Wandering Leg Sausauge

Crurifarcimen vagans

It's a MILLIPEDE! I know it sounds like an innuendo from Sex and the City or whatever they're watching these days, but it's a millipede.

I looked it up and it turns out Sex and the City finished almost 10 years ago, not including the films. I can't believe it! I'm so out of touch! Although that particular programme is just one degree of separation from both Star Trek and Columbo, so that's good enough for me.

Of course, Leonard Nimoy was in Columbo, too so it's all pretty incestuous already... but anyway! Too much human! 2 legs good, loads and loads of legs better.

Crurifarcimen vagans is a millipede from the Eastern Arc Mountains of Tanzania, east Africa. Its Latin name translates to Wandering Leg Sausage because it looks like a big, fat ambulating sausage. It reaches some 15 cm (6 in) long with a diameter of 1.5 cm (0.6 in). Sure, it's not the longest sausage ever, but let's see the longest sausage in the world make its way through the undergrowth halfway up a tropical mountain without use of refrigeration or a hot dog bun. It ain't happening.

The Wandering Leg Sausage isn't the longest millipede either, being just half the length of the Giant African Millipede. And like many a millipede they are well endowed with over 100 legs and feed on soft, rotting vegetable matter. However, one thing our heroic vagabond has in his favour is that incredibly chunky body which no amount of walking or strict dieting can shift. I guess it's a metabolic thing.

At the very least, you don't have to worry about a Wandering Leg Sausage crawling up your trousers to chew your legs off and add them to the collection. They seem perfectly satisfied on that score.

Odd to think that this mighty beast was discovered as recently as 2011! I think people were just too polite to point at it.