I found this in the Back 40 (inches) last week. It’s probably a leftover from last year. The Back 40, to bring you up to speed, is my small, fenced & walled concrete slab of backyard. Here, near the west coast of Brooklyn, USA, I get what I think is a fair (and wondrous) amount of life forms, either passing through, or, like this one, hitting the end of the line. Part of the reason I started this blog was to document these things.
So this one looks like a millipede. Note that there are two sets of legs to most of the individual body segments, a characteristic of the millipedes. (Most species have fewer than 100 legs, even though their name, as you probably remember from school, means “1000 feet”).
The Class name for these is Diplopoda, and they are part of the Arthropoda subphylum Myriapoda. They’re not insects, which are members of the subphylum Hexapoda. Also part of the Myriapoda are the centipedes, which are in a different class. The quickest way to tell the millis from the centis is to check out the legs (guess I’ve always been a leg man): centipedes always have one set of legs per body segment. There are about 1400 millipede species in the US & Canada. Is your skin crawling yet?
This critter was posed on a seed packet of California poppies.
Backyard and Beyond 
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