These Millipedes Stopped a Train
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- Опубліковано 6 лип 2023
- If I asked you to name an animal that could stop a train, you might guess something big, like an elephant or a bison. Or you might guess a group of smaller animals, like a herd of deer or a flock of geese. But I’m going to need you to think smaller. Like, much smaller. Because this is a story about how millipedes in Japan stopped a train.
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Sources:
royalsocietypublishing.org/do...
www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/sc...
www.loc.gov/everyday-mysterie...
www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2...
www.sciencedirect.com/science...
www.npr.org/2021/01/15/957371...
www.sciencealert.com/this-tra...
web.archive.org/web/201402211...
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You can order your millipede shirt all this month! store.dftba.com/collections/bizarrebeasts/products/shirt-of-the-month-millipede
Here before the same millipedes remove this video
😂👍🏼
Won't happen until a year from now
@@napoleonfeanorEXPLAIN
Sounds exactly like something a millipede would say.
@@napoleonfeanor ... You're a millipede aren't ya
“Eight year swarming schedule” is such a delightfully strange phrase, and if heard out of context, I wouldn’t be able to even begin trying to guess what it’s about
I'd immediately think cicadas tbh
Ha ha!
@@TheUltraDinoboy Literally my first thought.
It's nice of them to pick years divisible by 8 to make it easier for us to remember when they swarm 🙃
I kept hearing "trained millipedes" and my dreams are going to be crazy
Hahaha!
You can actually train arthropods. After a few generations, baby arthropods actually start retaining the training given to their parents!
This works for spiders, millipedes, centipedes, and even pillbugs!
similar events happend in south australia with the portugese millipedes, the crushed milipedes created a slime that stopped the trains from stopping
Why are they called Portuguese? Or do they come from there (pr Brazil)? Anyways, thanks for telling us there are other such species
@@napoleonfeanorYes, they come from Portugal.
_Ommatoiulus moreleti_ is the millipede in question.
That happened here in Perth as well! Train didn't stop in time and shunted the train in front, thankfully no one was seriously injured.
Portugal =/= Brazil.
When I heard 8 years I thought that's Bizarre because 8 is not a prime number. Animals that swarm in multi-year cycles to avoid predators usually swarm on a prime number of years because it makes it harder for a predator to match the cycle. for example, an 8 year cycle can be partially matched by 2 or 4 preditor cycles but a 7 year cycle is only matched by a 7 year cycle.
This new knowledge makes me very happy.
Which further supports the idea that it's not to avoid predation.
thank you foe this fun fact
It may be because it makes them less likely to meet another swarmer and overpopulate the region. I think different cicada species swarm in 7 and 13 year cycles, so they would only meet around once a century. This means more food for them. Then again, why not just both be 7 but offset the cycle 3 years?
so, what do millipedes eat?
So you could say the trains were...🙂>😎...imPEDEd.
Man I'm not normally one to comment on the host but oh my god the coordination of the outfit today is INCREDIBLE, Sarah. The velvet blazer! The hair! I live for outfits this well put together
I thought the same thing
I just made the same comment. It can be really hard to compliment someone's sense of style and self expression without treading into skeeve territory--I think you did good.
Same here. But Sarah just rocks this look! =D
how is it hard? just say 'cool outfit'
Having lived in Japan for several years, I was not surprised to hear this is in Japan, as mukade are a big deal there (which I thought were millipedes, but apparently are centipedes). Mukade have very nasty stings! This video sent me on an interesting Google adventure to see what the original Japanese is. These guys are apparently called kisha yasude, which is interesting because kisha is a rural word for train influenced by the fact rural trains are more often diesel (kidousha) whereas urban trains are generally electric (densha).
Neat!
as if there's any practical differemce between 100 and 1000 legs
It looks like some of the graphs might have the names too
@@NoNameAtAll2millipedes are different from centipedes because they have 2 pairs of legs per segment as opposed to 1 pair
@@rya1701 as if there's practical difference between spawn of satan with 2 legs per segment and spawn of satan with 4 legs per segment
If there’s one country that you don’t want to mess up the schedule for, it’s Japan. If they do press conferences to apologise for leaving twelve seconds early, imagine the chaos of stopping the trains altogether
I doubt they would, they have no control over this. Like to they apologize for trains being delayed from a earthquake or tsunami?
