This amazing animal is an AFRICAN GIANT BLACK MILLIPEDE named Millie!  At more than 25cm long she is a true giant and is a species which would originate from countries such as Kenya and Tanzania in eastern Africa.  When millipedes like Millie feel threatened, for example by their predators, they can release a nasty smelling and tasting chemical from their bodies which causes any animal to be scared away, especially if they get it into their mouths!

Here is Millie doing her best impersonation of a ring doughnut!

I keep a large group of African giant black millipedes and have been fortunate enough to have two big groups of babies hatch in my collection, one in September 2006 and the most recent in September 2008!  Female African giant black millipedes lay their eggs just below the ground surface and these hatch into tiny white nymphs called protonymphs which have no eyes, no legs and are unable to move or feed!  This stage of the life cycle is unusual in invertebrates and only occurs in millipedes and centipedes.  After 2-4 weeks the protonymph moults into a first instar nymph which has a mouth, eyes & legs and after this it moults regularly as it grows in size.

The picture above shows two millipede eggs, a protonymph (on the right of the eggs) and a 'true' baby millipede which will have moulted a couple of times at least since the protonymph stage.  You can see that even after a couple of moults the babies are really tiny!  It is at this stage that they can be found on the surface of the substrate in their enclosure, before this they would remain underground.  The picture above is one which I took in 2006, whereas the ones below are of one of the now quite big 'babies' which hatched then compared to one of the tiny babies which hatched in September 2008. 

As you can see they have grown a lot in two years but even this one at 16cm is still very small compared to mum Millie at 25cm+!