Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Run For Your Lives! It's Bugzilla!

YOKOSUKA NAVAL BASE, Japan — Nine whacks. That’s how many times the Navy spouse struck the insect before all 15 pairs of legs stopped wriggling.

"I don’t mind flying cockroaches, spiders or snakes. But this thing ...." Kelly Niswanger said Tuesday, wincing as she described her run-in this week with a gejigeji. It was her first encounter — she and her family just moved into their off-base home in Yokohama a few months ago.

Big. Quick-moving. More than 10 pairs of legs … having just one of these endearing qualities is usually enough to make an insect unwelcome, let alone all of the above, says Hideomi Kakimoto, a Yokosuka base environmental engineer.

But "geji," or household centipedes, are known as "good bugs" in Japan, as their ninja-like maneuvering (and, cringe, their ability to jump) allows them to hunt other household pests like cockroaches and clothing moths.


Here's a pic:

3 comments:

Home on the Range said...

Give me bats and spiders any day. Some of the creatures I've encountered in the jungles and other places are something out of a Heinlein novel. Some jungles, especially southeast Asia make the everglades look like a desert, everything SQUISHES when you walk, and there's multiple limbed things that consider you a source of nutrition.

No thanks.

Bob said...

I love snakes, but some insects and most arachnids tend to freak me out. These days, having seen what Brown Recluse Spider venom does to human tissue, I worry about these spiders that live "by the bucketful" in the typical American house.

And don't even get me started on ticks; I'm reading Teddy Roosevelt's account of his trip to Africa, and he talks of ticks all the time in terms that are totally off-putting.

Anonymous said...

We get the little fuckers here. The legs never die. You can beat them until; hell freezes over- and they're brittle- when you whack one, it breaks into a million pieces. Ick. Fuck 'em.