I recently had the excellent luck to go on a myriapod hunt with my friend and colleague Jackson Means. We headed to a local spot I hadn’t visited before, Ellett Valley Recreation Area. Notable online reviews of the park include gems such as:
“Not much to see.”
and
“One guy came out on his porch and scowled at me as I was leaving for about 5 minutes. It was weird. Lol.”
Luckily, we were there for the leaf litter critters, rather than the views and befriending the neighbors.
Dr. Means poses as he reaches into his bag for some collecting vials.
The trail winds through hilly terrain into a loop, and you pass by a few sinkholes—the first major one denoted by a nice interpretive sign. Sinkholes always pique my collecting interest, so I grabbed as much leaf litter as I could, digging down through the dry upper layers until I found moister material below.
Sinkhole beside path
The great thing about having a hiking buddy is that you two can lift larger rocks and logs to get at the critters underneath. We set about lifting rocks and logs, and found one particularly nice log to overturn (replacing it afterwards, of course). Scurrying out from under the log, I noticed an unusually light yellow Scolopocryptops centipede and scooped it up. I have a number of these in my collection, so I don’t always grab them, but the gestalt of this one was slightly off and I didn’t want it to get away.
Important background info here is that I’ve been searching for a particular Scolopocryptops species for a few years now, but haven’t found it yet: S. peregrinator (Crabill, 1952). It’s always in the back of my head when I see a Scolopocryptops scurrying away from me, but I never quite believe I’ll find it in the field.
By contrast, the two most common species in the genus that occur in Virginia are S. sexspinosus and S. nigridius, and they are indeed common. You can hardly spit in the woods without hitting one, and invariably, those are the species I collect.
Scolopocryptops nigridius, curled up in a yogurt cup under the microscope. Note its dark maroon color, often a useful field ID character.
Indeed, I collected S. nigridius from the leaf litter while we searched (see above photo). But back to that yellow one I mentioned.
Light yellow centipede stretched out under the microscope. Spoiler alert: it’s Scolopocryptops peregrinator.
Could it be? It’s a bit smaller than the S. nigridius I collected, but that light yellow color does make it stand out. I zoomed in on the tergites to look for the diagnostic character: complete paramedian sutures.
Middorsal body segments of Scolopocryptops peregrinator, showing its complete paramedian sutures. It’s most easily seen on the fourth tergite from the top—that thin white line on the right side of the tergite.
The complete paramedian sutures are there, that clinches it—finally, I found S. peregrinator! The light yellow color is noted by Hoffman (1995) in his account of the species, and he suggests it may be more fossorial than other species in the genus. Shelley (2002) posits that it is more active during cooler weather, though obviously not exclusively so, as my dead of summer luck shows. Despite doing a fair amount of cold weather collecting, particularly in the past year, I was unable to find it anywhere else in Montgomery County. Perhaps it has more specific habitat preferences than other Scolopocryptops. At any rate, I was glad to collect it and hopefully I’ll find more soon.
I found a few other interesting bugs that day too:
Erebomaster sp.
Mite in the family Erythraeidae
Dasycerus sp., a tiny strange Staphylinidae that feeds on fungi in the leaf litter
After collecting leaf litter and running it through my Berlese funnels, I ended up with 11 species of centipedes, 6 species of millipedes, 1 pauropod, and 1 symphylan. Not too shabby! I’m planning to return in the fall and winter to see what cold-weather species will be active, and to check out more of the sink holes that dot the landscape throughout the park.
I still haven’t collected a few myriapod species that have been reported from Montgomery County, but with my collection of S. peregrinator, that leaves just a few more species to find. Maybe they’ll be hiding at Ellett Valley too.
References:
Hoffman RL (1995) The centipeds (Chilopoda) of Virginia: a first list. Banisteria 5: 20–32.
Shelley RM (2002) A synopsis of the North American centipedes of the order Scolopendromorpha (Chilopoda). Virginia Museum of Natural History Memoir 5: 1–108.