Day 22: growing younger?

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OUR TOP STORY TONIGHT!

We are all still socially isolated; all stay-at-homers. It's the right thing to do. So, let us scratch around in the dead leaves for you. It's what we do.

Our gonzo man-in-the-woods is pretty upbeat. With the three days of warmer temperatures, he found activity, one of his favorite invertebrates crawling around.

Millipedes have two sets of jointed-legs at each body segment and they are detritivores. They eat dead leaves on the forest floor. Without them we would all have leaves 12-feet deep around our homes.

Gonzo naturalist found a yellow flat-backed millipede (probably Cherokia georgiana). It's a male. You can tell because one set of legs is missing. [Please don't snicker. This is biology.] Where the legs are missing is where his male reproductive parts are located. Just sayin'. It's a neat thing to drop into the conversation at a dinner party, but who's going to dinner parties?

Here’s where it gets interesting. There's even a touch of Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray. As reported by Sue Hubbell in her book, “Waiting for Aphrodite” some kinds of millipedes can turn back time. Like insects and spiders, when a millipede grows it has to shed its old skin because it gets too tight. This skin is called a cuticle. Sometimes, as they molt their old cuticle, the fully mature adult males can also go back to having immature, undeveloped reproductive parts. In time, as the millipede ages these parts can become fully mature all over again.

Growing younger. Neat trick. 

Ob-la-dee, ob-la-da.

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