Introduction

There are more than 200 species of centipedes, millipedes, Pauropoda, Symphyla and velvet worms in Tasmania. This website will help you identify the Tasmanian 'multipedes' (native and introduced) and will direct you to relevant books, reports and papers. To navigate to or from any page on this site, use the links in the left-hand sidebar. To make the text larger or smaller, use the font size adjustment in your browser.

If you are not sure whether your multipede is a centipede, millipede, velvet worm etc, click here.

Text, photos, maps and drawings on this site are my own work and copyright, unless credited to someone else. Apart from images used with permission from other sources, you are welcome to copy any information on the Tasmanian Multipedes website for non-commercial purposes. Please cite the Tasmanian Multipedes URL in your work so that others know where you got the information. For higher-resolution versions of any of the images on this website, please contact me by email.

Please note: the great majority of Tasmania's native multipedes are endemic to Tasmania. This means that even if you find a multipede somewhere else in the world which looks almost exactly like one of the Tasmanians on this website, it is highly unlikely that they are the same animal. Note also there are whole groups of centipedes and millipedes found elsewhere in the world which are not found in Tasmania. Non-Tasmanian users should identify their multipedes using references written for their own part of the world.

In late 2007 I added a mapping page to this website. To use it your browser needs to have a Flash player and Javascript enabled. The mapping page can also be accessed from the individual pages for named species. Distribution maps are shown on all species pages, but may not be as up-to-date as the interactive map on the mapping page

Bob Mesibov
December 2007