Otago Museum introduced their latest arrivals yesterday — a clutch of baby giant African millipedes — and while they were fairly certain who the father was, living environments co-ordinator Tony Stumbo said it was not yet known who the mother is.
"That’s because we have six female adults and only one male," Mr Stumbo said.
He said the female laid eggs in a burrow and several months later, they hatched.
"Once they’ve hatched, they just fend for themselves.
"The babies actually do quite well by feeding off the adults’ waste products ... until they’re old enough to stake their own claim."
When the museum first took responsibility for the adults in 2021, they were all in the same enclosure together.
"We learned pretty quickly that we needed to separate the sexes from each other.
"They’ve been quite busy, yes," he said.
"When we got them from Wellington Zoo, we knew that it was possible for them to breed. We just didn’t realise how easy it would be for them to do it."
Dr Stumbo said he was quite excited when he received word that the first few eggs had hatched.
"I was a proud granddad.
"It’s going to be quite hard to name all of them. I know our marketing team is keen to do it, but I won’t be able to keep all the names straight.
"I’m just going to name them all Bob — 300 Bobs."
In the wild, millipedes laid so many eggs because not all of them were expected to survive.
But in captivity, a lot more of them have survived and were growing quickly, he said.
"We’re not sure what to do with them all. That’s to be determined at the moment."
He said the detritivores were still quite young and easy to take care of at the moment because they mostly ate compost, supplemented with fruits and vegetables.
Eventually, they would grow up to 35cm long, 3cm thick, weigh up to 80g and would have up to 300 legs each.
He said 300 of them would be too much to handle.
"This is our first group of young ones, so we’ll see how many of them survive.
"We might have to see if the Wellington Zoo would like to take any back."
