From the archive record
A millipede crawls in a mango farm in Malihabad, Uttar Pradesh. The small black and yellow flat millipedes, the slim brown ones with a yellow stripe running down their backs, and the large 20-centimetre browns smell awful. Millipedes exude cyanide gas and a cocktail of noxious chemicals such as benzoquinone to deter predators. The majority of millipedes are detritivores and feed on decomposing vegetation, faeces, or organic matter mixed with soil. They often play important roles in the breakdown and decomposition of plant litter: estimates of consumption rates for individual species range from 1 to 11 percent of all leaf litter, depending on species and region, and collectively millipedes may consume nearly all the leaf litter in a region. The leaf litter is fragmented in the millipede gut