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Photo#289771
Masses of millipedes - Pleuroloma flavipes

Masses of millipedes - Pleuroloma flavipes
St. Francis National Forest, Phillips County, Arkansas, USA
June 15, 2009

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Masses of millipedes - Pleuroloma flavipes Masses of millipedes - Pleuroloma flavipes

Moved
Moved from Millipedes.

Judging from the few adults i
Judging from the few adults in the photo, this is probably a mass of Pleuroloma flavipes Rafinesque, 1820, which occurs in Arkansas and is known to mass aggregate. Rowland Shelley

 
Thank you very much
for the identification. Self-aggregating creates a bunch more questions, such as, Why do they do it? And are they entirely inedible? No one seemed to be cashing in on all this protein, though we did notice a beetle larva attacking one.

 
Beetle larva
Was it a glowworm by any chance? As I understand it, glowworms are one of the few things that eat millipedes.

 
Wow, it may well
have been a glowworm. We don't know if we can add more pictures here, so we have sent two pictures of it into ID Request. What the beetle larva did was grasp a millipede with its mandibles, then wrap itself around like a constrictor. It looks like, within the picture, there are two dead millipedes. In this case the larva is much bigger than the half-grown millipedes, so it could not penetrate their bodies in any way.

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