"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.
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3 comments:
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.
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.
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.
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