It's a very interesting coincidence that in the Malaysian Chinese Hokkien dialect, millipedes are called 火車蟲, which directly translates to Train Worm. It's got segmented bodies like train compartments.
I love that the auto subtitles call these 'trained millipedes' lol. Something about the phrase 'when the trained millipedes swarm again' sounds very mad scientist-y
For another difference between centipedes and millipedes: because millipedes are herbivores, they lack the specialised venom-injecting front pair of legs, known as _toxicognaths,_ that centipedes have. It's important to inject the word _toxicognaths_ into whatever conversation you can, because it's a cool word.
Can we all just appreciate the incredible dedication to colour coordination in this episode?
This made me think of how bizarre it would be if humans had several instars during their develop to adulthood.
Imagine how disturbing that would be... A baby hits their first instar and suddenly you have an entire infant's worth of husk left behind, getting worse and worse as they slowly become adults...
We would be a very weird shape and probably not have limbs in the same way, since we wouldn't have bones! The reason small critters go through instars is because they get too big for their exoskeleton and have to shed. (Fun fact: lobsters also shed their exoskeletons and keep growing their whole lives and if they make it to adulthood without getting eaten, they will eventually die because they are too big/heavy to properly molt)
Anyway, a less weird version would be if we shed like snakes. They still shed in adulthood, but they shed way more as they grow because they keep outgrowing their skins. Turtles do it too with the scutes on their shells, and so do lizards. But it's less dramatic because they don't shed it in one go like a snake does
@@harmonicaveronicaI know the energy cost of Molting is what eventually kills a lobster, but if given the right energy source, I wonder how long we could make one last before it's body is just physically incapable of storing enough energy to survive the process.
I bought that shirt faster than I've ever bought anything else. Its so adorable and the colors are perfect!
Aren‘t we, good millipedes citizens, allowed to have our own rave parties on train tracks ??! For blob sake !
I for one welcome our new millipede overlords.
Fun fact, no centipedes have exactly 100 legs nor do any millipedes have 1000 legs.
@@DJFracus it couldn't have though, because 306 is not divisible by 4
@@lred1383prolly just lost a few legs or smth
"If I asked you to name an animal that could stop a train..."
A Blue Whale. Definitely.
The logistics of how to get it there is just a technical detail but I feel confident in the accuracy of my answer.
you know youve got an infestation problem when a 250 tonne block of steel travelling at 300 miles per hour gets stopped by a couple of worm like creatures
We've had a similar thing in Vic, Aus: trains on the ballarat line had to be halted & cancelled due to 'worms' clogging the line.
Unknown if it's the same species, or just a similar mechanism.
I've heard of armyworms or cutworms stopping trains, those are caterpillars of moths. And no, there's just a lot of them lol.
@@quitlife9279 well, good for the caterpillars. They don’t want to be splatted by a train!
This is new for me. Where I live we've had problems with beavers (digging under the rails) and sometimes cows that escape from their fields. Most regular though are humans walking on the tracks, but that's obviously for a short amount of time.
If someone asks me how many legs a millipede has I'll be f*cking done with life and just quit
Nature is ever so surprising. Brilliant video and presentation! I'm so glad you all showed up in my feed so I could sub ^_^.
Get your own millipede pin (the rare glows in the dark!) and never miss another beast by subscribing to the pin club here! store.dftba.com/collections/bizarrebeasts/products/bizarre-beasts-pin-subscription-1
And you can find your own millipede shirt here! store.dftba.com/collections/bizarrebeasts/products/shirt-of-the-month-millipede
Your two tone hair is wonderful!
this is wonderful, i can get a millipede pin to go along with my centipede pin 🥺💞
Is cocaine illegal? Those bidens are always up to something
Ayayayayayayaya
ahhh cool shirt where do you get a millipede shirt?! haha and also it also reminds me of the sand worms from the Dune books and movies
oh ok found the link in description. $32 for a tshirt?! what are they crazy? Yah I do not want a millipede tshirt that bad, to pay that much. Dah well…. cool tshirt!
