Three Stone Centipedes New to Nevada, Found at Great Basin National Park

Overlooked predators

About 3,000 centipede species have been described worldwide, roughly 20% of them recorded in the United States. Most are overlooked — they're small and not much to look at.

Stone centipedes (order Lithobiomorpha) may be among the least studied of North America's common ground-dwelling arthropods. Almost no work on the classification and distribution of western stone centipedes has been done since the death of the centipede and millipede specialist Ralph Vary Chamberlin in 1967 — a pity, because centipedes matter:

• in some soil communities they are the dominant predators by biomass, so they can control prey numbers and shape the whole community of larger soil animals;
• they are also food for vertebrates and other arthropods.

Three new state records

On June 13, 2018, during the Beetle BioBlitz at Great Basin National Park, centipedes were collected by hand from leaf litter and from under stones and logs along Baker Creek and Lehman Creek. Three species had never been recorded in Nevada:

L. loganus made up most of the catch — 24 individuals, 60% of the total. All specimens went to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

Why it matters

The finds bring Nevada's centipede list to 16 species — and suggest the state still holds centipedes that are unrecorded, or even undescribed.

Sources

Based on Cedric Lee (Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County), "Three New Records of Stone Centipedes in Nevada," first published in The Midden, Great Basin National Park, Vol. 18, No. 2, Winter 2018; National Park Service; published by the National Park Service and in the public domain; rewritten in hubnx's own words. The author's specimen photographs are not reproduced. Further reading: R.J. Mercurio, An annotated catalog of the centipedes (Chilopoda) from the United States of America, Canada and Greenland (1758–2008), 2010; M. Schaefer, "The soil fauna of a beech forest on limestone: Trophic structure and energy budget," Oecologia, 1990.