Meet The Newly Discovered Millipede Named After Los Angeles

There's something lurking beneath Los Angeles soil. It's pale, alien-like, and the size of a paper clip.

Meet the Los Angeles Thread Millipede, a newly discovered species native to Southern California. Its scientific name: Illacme socal.

Four years ago, naturalists Cedric Lee and his colleague James Bailey were searching for a rare type of slug at Whiting Ranch Wilderness Park.

They found something with 486 more legs.

The Los Angeles Thread Millipede is the size of a paper clip

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Courtesy of Cedric Lee

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“I’d never seen a millipede that looked like that, so I kind of knew it was special,” said Lee, a PhD student at UC Berkeley studying centipedes.

Lee and Bailey uploaded a picture of the arthropod to the citizen science app iNaturalist. Then, they teamed up with a researcher from Virginia Tech to confirm the millipede was a new species using DNA sequencing.

Their findings were published in the journal Zookeys earlier this spring.

Despite their namesake, millipedes rarely have a thousand legs; most species have under 100, Lee says. The first "true millipede'" — with 1,306 legs — was discovered in 2020.

L.A.’s new neighbor joins over 200 millipede species and subspecies in California, and 7,000 worldwide.

According to Lee, there could be plenty more L.A. millipedes out there. But it's hard to find them, since they burrow deep underground and only come up during significant rainfall.

These little guys do the dirty work so you don’t have to.

“They’re detritivores, so they break down organic materials like dead leaves and recycle nutrients back into the environment,” Lee said.

He encourages nature goers to upload photos of curious wildlife to citizen science apps.

One day, they may have an arthropod discovery story of their own.