I remember reading about the Millipede swarming in an old book in our school's library and it actually happened we always stepped on a millipede everyday 😢
What a truly wonderful Bizarre Beast!
We had a similar story to this out in Colorado and New Mexico. Fair warning, it’s a bit disgusting.
I was riding the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic railroad when one of the passengers told me a story about how millipedes stopped the train. A few years ago, a train was climbing the hill out of Chama New Mexico when it came upon an infestation of Millipedes along the track. The train tried to keep going, but it couldn’t get enough traction thanks to all the guts and pieces of the millipedes it squashed, so another locomotive had to be called to push the train up to the top of the hill.
Was there anything specific about the train tracks that attracted them, or were they swarming in that density everywhere in the region??
Yes so many unanswered questions. How did the trains get blocked? Was it the cyanide? Or did they make the tracks too slippery? or were they like 8 feet deep? for miles on end?
Great questions! In the research it sounds like the millipedes swarm together and travel as much as 50 meters to mate and eat before laying eggs and hibernating. It doesn't seem like the tracks are attracting them so much as the tracks just happened to go through places the millipedes already were. Much of the sampling in the paper was taken from swarming densities in the surrounding forests, but the train obstruction helped make this something people were interested in studying (and gave them a lot of data points).
And as far as how they obstructed the train, in the LiveScience article about the research says, "Train operators in Japan first observed an outbreak of train millipedes in 1920; they had to briefly stop their train as they waited for the creepy crawlers to pass over the tracks. According to various accounts, the millipedes returned every eight years or so after that, each time forming a dense blanket that was impossible to pass through." The paper has the recorded densities of millipedes in 1984 and the highest was 768 individuals per m^2 on nearby roads.
This does make me think that the millipedes were visible on the tracks from far enough away that they were able to stop the train to avoid trying to pass through them, which is a wild thought! So I can't say from the information I have whether a train could have pass through them, but (as a few other commenters have pointed out) there are reports of millipedes derailing trains in other locations! -Sarah
www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/09/australia-just-had-a-train-accident-thats-being-blamed-on-millipedes/279380/
I live not too far from the swarm area, but I guess having no swarms since 1984 explains why I had never heard of this. I might have to check it out next year. Maybe the swarms will return.
It would be so cool to have on the back of the shirt the same info as the paper that comes with the pins
Between 10-30k years ago? So the first Jomon settlers still had a different geology?
Wow
@@nebulan First settlers arrived around 30k years ago and were the mysterious Jomon whose genes still remain part of the Ainu and a far lesser degree in normal Japanese people.
@@napoleonfeanor can you imagine all the changes they've seen?
@@nebulan Perhaps they saw the first millipede swarm!
One of the best channels out there!
A millipede outbreaks sounds like a national emergency tbh
For those that are impatient the millipedes stop trains by millions of them getting stuck in the tracks.
I came for the bizarre science (and was not disappointed), but I was delightfully surprised by the lewk Sarah is serving.
Crows derail trains by putting pebbles on the tracks.
her hair is so awseome
So you could say, this millipede is TRAINed to endure the cold
I want her shirt!!! Okay, scratch that...
I WANT HER WHOLE OUTFIT!!!!
You are in luck! You can totally get the shirt!!!! store.dftba.com/collections/bizarrebeasts/products/shirt-of-the-month-millipede
I think you might need a time machine for the blazer (maybe Dillard's in the early 2000s..?). The pins are all from Bizarre Beasts, except the Bird Facts pin which was DropOut/Dimension 20's pin of the month in March this year! - Sarah
@@BizarreBeasts Thank you!! BTW we have similar hair right now! I have green ends too. :)
Not too long ago a train in my neighboring municipal collided with 13 escaped cows and all the cows died (no passenger deaths tho), they claimed the clean up could take up to a year as new road had to be laid
"Except, that their toxic chemical is cyanide".
