Hacker News Reader

Comment by weatherlight | Hacker News Reader

We had a house centipede infestation when I lived in NYC.

It was awesome. No bed bugs. No roaches except in the end of summer, (the giant flying variety and it was really just the month of August when the humidity is out of control they would come out of the drains.)

No bugs in general.

Those house centipedes ate everything.

View on HN

When we moved into our house we were disturbed by the house centipedes.

I did a quick search online about how to get rid of them, and I mostly found stories of the form "Help, I got rid of all my house centipedes and now my home is infested with other bugs! How do I get the house centipedes back?"

So we let them be.

I had a bunch of hornets once. Great, because there were no flies mosquitos anywhere near the house all summer. Unfortunately, the moved out, the hornets, next summer...

In my neck of the woods it’s the same deal with spiders. You just escort them outside once they get fat and too lazy to not be on your wall in the daytime.

An indoor spider might not survive outside. Leave it alone!

https://www.livescience.com/55270-can-indoor-spiders-survive...

There's a spider size limit in this household and they get big enough that I'm not having them walk around unescorted. They go back to the woodpile their ancestors came from.

I’ve had to kill a couple particularly nasty ones. In particular I’ve found a wolf spider in my living room and a black widow in my garage. If they have no danger to me, which is most of them, they are happy to continue coexisting with me and eating bugs in my house

What's particularly nasty about a wolf spider?

Mainly their size - I’m aware they aren’t really dangerous. But their bite can still hurt. Same as a tarantula

It can go pay it's own mortgage.

From Wikipedia in 2005:

> House centipedes feed on spiders, termites, cockroaches, silverfish and other household pests. They do not cause damage to food or furniture.

> For this reason, house centipedes are considered among the most beneficial creatures that inhabit human dwellings, but because of their alarming appearance few homeowners are willing to share a home with them.

( https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Scutigera_coleopt... )

For some reason, this has been stripped from the article, despite obviously being the most useful information that was present in it.

I once awoke to see a large spider running away from me on my bed. I was a bit displeased with that until I learned that they hunt roaches. I figured if it was running away from me, then it figured (perhaps incorrectly) that I was not to be messed with and so the food chain in my house remained as it should be.

You mean the food chain remained intact as long as you're awake. ;)

I think it is always correct to run away from something 100 times bigger than you!

They would be 1.7cm long if they were 100 time smaller than the average human. Seems to check out.

I’m glad you weren’t referring to weight. The average human weighs 60-80kg, depending on what region you’re in. The heaviest spider is the Goliath, grows up to 13cm, but only weighs up to 135grams…

the real danger is not the spider eating you but vice versa!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiders_Georg

Same, had an old house in Michigan that would otherwise have been prone to filling up with orb-weaver type spiders if not for the centipedes. They’d also quickly vacuum up the wolf spiders that would try to invade whenever it rained.

Apparently house centipedes can live for up to about 7 years, and need a few years to reach breeding age.

They are creepy, but they eat baddies.

The last time one showed up in our bathroom, my wife yelled at me to "Stop marveling at it!"

It was the biggest one I had ever seen, close to 3 inches. RIP Uber-coleoptrata scutigera!

yeah, the get big and move fast..

If they're big it means they're eating well, so consider how many more bugs you'd be seeing if it hadn't already made a meal of them!

Is that true? My first guess would have been that size more or less directly reflects age.

That's not how it works with other species like humans :)

True, humans reach a maximum size and stop. But they won't get bigger if you feed them more. If they eat too much, they will deform, but they won't just enlarge proportionally.

This is frickin hilarious. Your awe and wonder at it, your wife's repulsion, and your eulogy hahaha

I just googled the scutigera and they’re somewhat more adorable than the giant centipedes we have in Australia (no they’re not everywhere, but they’re enough to startle you).

Not when you watch them move, I bet.

The thing about them is they're lightning fast compared to a standard short legged centipede.

This may have been distorted by time, but I think that's about the average size of the ones I had at my old apartment.

I discovered we had them when I was going to bed one night and one was just hanging out a few inches from my light switch.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com