Derek Hennen, Ph.D.
@derekhennen
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Myriapodologist. @DearMillipede , author: Ohio Millipede Field Guide. "Scientist & avowed Swiftie" -Rolling Stone (he/him)
Blacksburg, VA
Joined June 2010
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Pinned Tweet
I've got excellent news for the millipede fandom: new field guide just dropped! Jeff Brown and I worked with the
@OhioDivWildlife
to produce a photo-based guide to all ~50 of Ohio's millipedes! And it's free!
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@Nannaria1
@apheloria
@taylorswift13
This new millipede species is Nannaria swiftae: I named it after
@taylorswift13
! I'm a big fan of her music, so I wanted to show my appreciation by naming this new species from Tennessee after her. A high honor!
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Friend: Does anyone have recommendations for places to vacation?
Me: *raises hand*
Friend: ...that aren't based on the quality of the local millipede fauna?
Me: *slowly lowers hand*
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BIG NEWS! Our new paper describing 17 new species of Twisted-Claw Millipedes from Appalachia is published! I spent 5 years of my life searching for them with
@Nannaria1
and
@apheloria
. I named a new species after my wife, and another after
@taylorswift13
!
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Celebrate the egg
This stork couple celebrates their first egg. Wait for it. Sound on...
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Broadcasting setup for my dissertation defense. Happy to announce that I passed!
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A STUDENT MADE A MILLIPEDE TOBOGGAN FOR ME BECAUSE SHE ENJOYED MY CLASS 😭😭😭😭
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Eight years ago this flying potato blessed us at the moth sheets
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My wife found some strange webbing on her banana, so I peeled it back and it's an egg sac of some sort! I've quarantined the banana and I'm crossing my fingers that I can get the eggs to hatch.
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Spiders and ants from a recent leaf litter sample in southwest Virginia
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Happy to announce that I passed my preliminary exams and am now a PhD candidate!
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A student today in insect biology, whispering as she put a beetle into her kill jar: "Sad girl summer"
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Just found this beautiful house centipede on my bedroom ceiling, what a gift of good luck!
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My friend went to the Asian Lantern Festival at The Cleveland Zoo last week and she found THE BEST lantern
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Starting my personal website. Here's what I have so far.
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More favs from Mothapalooza. These are just out there! They're real and you can go see them!
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The gang's all here: harbingers of the autumnal fauna
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Check out this gorgeous millipede molting chamber! It's like a kinder egg but with a better prize inside.
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Can never get enough of old-timey entomology illustrations where they all look like giant dorks
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I spent an entire day looking for a millipede species that hadn't been found in 60 years. 8 hours later the sun was setting, I was exhausted, but I finally got it! 5 of them! I screamed real loud and was so excited I forgot my friend's name, had to wave her over.
#ScienceFeels
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I married my favorite person in the world this weekend!
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Instead of referring to a bug or plant as "not uncommon" to find in the field, I suggest we start saying "it's a nice little treat" and wiggle our fingers around like we were just offered a piece of chocolate.
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Instead of retweeting spam accounts that steal others' images and give no attribution, you can reverse search the images to find the source! These appear to be taken by Kenji Nishida and were first posted here: . Don't follow these types of accounts.
The Ceratocanthus beetle's incredible transformation!
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Can I offer you a soil centipede in this trying time?
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You uhh.....wanna see a ridiculous spider? This is Gnathonargus unicorn, what a name! I collected this spider a few days after Christmas last year, and
@ForTheSpiders
recently identified it. This is the 3rd time the species has been found, it's a new state record for Virginia!
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This applies to eating pretty much any bugs, FYI. It's cause they share a muscle protein and your body might be all "BAD NEWS WE ARE REJECTING THIS"
JUST IN: FDA says to avoid eating cicadas “if you’re allergic to seafood”
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Periodic reminder that you can pronounce scientific names (almost) any way you want. It doesn't matter and you should ignore anyone who says otherwise.
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EVERYONE DRAW YOUR STUDY ORGANISM IN MS PAINT USING YOUR NON-DOMINANT HAND
To answer your question, no it’s not easy for a left-handed person to draw a gar in MS Paint (using a mouse).
