I’ve been called a lot of strange things in my life, but I never thought I could be called a nematode-lover.
I certainly never envisioned a day when my wife would start referring to house centipedes – those terrifying huge invertebrates that seem to have a million legs and run at top speed – as our “honored guests.”
We’re definitely not “bug people,” so what turned us around?
As an ecologist, I can appreciate that even unlovable critters serve valuable functions in nature like decomposing organic matter and keeping the populations of other organisms in check.
Then again, I never thought the indoors had room for biodiversity or strange “guests.” Living in the aptly named “eco-house” in college (where a dirt floor basement and holes in the walls contributed to hefty populations of slugs, moths, flies, and more) forced me to get used to it, but it certainly wasn’t my ideal living situation.
So you can imagine my unhappiness when I discovered several years ago that I’d moved into a condo chock full of house centipedes.
Then the ecologist in me started wondering why they were there, and what would happen if I successfully got rid of them. I knew that getting rid of wolves in Yellowstone led to a number of problems (e.g. higher elk populations started to wipe out cottonwood groves), and that the centipedes wouldn’t be there if they weren’t finding something to eat.
It turns out house centipedes actually eat cockroaches, ants, bed bugs, moths that can eat clothes, and other household pests.
We don’t keep a pristine house, and living in a condo there are always cockroaches and ants somewhere nearby, waiting to strike. When we realized that these beasts were our front line against even more unsavory bugs, our attitudes towards them changed; after all, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
No more vacuuming them up, and no more trying to bring the humidity levels low enough to make them unwelcome.
A Few Million Nematodes
When our household worm compost bin (another adventure in urban ecology) got infested with fruit flies, we naturally wondered about biological controls.
While there were many species of mites, springtails, and other tiny bugs in our bin, we were missing predators.
I ordered a few million nematodes (a kind of tiny roundworm) by mail. Within a few weeks (long enough for the adult flies to die off and their larva to have been eaten) we had a fly-free bin. To this day, I smile when I see the tiny little white thread-like nematodes patrolling my compost bin, looking for new larvae to eat.
My wife has made it clear that bringing in spider eggs from outside to take care of the occasional housefly is going too far.
But we’ve learned that whether we like it or not, we do share our homes with a variety of other creatures.
Rather than dive into a spiral of ever-increasing applications of poison or traps, we’ve been learning to love our allies, no matter how creepy they may be.
(Photos: Centipede by Flickr user robswatski under a Creative Commons Sharealike license; nematodes by Jon Fisher/TNC under a Creative Commons Sharealike license).
Since moving to central France (Europe), I’ve come across these awesome creatures often and always in my bathroom (humidity). I tend to try and catch them with a glass and a postcard and put them outside, as I do with all bugs including flies, but these bathroom dwellers are oftentimes just too fast and too thin for me to catch them.
I don’t mind predator ‘insects’ in my house, but I do mind them catching me unawares or the thought of them crawling over me at night.
I do not have a pest problem as far as I know as I’m a clean-living individual on the whole, but these critters come from outside and from the other side of my appartment wall, which is the rest of an appartment building. And who knows what dirt and pests there are in that twilight zone!
The main thing I’ve come to realize after years of catching bugs and freeing them into an outdoor space, is definitely how scared they are of me (see Grace Sapia’s comment below, who I totally agree with) and it hurts me to see them so terrified, when all I want to do is rescue them from me and my personal space. So please remember, all you bug-killers out there: We are huge! Enormous! Scary! Please always try to remove bugs from your space rather than kill them. We humans are already killing everything in this world and bugs never seem to count, but they do!
Did you know: I even try and put a stray ant back with its colony if I can? Sometimes, one sits on my coffee cup outside or on my cat’s food bowl and I inadvertently move it with the vessel it’s on. An ant is helpless and doomed to die if it cannot be with its colony, so I always make the effort to bring it back to its friends.
I admit to having less empathy for human beings, as they’re not the innocents of this world.
Appreciate you ??
When I was a kid, I used to be scared as all shit of these when they crawled out of the drain or when zooming across the floor at high speed. So many legs, meant danger to my mind. About seven or eight years ago now I started seeing one particular specimen in my basement, and decided to look them up. Reading articles like this about how they’re helpful, I named him Frank and decided to leave him be.
I did have to rescue him from the shower a few times, and let him know that I was fine with him being in my room but my face was off limits for midnight exploring. I like to think we became friends, though a few years later he was getting too old- too big to climb anywhere without falling off, too slow to catch the meagre offerings of bugs invading our house. I moved him outside during the height of summer and mourned his departure like I would a favoured pet.
He was succeeded by his many children, some of whom have since grown big and clumsy and gone outside, but many others lurk beneath the trim, behind appliances, and under furniture- doing good work keeping the house clean. My mom affectionately refers to all of them as ‘Franks’, though she still calls me occasionally to shoo away some that have invaded her space. Usually I just pet them lightly and that sends them off, but occasionally stronger methods are needed- a paper towel is usually good to push them away from a space without injury.