Duff Park
Murrysville
Pennsylvania
October 2013
Training day. Duff Park. Altitude gain of about 200 feet in a tenth of a mile on Round Top Trail. Once. Twice. Many times.
Lots of people on the lower, flatter elevations, running, walking the dog, picking invasive garlic mustard. Trillium, skunk cabbage, may apple, squaw root, the last of the trout lily. Chipmunks, the ubiquitous Eastern grey squirrel, some smaller hawks, crows, jays.
And thousands of millipedes.
Let’s see now…
centi = hundreds
milli = thousands
pede = foot
Centipedes have a hundred feet, millipedes have a thousand. Telling them apart without counting is easy; centipedes have one pair of legs, or feet, per body segment while millipedes have two pair.
Full disclosure. Centipedes don’t really have a hundred feet. Millipedes don’t really have a thousand feet.
A centipede will have between 30 and 354 feet. So from time to time, depending on the species of centipede, the name is accurate. Some of them really do have a hundred feet.
On the other hand, so to speak, no millipede has ever been observed to have 1000 feet. The record is the American millipede (Illacme plenipes) which has been known to score up to — yow! — 750 feet! It takes me five full minutes to get my socks and boots on, and there’s only two each of them. Imagine!
So like I say, on this training hike, I see a thousand millipedes on the trail. You could say I see a millimillipede. A thousand thousand. That would be a million. There must be a name for that.
In metric, mega indicates a million. In this case, it would be a million pedes. A megapede. But because we also use mega to indicate huge, megapede could be confused with Bigfoot.
Might also could be a maxipede, maxi meaning “large” or “many.” Maxipede should not be confused with a maxi pad, which has very little to do with feet.
The mind wanders when kicking out the jams on a solo training hike.
There’s a catch. In metric, centi technically indicates one one-hundredth (0.01) and milli is in fact one one-thousandth (0.001.) Even that low to the ground, these critters would have a hard time making their way with just a hundredth part of a foot. To be accurate concerning our Diplopoda, centipedes should be named hectopedes and millipedes should be kilopedes. They’re not.
Ain’t this a kick!