The centipede in question, first discovered in 2001 by entomologist George Beccaloni, can grow up to 8 inches in length and has a venomous bite. While the bite is venomous and would cause a lot of pain to a human, it is not potent enough to cause death.
Despite its discovery 15 years ago, the species has only recently been fully described for the first time in an online journal called ZooKeys.
The centipede is known as Scolopendra cataracta, from the Latin for waterfall, and is found in various Asian nations, such as Laos, Vietnam and Thailand.
Beccaloni, in an interview with National Geographic says “Wherever I go in the world, I always turn over rocks beside streams, and that’s where I found this centipede, which was quite a surprise”
He managed to capture the specimen in a beaker of water, which is where he observed that it could in fact swim. Beccaloni then brought the centipede back to the Natural History Museum in London, where he is the curator of orthopteroids. Here it was confirmed that only 4 specimens of the type of centipede had ever been found, after the initial collection from Vietnam in 1928. Despite this, none of the species had ever been seen swimming before.