But it was a nice break from writing! “🐟🎨”
#sciart
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Hey everyone. This is your periodic reminder to not follow mass photo accounts like this one (Weird_Animals) because they steal photos and rarely credit the photographers. Also, they often spread misinformation about the animals they feature!
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Well, I found a pre-print written using AI. It's about millipedes and is incorrect in weird ways. I've checked 5 references so far and they do not exist. The text is pretty general, and cites research by my colleagues that I know they didn't do!
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BRB flooding the "Cute animals" tag on Instagram with centipedes
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I'm an entomologist and I'm describing a new millipede species after
@taylorswift13
! Soooo if anyone can connect me with her so I can tell her about this cool new species, help me out and lemme know!
#Swifties
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Mites and collembola: for the person who likes sand, but just wishes it had legs!
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"Haha, weird, pseudocentipedes breathe through their head," I think to myself, before realizing that's also how I breathe.
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Why are spam bots negging me in my DMs AND getting their taxonomy wrong?
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Just submitted this bad boy to my committee! 198 pages on millipedes, garnered through mosquito bites, trekking through stinging nettle and poison ivy, and fighting with computer programs. It feels incredible to see it all together at last.
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This Parajulid millipede looks like it's plotting something
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Misspoke and talked about the Crustaceous Period in class instead of the Cretaceous
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It's astounding how useless most of Google's search results are now. I used to be able to find niche web pages with great info, and that has effectively disappeared.
On how and why google changed the system behind their search engine and how it’s ruined looking up anything now
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uh oh UH OH
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Sorry, can't hear the haters cause I'm too focused on how lucky we are to have periodical cicadas. They are AMAZING and we are BLESSED. We get one perfect month every 13 or 18 YEARS so go make a SCREAMY FRIEND.
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A slug millipede (Petaserpes sp.) walking around a petri dish. These pedes are likely fungus-feeders, and release a defensive chemical that smells like chapstick when they're disturbed. They have lots of legs, which are hidden under the body because their segments are so wide.
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Ooooh, now using that first line in my Twitter bio.
A scientist and avowed Swiftie has named a new millipede species after Taylor Swift, dubbing the bug "Nannaria swiftae."
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I CAN'T TELL YOU WHAT IT IS BUT WE MADE A SUPER COOL MILLIPEDE DISCOVERY TODAY AND IT'S THE CULMINATION OF YEARS OF TRYING TO FIND ONE ENIGMATIC SPECIES AND WE ARE SO HYPED!
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Urgently whispering "POCKET WASP POCKET WASP" as I casually slip a dead cicada killer into my pocket
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I HAVE THE BIGGEST NEWS. I proposed yesterday and now have a fiancée! We are very very excited!
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Moving prep: did you know you can fit 8000 millipedes and centipedes inside only 3 plastic containers?
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The mammalogists are asleep, post glowing inverts.
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Your view when you have separated the myriapods from their leaf litter hideaways
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I have big news! I've accepted a job as Field Zoologist with the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation! I'm super excited to start next month, Richmond here we come!
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Maybe humans are the nightmare and bugs with lots of legs are FINE
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Look at this weird Christmas ornament I found in the woods yesterday! A Notcuid moth killed by an entomopathogenic fungus! So festive.
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Here's my favorite photo that illustrates just how large centipedes can get in the tropics. A dead Scolopendra centipede on
@apheloria
's forearm, from northern Vietnam.
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Have you seen a bug recently and just don't know what it could be? Reply to this post with a photo and I'll do my best ID! *(even if it's a brown fuzzy blob)*
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Hey friends. Remember when we were tweeting cool science facts at Paris Hilton that one time? Guess who just got featured in In Touch magazine for my biggest
#scicomm
win so far.
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Hey friends. If you're interested in watching my dissertation defense tomorrow, I'm streaming it at this link at 10 AM!
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Psst...hey kid, you wanna learn about winter-active bugs? All these were collected last week in southeast Ohio in a deciduous forest. Spoiler: mostly myriapods, but not all!
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Bored with your family during the holidays? Take a plastic bottle and make a family pitfall trap for catching cold weather active millipedes!
