{"id":1290,"date":"2021-12-27T17:36:26","date_gmt":"2021-12-27T17:36:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/interestinganimalfacts.com\/?p=1290"},"modified":"2021-12-27T17:36:28","modified_gmt":"2021-12-27T17:36:28","slug":"how-many-legs-does-a-millipede-have","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/interestinganimalfacts.com\/how-many-legs-does-a-millipede-have\/","title":{"rendered":"How Many Legs Does A Millipede Have?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Many of us have sat in the garden on a sunny day and watched as the creatures that live there go about their business.
The birds singing, the leaves rustling, and the insects munching on whatever leaf or other animals they may have found.
On those days, we have all seen some strange and exciting creatures, however none match up to the bizarre sight of hundreds of little legs carrying an armored titan of a creepy crawly.
Millipedes are undoubtedly strange creatures, if you had no knowledge of a millipede before it was described to you, you may think it was a weird joke at your expense. But these hardy little travelers are everywhere, bumbling their way through life and hardly ever causing a problem for others.
Yet, their strange look and excess limbs make people question why they would ever need so many legs.
In this article, we seek to answer a question asked since a person ever thought to give millipedes a passing glance: how many legs does a millipede have?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To answer this, we have to go back early in Earth\u2019s history, long before the dinosaurs, long even before reptiles and mammals ever existed, some 440 million years ago in the Silurian period. It was during this time that millipedes started to colonize the land, making them one of the oldest land animals to ever exist.
At this point in history, predatory animals had only come to be around 50 to 100 million years before, and so many animals had only begun to develop defense mechanisms shortly after this.
Much of the animals at the time belonged to the arthropod family, which today includes millipedes, insects, spiders, and many more, and this group of animals developed hard, segmented bodies to defend themselves.
Millipedes took this a step further by elongating their body, allowing them to curl into a defensive ball with their hard shell on the outside and soft belly protected on the inside. However, moving such a long body requires legs at each segmentation, thus creating a need for many, many legs.
This design was so successful that it has remained virtually unchanged for almost 400 million years. In fact, it has aided millipedes in not only being one of the most successful but, at one point, they became the largest land invertebrates to ever walk the earth.
During the Carboniferous period \u2013 sometimes called the age of bugs \u2013 a giant millipede roamed the earth called Arthropleura, that could grow as long as 2.5 meters (8 ft), a size in invertebrates that hasn\u2019t been matched since.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, we know why millipedes have so many legs, but how many do they have.
The reason we answered the why first is that it affects the how, as how long and how segmented their armor gets depends on the number of legs.
Some millipedes can have as little as 24, while others can have as many as 600 to 700, with the record being 750.
As a matter of fact, most millipedes and millipede species have fewer than 100 legs. However, so far, there have been no recorded cases of any millipede having 1000 legs, making its name a misnomer that science has refused to correct.
Another thing that affects the number of legs a millipede has is its age. When a millipede hatches from its egg, they only have a few pairs of legs. This is due directly to baby millipedes only having a few segmentations at that time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n