pede fight

My luck ran out today. Haha, sorry, no vid or pics of the fight. I tried to hook up two pedes today and had my first real fight. I should have taken a pic but I broke it up first. Here's how it looked to me. They locked terminal legs and started a tug of war, pulling in the other direction as hard as they can. I'm guessing the loser is the one that has a terminal leg pop off first. Maybe that's why I see some pedes missing one terminal or when I see regenerated terminals. They really fight with those things. I saw one crush one in the middle of it's body with it's terminals but let go.

I don`t think it is a fight, it is their normal way of communication!

WOW! I've never even heard of this type of behavior! Using their terminals, obviously yes, but this sounds like they intentionally locked terminals the way moose or deer would lock antlers. Could you have witnessed two males / females in a dominance or territorial dispute? If so, the loss of a terminal is a pretty good way of taking your competition out of the race... without the additional risk of either getting killed.

Were you certain of sex of each 'pede you introduced? How did they approach each other? Did they just walk past each other and grab? Amazing stuff.

Why wouldn't one just eat the other? Possibly because neither was hungry... who knows... but it's great that you're witnessing this stuff!

Seriously! Take notes! Write a book! :worship:

Oh it definitely was a fight. I didn't spill more details. It looks like they normally test each other by turning around and teasing each other with their terminals to see if the other is going to start a fight. Well with these two, one grabbed the other a little high on the last couple of tergites and a terminal sunk in, I'd say at least a quarter inch and pede blood went everywhere. I had to get some tongs and a chopstick and work the terminal out of the other pede while they were still doing a tug of war with each other. I took out the injured pede, went back to look at the other one and it was drinking the other pedes blood that was on a rock. Both are going to be OK. I did write a pede breeding article about a year ago in Invertebrates Magazine. So far, the only thing I would add to what I wrote is that the females will shake their terminals more than I was seeing before I wrote the article. But when a male and female pair up and she is following him, he does all the terminal shaking. A male will tap on terminals of another male too but it looks slightly more aggressive to me so far. I'm still working with crossing the diff color forms, I want to put the curiosity to rest. It was a castaneiceps and arizonensis I put together this time and that might have been part of the problem, I don't know. Scientists are pretty sure that all the color forms are the same species and it used to be published that way but I don't think it is anymore because it wasn't 100%. Maybe it is now, don't know. Maybe there's enough difference between these two that they don't match up, but I plan on trying it again sooner or later. I know the castaneiceps is a male because I saw him mate with another castaneiceps. I'm still not sure about the sex of that crazy arizonensis, it's the one going after my finger in that older vid. Anyway, the other pede leaked out a lot of blood, here's the fight scene.

Hi,

very nice experiments & keep up the good work!

Mating pedes is not that easy & i even saw that male/female "couples" show aggressive behaviour if it's not the right time to mate.
Some species are naturally aggressive or distinctively solitary (like Sc. cingulata) - and you can't find out gender dimorphism if you see aggressive behaviour.

Of course i experienced scolopendra heros specimen seem to be a little bit more tolerant for experiments, so that putting two specimen together does not necessarily result in dead specimen that fast (in opposite to Scolopendra cingulata).

Thanks for sharing the knowledge & don't give up.


Regards
Turgut

OK, I will keep going! I'm going to give it a break some day. I haven't been interested in breeding species other than Scolopendra heros so far. Here's what I do with the heros pedes. I try to get one I know is a male and put it in a container for breeding. I wait until he stops walking around and seems calm. Then I get a chopstick and pick up a diff pede with it. As she climbs to one end of the chopstick I move the stick so her head is close to the terminals of the other one so her antennae make contact with the terminals of the male. If it's a female on the stick that's ready to mate, she won't panic and run but will instead seem interested and calm. So then I try to ease her off the stick. That's how I "try" to do it anyway. Sometimes the other gets under a rock so I just let them crawl off the stick and see what happens and I always get ready to take one out. Yesterday when they got in a fight, I just started throwing rocks on the floor and didn't care where they were going, I almost hit a guitar with big rock!