A number of topics of an ecological nature namely behaviour, food and feeding, respiration, the reproductive system and reproductive behaviour, life-histories, predators, and defence mechanisms and parasites have been the subject of previous chapters.

Many of the remaining ecological data are fragmentary and widely scattered and any account must needs reflect the interests of the particular author and his reading and cannot be comprehensive.

Water relations of terrestrial centipedes

Water loss experiments

A number of investigators have shown that centipedes lose water rapidly at low humidities. Auerbach (1951) investigated the ‘desiccation death time’ of various centipedes from Michigan, USA (Table 17): Roberts (1956) and Vaitilingham (1960) measured ‘survival times’ of British woodland centipedes at six different humidities; their results for 55 per cent relative humidity are shown in Table 18. Lewis' (1963) results, for six British species are shown in Table 19. Palmen & Rantala (1954) found the geophilomorph Pachymerium ferrugineum in Sweden to survive for between 38 and 109 hours at 34 per cent relative humidity at 20 °C.

It is clear from these results that, by and large, geophilomorphs are more resistant to desiccation than lithobiomorphs or scolopendromorphs. Unfortunately there are no data for scutigeromorphs.