La Maldición de Santiago

A few days ago I happened to be standing in the kitchen, talking to My Favorite Wife as she was removing a large pot from the bottom rack of the dishwasher. "What's that thing sitting on the bottom of the dishwasher?" I asked. By removing the pot she had revealed a small bristly object, around an inch in length, that had been obscured from view while the pot was still in the rack. She glanced into the dishwasher and emitted a small shriek. "It's a Santiago!!!"

Huh?

I looked more closely and saw that the small bristly object was some sort of insect, a make and model that I had never seen before. What looked like a couple dozen spindly little legs radiated out from the elongated body, at the front of which were two prominently visible eyes. I thought it looked pretty interesting, actually. I particularly liked the stripe down its back that gave it kind of a sporty look.

From her demeanor it was clear that MFW did not think it looked interesting, but rather dangerous and threatening. She does not particularly care for small crawly things with lots of legs. Up to six legs, OK; plain ol' bugs are not such a big deal, unless they're unusually large. Eight or more legs: we have a problem. Spiders of any size immediately push us up to threat level "red". Any eight-legged intruders in our home must be dispatched immediately while MFW temporarily removes herself to an undisclosed secure location.

MFW's reaction to spiders goes a little overboard, which she will freely admit, but she says she can't help herself. She claims that as a small child she was traumatized by her two brothers, who, when they learned that she didn't like spiders, began breeding them and forced her to watch while they fed them flies. The effects of the PTSD (post-traumatic spider disorder) remain evident in unexpected ways decades later, such as when I walk up to her holding a small gift or other nice surprise behind my back, saying, "I have a something for you," and her spontaneous reaction is always to jump back and ask, with a ring of apprehension in her voice, "Is it a spider?!"

I've never really understood this mortal fear of small arthropods that a lot of people have. I will not claim that I particularly like insects, spiders and such. I am not tremendously interested in having them crawling around in my house or finding them in my food. Once, while living in a cheap student rental in northern California, one of the very large (around 2" long, no exaggeration) cockroaches that made occasional appearances in dark corners of the house startled me awake in the middle of the night by crawling over my arm, and I found that fairly upsetting and searched every inch of my room the next morning to minimize the likelihood of a repeat. As a small child I was a little freaked out by the huge potato bugs (read lies about them here, or click here for the horrible truth) that would very occasionally turn up around our house in the San Francisco Bay Area. But as a general rule, the sight of a little bug does not induce in me the kind of hysterical meltdown that it does in more than a few otherwise stable adults.

This thing in our dishwasher had a lot more than eight legs, qualifying it as extremely menacing on the MFW scale. I learned later that it was a house centipede, Scutigera coleoptrata. I initially guessed that it was some sort of centipede and did a Google search for pictures of centipedes and yes, that's what it was. It turns out that house centipedes are predators that eat ants, termites, silverfish, bedbugs, cockroaches and many other crawly things that you would rather not find in your home. They sting their prey with a venom that is passed through their two frontmost legs, which have evolved to serve this purpose. In theory they could sting humans but in practice this apparently doesn't really happen and I didn't find any reference to actual reported stings in humans. So in other words, S. coleoptrata is friend, not foe. It probably wouldn't be a bad thing to have a whole army of them patrolling the dark recesses of inaccessible crawlspaces under the house and such. Not that most people would probably agree with me on that, though. I found lots of web pages explaining how to get rid of them, with plenty of reader comments about how much people fear and hate and wish nothing but harm on them. It's just a little bug, fer crissakes!



We come in peace.

My daughter once recounted a story about how some sort of weird looking bug—a certain Mr. S. coleoptrata, as we now know—had been crawling across the floor of her classroom at school. When one of the other girls spotted it, she screamed and jumped up on her desk, inciting a small riot that took twenty minutes or so for the teacher to bring under control. After order had been restored, they captured it and attempted to keep it as a class pet, and out of a field of many proposed names chose to call it "Santiago" (this wasn't a Spanish class, but for some reason most of the names suggested were Spanish ones). It died fairly soon because the teacher attempted to keep it alive by feeding it oranges or some such thing, when it would have preferred a nice fat bug, or maybe its new habitat was just too dry, things the teacher could have found out in about three minutes on the Internet. Foolish teacher. Now he has the curse of Santiago hanging over his head.

This dishwasher appearance was now the second confirmed Santiago sighting in our own home. The first Santiago had shown up in the kids' bathroom sink, and my daughter identified it as the same kind of creature she had seen at school. Our latest specimen was an average-sized one (based on what I had later read) that must have crawled into the warm dishwasher overnight—I had left the door of it standing open after the wash cycle finished so that everything would be dry in the morning. "That's a small one," MFW told me from the other side of the kitchen, where she was maintaining a safe distance in case it suddenly attacked. "The one in the bathroom sink was this big!" she said, motioning with her hands to indicate an object about the size of a toaster.

"Be careful!" she admonished. "When you hit them they explode!" I suppose that whacking just about any small, soft thing with the heel of a shoe using massive force, as, judging from past experience, MFW had probably done to defend her family from the raging monster in the bathroom sink, could cause this effect. I explained that rather than sending the tiny menace on a footwear-induced journey to meet its maker, I would instead risk life and limb to capture this one alive for release into the wild, due, no doubt, to the latent influence of a steady diet of Wild Kingdom in my increasingly distant youth. Ignoring the peril and without weapons or protective clothing of any kind, I put a glass over it and slid a 3x5 card underneath.


Its venom is lethal, Jim, second only to that of the house centipede.

I noticed that it seemed to be making no effort to escape, so I put the glass down and just held it clinging to the end of the card. According to my several minutes of extensive research, they can scurry fairly quickly for cover on all those legs. I don't know if this one was tired or unwell or just fatalistic, but it made no moves to escape. At any rate, I carried it to the edge of the back yard and flicked it off the end of the card into the bushes, while MFW watched the operation from the kitchen window to verify that I had carried it a safe distance from the house. Bless me, Santiago, for I have spared thee, that thou mayest once again partake freely of ant and cockroach.