Hello once again, friends, and welcome to episode 115 of Just the Zoo of Us. This week, I am joined by a

relentlessly delightful entomologist who is here to talk about our friends of many legs, the myriopods.

So we are talking millipedes, centipedes, and some teeny beanies that I had actually never heard of before called poropods.

You're going to learn some stuff like what the difference is between these long guys, how they

manage to scurry around without tripping over all those feet, and what they're up to down there

underneath the leaf litter. Some of them glow in the dark, some of them smell like cherries,

some of them can eat entire birds,

and every single one of them is an absolute treasure. Stick around afterwards for announcements,

plugs, and a sneak peek at next week's episode. Without further ado, just the Zoo of Us presents

Miriopods with Dr. Derek Hennon. Henan. Say hi, