Even aggressive centipedes will co-operate if they have to

CENTIPEDES DO NOT generally get on well together. Even members of the same species may attack one another when they meet. So it is a surprise to find mother centipedes sharing nests and a double surprise to find that those co-residents are sometimes not even conspecifics. This, though, is the conclusion of research published in by Farnon Ellwood and Josie Phillips of the University of the West of England, in Bristol.Dr Ellwood studies the invertebrates of the Danum Valley, an area of rainforest in Sabah, a Malaysian state in north Borneo. His past expeditions have found lots of centipedes living in epiphytes called bird’s nest ferns. These ferns tolerate the low illumination beneath a forest’s light-absorbing canopy and may weigh more than 200kg. They and their inhabitants are hard to investigate because they grow on tree trunks dozens of metres above the ground. But when Dr Ellwood did bring a few down to he found that the largest of them contained, besides the plethora of herbivorous insects he was expecting, 126 centipedes. That led him to wonder whether, rather than migrating from the ground as he had previously assumed was the origin of such myriapods in tree tops, the creatures were actually being born there.