hi! really neat to see you're on Tumblr, I follow you on Twitter and love seeing stuff from you but I don't use Twitter anymore haha
anyhow! you're quite knowledgeable about centipedes and I love centipedes, but I wouldn't be able to identify many that well if my life depended on it :p Still love them wholeheartedly 💗
So I'd love to hear if you can identify this fella! A friend forwarded these to me from someone else from southeast USA. That's all the info I got.
I really tried to figure out what it could be but the ultimate legs on this guy is puzzling me to a great extent. Literally have no idea what's up with the indented, flattened segments, and I unfortunately don't know any good sources to look into about centipedes and god forbid anything about centipede life cycles/development, so I couldn't even figure out if it's an immature centipede that still got growing to do 😭
in any case I hope you might be able to give some insight! This centipede has been on my mind for like a month now, I want to know what it is so badly
I’m not very familiar with US native lithobs but I can tell you it’s probably the family Lithobiidae based on general appearance. based on a regrettably unproductive search through literature and some iNat photos I think he could be a Neolithobius, since others in the genus have those bizarre modifications of the terminal legs in the mature males. the distribution of southeastern US works for that too. there is a dearth of information on these critters though and I wouldn’t be surprised if I got the genus wrong.
most of the characters for IDing a lithobiomorph to species involve little spines, bits, and pieces you need a microscope to see, so if you haven’t got the physical animal there’s no point in trying that unfortunately.
If you’d like I could ask a myriapodologist on Twitter if he recognizes at least the genus!
