Centipede on steroids

RAWAI: Villagers in Rawai were dumbfounded when a huge centipede, reportedly half a meter in length, was spotted near a public waterhole in Village 2. At 1 pm on February 6, villagers in the area of Baan Thai Mai (New Thais Village, or “Sea Gypsy” village) on Wiset Rd were seen crowding around a 20-meter-tall sugar palm tree. All were excitedly trying to catch a glimpse of an enormous centipede reportedly hiding out high up in the tree’s canopy. Some villagers were throwing rocks at the tree, hoping to force the arthropod to come down and make an appearance. Others stood ready with cameras, hoping to capture an image of the creature as a souvenir. One villager, identified only as Rawee, 45, said he was the first one to spot the centipede the day before. He and four other friends were bathing in the public waterhole when he saw the enormous centipede crawl down the tree and dip itself in the water before crawling back up to the safety of the tree’s upper reaches. He described the centipede as reddish-brown in color, about 50 centimeters in length and with a girth similar to that of a human arm. Rawee and his bathing buddies were astonished by the size of the centipede because they had never seen anything like it, he said. After the initial shock wore off, he screamed out to other villagers in the area about the centipede. All who saw it agreed that it was, in truth, a very large specimen. Word of the discovery soon became the talk of the tambon, with people from near and far hoping to catch a glimpse of the hundred-legged invertebrate. The sheer size of the creature, if correctly reported, is significant because the largest known species of centipede, the Amazonian giant centipede, reportedly maxes out at about 30 centimeters in length. The Vietnamese centipede, which matches the color description given by K. Rawee, only reaches about 20 centimeters in length. At last report, residents of the area were planning a mission to scale the sugar palm in an effort to catch a better view of the centipede – or even capture it and put it on display for all to see. Surprisingly in a case such as this, there were no reports of people trying to divine winning lottery numbers from aspects of the creatures physiology.