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Checked one of my preserved millipedes and found it holding a crystallized sunburst
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Dig through the forest leaf litter and you too could find weirdo fly larvae like this one in the family Faniidae. The adult looks like a house fly.
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Give us more arthropod emojis, you cowards
Emojis aren't representative of the breadth of the Tree of Life. Scientific American has a great summary of a recent paper by
@StefanoMammola1
in
@iScience_CP
:
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Total score: we had a house centipede in the office today! What a pal.
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I made a nice circle today and I am proud of it. Please appreciate my circle with me. It was made with 200 millipedes.
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Check under enough logs in the southern Appalachians and you might be rewarded with a sight like this: feather millipedes (Brachycybe lecontii) feeding on fungus! All juveniles in this photo, the larger ones are slightly older. Carter Co., TN
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POV: You are a millipede in an eastern deciduous forest.
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If you don't like millipedes/centipedes, that's your opinion and I can respect that. But please do not yuck my yum by tweeting at me about how much you dislike them.
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And while we're here, check out the palps on this Cicurina spider. NEAT.
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Kentucky blue centipede needs extra toothbrushes to handle all its teeth. Really digging the blueberry blasted antennae too.
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MORE! MILLIPEDE! NEWS! What happens when you tackle a group of millipedes that's been mostly ignored since 1918? In our case, we described 35 new species! Check out the Twisted-Claw Millipedes!
@Nannaria1
@apheloria
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Found this photo from 7 years ago at the first Mothapalooza in Ohio. We were all tired after a good night of mothing.
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A hickory horn devil: a lifer caterpillar for me! I've been searching for years for one of these! 😍😍😍 (Hand for scale)
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Got a new magnifying glass for Christmas and had to test it to make sure it worked.
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Things men can do to support women in science, grad school edition:
-if their ideas are ignored in a meeting, speak up and cite them by name "As X said before..."
-recommend them as speakers for conference symposia
-stop interrupting them
-stop being awful
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So excited that I'm making great progress on a little paper about this millipede--it's the first time it's been found in 100 years, and I've got two localities for it! WHAT UP CONOTYLA
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Sir? Your knees have beautiful eyelashes. (Ultimate legs of a stone centipede)
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Does this look like an appropriate father/son interaction to you?
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Today, I accomplished a dream. For too long, I've only known fleas of lilliputian size. No longer! Because I finally got to bask in the glory of the giant mountain beaver flea, Hystrichopsylla schefferi. BEHOLD!
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Struck gold today! Pink Lady's Slipper (Cypripedium acaule) right off the path, just gorgeous. Size was about 8 inches tall, check it out in your local forest! (Terms and conditions apply; eastern North America only)
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You know you picked a good place place for an evening walk when you find a Luna Moth hanging around! Blacksburg has some great nature
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Hahahaha I took an extremely upsetting photo of this thing
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My Millipedes of Ohio Field Guide has been printed! I can hold the physical copy in my hands!!! It's beautiful! You can get your own copy FREE from
@OhioDivWildlife
! What a day!
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When using iNaturalist or asking an expert for a species ID, please keep this in mind: not all wildlife can be identified to species based on a photograph. And that's okay. Family or genus is great! It's not a failure.
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EVERYONE. I need to give a shout-out to
@Chelsealinaeve
for making this IMMACULATE illustration of a millipede I study (Pseudopolydesmus) that evokes its gentle curiosity and bold opinions! I love it! Also her commissions are open, just sayin'.
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I guess I never actually announced this, but I'll have a new job in the new year! I'm going to be working with the Virginia Dept. of Ag as the Slow the Spread Survey Coordinator to track and slow the spread of the Lymantria dispar moth! Excited for the new opportunity!
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Just gonna brag here real quick: I was presented with the Alwood Award from the VT Entomology department tonight! It's a recognition of excellence in outreach and I was honored to receive it. To more teaching about bugs!
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One of the annoying things about trying to learn about obscure centipede species is that the description is only like 2 pages and most of that covers unremarkable characters. Then they'll sneak in three words that are like "it shoots lasers"
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