Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Other trails in the sand




When people speak of trails in the sand in scrub, they're usually talking about Sand Skinks. However, sometimes the sand surface looks like a miniature railyard with many crisscrossing paths. The tracks are on the surface, not beneath it. They belong to Narceus gordanus, the resident large species of millipede that is quite common here. I had this species identified a couple of years ago by a scientist at the University of Florida. It was first described in 1948, owing to the slow progress in cataloguing Millipedia, no matter how easy they are to find.