About

About

The Millipede Enthusiast's Database (TMED) is a collaborative effort to build a comprehensive database of millipede husbandry information made by millipede enthusiasts, citizen scientists, and photographers from around the world.

Millipedes have historically been understudied professionally, and unfortunately this is mirrored in that millipedes are one of the most misunderstood invertebrate groups kept in captivity, with misinformation rampant. TMED is aimed at collecting reports of millipede captive breeding successes, wild observations, and notes on taxonomic positions of species kept in captivity. Our goal is to dispel misunderstandings regarding millipedes and to provide a source of scientifically-rigorous, consistent information.

This website was started in October of 2020, as a retry of an earlier attempt at crowd-sourcing a millipede husbandry book. It has since grown to be the largest English-language online source of millipede husbandry.

If you like what we do, please consider contributing to our work by submitting husbandry, breeding, and wild observations of any millipede species you have encountered. We are also looking for quality photographs and videos of millipedes both in captivity and in the wild. A critical element of our work is fact-checking, so if you find a mistake, please contact us.
If you want to support us further, inquire about joining our team, or consider supporting us financially once we launch under the coming Digital Encyclopedia of Arthropods.

Disclaimer and Citations

This free site is not this database's final home. We expect to port the information here into a more user-friendly site within a few years. We also hope to eventually translate TMED into other languages such as French, German, Russian, and Spanish.

All presented material belongs to its respective owners. All writing unless otherwise noted is by Arthroverts and Connor Smotzer.
We are currently in the process of adding proper citations to TMED. If you see something that is not cited yet, it is likely we have not gotten to that part of the website yet.

Due to the uncertain taxonomic position of many millipedes, we cannot guarantee that all identifications are correct, though we do our best to ensure accuracy. The site is constantly being updated to reflect this.

Taxonomy

We use Millibase and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility for our baseline taxonomic information, usually in concordance with published articles accessed via Google Scholar, JSTOR, and the Biodiversity Heritage Library. For the many millipedes that are undescribed or of uncertain generic position, we try to narrow the identification down to family at minimum where possible. We are developing a numbering system that can be used for undescribed or otherwise unknown species, building off the numbering system already being used for many Spirostreptidae sp.

Page images courtesy of Arthroverts (Lebanese Polydesmida sp., probably Libanaphe adonis, in-situ) and MontePython (Acladocricus/Thyropygus sp. "Java").