CENTIPEDES 51 



found devouring the side of a living toad. On the other hand, 

 specimens of S. morsitans from Texas refused to bite toads. More 

 recently, Lawrence (1953) has seen S. jnorsitafis speedily kill small 

 geckoes of the genus P achy dacty his by biting them in the neck. 

 One large unidentified Scolopendra was discovered on the floor of 

 a house at Kokine, a suburb of Rangoon, with a small snake 

 writhing in its clutches, from the tail of which the skin and flesh 

 for about two inches had been completely removed. 



Under laboratory conditions S. heros feeds freely upon the 

 agriculturally noxious insects provided: it prefers to remain under- 

 ground on warm days but is restless on the surface in cloudy and 

 wet weather. S. viridis refuses woodlice and earthworms but is 

 partial to flies; the prey, of which the hard parts are rejected, is 

 held firmly to the mouth by the poison claws whilst the mandibles 

 and maxillae tear it to pieces. Lawrence (1934) observed a large 

 S. siihspinipes feeding on a slug {Veronicella leydigi), but in cap- 

 tivity the same species from Borneo does not touch raw meat, 

 worms or various insects. S. subspinipes is abundant in the vicinity 

 of the town of Tarragona in the Philippine Islands, and Remington 

 (1950) wrote: 'Almost every night the writer saw one or two of the 

 great chilopods feeding voraciously on the winged insects which 

 swarmed into his pyramidal laboratory tent, attracted by the elec- 

 tric light. The centipedes climbed the walls of the tent easily, 

 fastened their powerful anal legs near the ventilator hole of the 

 tent peak and swung their bodies quickly to one side or the other 

 to seize insects which alighted nearby.' 



The present writer kept a female S. cingulata found near Mar- 

 seilles for several months in a crystallising dish covered with a 

 sheet of glass. She was fed on medium-sized nymphal cockroaches 

 of which on the average she ate about one per week throughout 

 the summer. Adult cockroaches had to be disabled before she 

 would tackle them. She fed also on spiders, flies, moths and other 

 insects and chewed up some worms which she did not finish. She 

 even ate bees and wasps which she caught in mid-air, rearing up 

 the fore part of her body to snatch them with her poison claws 

 as they flew past. These she dropped quickly and waited until 

 her poison had had time to take effect (Cloudsley-Thompson, 

 1955). 