Um, excuse me, but that is not the exception in millipede toxic warfare.
Also, and I'm pretty sure @ClintsReptiles would agree with me, you missed the most significant difference between millipedes and centipedes: toxicognaths.
Awesome episode!
Oh my gosh I'm so excited for this millipede pin, I love millipedes!
“Think smaller. Think more legs.”
Millipedes are ticklish 😂
These bugs look so cool!
Ok but my question now is, can they be introduced to cold islands in the Bering strait and make a viable population? Or something similar
Another thing that separates most millipedes from most centipedes: millipedes are lovely; centipedes are creepy (IMHO).
Also, I make it a habit to not comment on presenter's looks, but -- oh my gosh! -- your hair, your blazer, your earring, your entire coordinated look! It was hard to listen, you look so stunning.
Thats a very cool Millipede shirt!
watching in the first week of August, I am fascinated by the beasties' climatic needs, but also distracted by knowing I can't get that lovely shirt...
Good stuff!
Plot twist: the train was carrying fossil fuels and the millipedes are climate activists.
l e g g y b o i s
Thank you
the only creature that can stop the train in GTA V
Most beautiful narration voice
I love your hair! And with the eye shadow! And jacket! So good!
As an old guy who works with younger folk, I must admit I love the green hair!
How cool!! I love millipedes!
Train vs train action.
Why did the millipedes stop the train? Couldn't a 1000 ton train just plow through them?
At this point I'm convinced hell is real and sometimes it just seeps into the real world.
Fascinating
Style icon!
I'm more impressed with just how young those mountains are!!
This ladys hair is making me the happiest nugget on the planet, i hope she likes green as much as me
I called work to inform that I could not attend that night. My vehicle was covered in praying mantis nymphs. I found the egg case was on the sway bar link and had hatched. The praying mantis nymphs took over my vehicle for six hours. I refused to kill them for just $70 an hour.
I love nature and animals, and I WANT to love insects, but I just can't help but feel revolted whenever I see them. Any tips for loving my bug friends?
Dang, that will happen this year!! 😮
Oh hey what a coincidence!! I juat added three millipedes to my Madagascar Hissing Roach terrarium, to join the hissers and springtails and isopods in there!!
Best UA-cam host ever! ❤
The conductor can usually stop the train pretty easily.
It might be pesticides. Do you remember when we were kids & all the weird bugs that smashed onto the car windshield? When’s the last time a bug splatted on yours?
Yoooo, great hair and jacket combo :)
No explanation of how the millipedes stop the trains, unless you mean that running over them would generate enough cyanide gas to actually penetrate the train and kill the occupants? Since cyanide is usually delivered orally, I have my doubts.
Millipede’s are such a fascinating shbset of our arthropod friends. I am personally scared of centipedes.
Isntnit cool how they have those waves jn their legs when the wLk?
Spokane valley must have a lot of millipedes on the Park/Trent intersection.
Shame Arthropleura is no longer around, that would make an awesome pet.
In other locales (england)wet leaves sometimes do the same thing.
1:43 a pretty big flex there if you asked me
In the UK, leaves on the rail track was the genuine excuse for stopping the trains!
I love the shirt 🥰
Did Sara (I think this is Sara?) deliberately buy a jacket to match her hair? Cause, damn, that's a phenomenal job!
Why does the large groups of millipedes remind me of the demonic look from Princess Mononoke? Just light color rather than black.
If I were blind I would think you were the lady who draws everything she talks about.
The presenter is not a bizarre beast, she's a bizarre beauty ^_^
They just happen to be outbreaking right when I'm heading to Japan, nice.
Train Millipedes are so creepy and so cute!
All that trouble to catch the train together, and it doesn't even show up. Typical.
That there is some forbidden pasta
i still dont get how they stopped a train tho, couldnt the train just drive over them??? or was it like 400 tonnes if them??
Title subject starts at 1:50
only fake fans skip
I would buy a eel shirt! Pls consider offering t shirts for previous and future designs!
I mean... for train stoppers.... a tiger... in the driver's cabin
Do one about the billipede.
fascinating