in the world: it exceeds 30 cm, with 21 or 23 segments.
• It hunts bats on the wing, and does so in an extraordinary way. A 2005 study in the Cueva del Guano, in Venezuela, documented specimens hanging from the ceiling two metres above the floor, holding on with only their last five pairs of legs while gripping and devouring adult bats with the front eight pairs.
• In one of those cases, by the time the researchers collected the two animals, the centipede had already consumed 35% of the bat's body mass.
• It eats almost anything it can overpower: large insects, spiders, tarantulas, scorpions, lizards, frogs, snakes of up to 25 cm, mice, birds the size of a sparrow, and bats.
• Its venom is injected through the forcipules, the first pair of legs transformed into venomous claws set beneath the head.
• There is one confirmed human death: in 2014, a four-year-old boy died in Venezuela after the bite of a specimen hidden inside an open drink can.
• Its popular names are geographically wrong: it does not live in Brazil, or Peru, or Chile, despite being called the Amazonian — or Peruvian — giant centipede.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - chitin exoskeleton

Habitat & environment

Moist tropical and subtropical rainforest, and tropical dry forest, of South America and the Caribbean

Birth weight

Tiny on hatching, a miniature of the adult with fewer body segments

Size at birth

Tiny on hatching from the egg

Sexual maturity

~2 years

Gestation / incubation

No precise figure for egg development; the female tends the eggs until they hatch

Litter / clutch size

15 to 60 eggs per clutch

Lifespan in captivity

Documented record of up to 10 years in captivity

Sources consulted: Dimensions.com; PestInsight; Planet Zoo Fandom Wiki; Animal Diversity Web; Animalia.bio; ReptiChip; Advance Pest X; The Animal Facts