Females excavate cavities in soil or rotten wood and lay a mass of eggs that they coil around and protect. Young are protected until they can fend for themselves but since they're Scolopendra centipedes, that really doesn't take too long.

Let it be said in their defence that they render us a tremendous service by destroying all kinds of harmful insects, including cockroaches, locusts, grasshoppers and sometimes even small rodents.

Entomologists, are therefore wary of centipedes and handle them carefully. The same cannot be said of children in the Chaymas tribe, whom the explorer Von Humbolt visited in 1803. He reported seeing them capturing huge centipedes with their bare hands and gulping them down still alive! Curiously, this custom appears to have died out... perhaps the venom finally took its toll and the last raw centipede eater, too!