One day recently our son and his family arrived at our house for a visit. He parked in the open space in our garage and his son (our five-year-old grandson), got out of the car first and came trotting in through the back entryway. The first thing he said was, "You've got a centipede inside your ceiling light." (this tells you something about the way he is being raised.) Cheryl and I had just come through that entrance way a few moments before and hadn't noticed any centipede (and we pride ourselves on our sharp eyes) and we ran out to see it, and sure enough there it was just a few inches over our heads. We raced for cameras because we had not previously seen a centipede among our house wildlife.
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But once it was catalogued, I didn't want it falling out of the light and then walking around in the house where someone might accidentally step on it with bare feet. When I was a little kid I picked up every bug I saw and that was how I learned that a centipede has a bite like a controlled bolt of lightning. It wasn't the only creature I "experimented" with back then. I still remember from those days picking up a bright red and black furry insect that I now know was a velvet ant and getting my worst sting ever. I can describe it as being like a sliver of glass shoved deep into my hand and then shattering. It goes on and on. The first time I was in a Central American tropical forest I encountered a swarm of army ants. I was quite thrilled to see them and reached into the swarm and plucked one out to examine. I held it carefully by the sides of its thorax so it couldn't bite me with its powerful jaws, and that was when I learned that they can also twist their abdomen around and jab you with their painful rear end stinger. There are other stories, getting my worst spider bite, and on, and on. I finally had to conclude I was just really stupid, but instead it turned out I was just ahead of the wave. You see, there are some scientists around now who are making their reputation by intentionally getting themselves bitten by every insect or other arthropod they can find that has a reputation for a painful bite or sting. Justin Schmidt for example has spent the last few years developing the Schmidt Pain Index. When you or I, for instance, visit the jungles of Central America and we are climbing around in the dense vegetation, we are warned not to casually grasp a stick or branch to balance ourselves, because we might accidentally grab a Bullet Ant which happens to be walking there. The Bullet Ant is the most famous pain producer. It is a 4 on the index, which is as high as it goes. Schmidt knows this by picking one up. In addition to a number, these nutty scientists sometimes give almost poetic descriptives. For the Tarantula Hawk (that's the big wasp with orange wings that tangles with tarantulas), instead of saying its sting is like an electric shock, it is "like dropping a turned-on hair dryer into the bubble-bath."
Anyway, I don't think our centipede is one of the serious biters (maybe a 2 or 3), and anyway I thought a new generation should be doing the testing, so with my acquired wisdom I let my son balance on a stool while he took down the light fixture and released the centipede outside with no one getting nipped.
