Millipede Mayhem

Read about how members of CSIRO's Double Helix Science Club helped to research these pesky invasive critters.

• 29 November 2007 | Updated 14 October 2011

Overview

• Enter the doctor
• The Double Helix team gets results!

Imagine a scenario where your house is being invaded by a black bug. This bug cannot be stopped – it seems to be able to go through brick walls, locked doors and find ways through concrete floors.

Every morning you wake up to find these bugs throughout your home, under mats, in your bed and kitchen cupboards, and dropping into your bowl of breakfast cereal. Stop imagining. This actually happened to residents of South Australia over the last 40-50 years.

During the 1960s, these crawling bugs began appearing by the hundreds of thousands in people's gardens and homes around Port Lincoln and the Adelaide Hills.

The bug in question was the Portuguese millipede. As you can probably guess from its name, this millipede was originally from Portugal and Spain.

It was accidentally introduced to south-eastern Australia (possibly arriving as a stowaway on a cargo ship). Ever since arriving in Australia, it has been crawling into people's homes and driving residents up the wall.

Enter the doctor

In 1973, young scientist Geoff Baker began studying the Portuguese millipede at the University of Adelaide. One of the first things Geoff did was to compile a map of the millipede invasion.

He found that by 1978, the millipedes were in south-eastern South Australia as well as in Melbourne in southern Victoria.

Seven years later, in 1985, Geoff did another study to see if there was any change to the pest's distribution. Geoff found not only that the millipede had established itself in new areas surrounding the original spots in South Australia and Victoria, but had also dispersed to colonise new States including the ACT, Tasmania and Western Australia.

In that same year, Geoff plotted on a map of Australia all the places that possessed the climate favourable to the millipede. The purpose of this map was to predict the areas of Australia that the millipede was likely to spread to and become a nuisance.

The Double Helix team gets results!

Now, 20 years since Geoff made that prediction, members of CSIRO's Double Helix Science Club have helped create a map of where the millipedes live in Australia in 2007.

Members all over Australia collected millipedes of all varieties and sent them to CSIRO as part of Millipede Mayhem, the Double Helix Science Club national experiment for 2007.

By donating their time, members gained a better understanding of their local soil invertebrates and also helped scientists better understand the impact that Portuguese millipedes are having on the ecosystem.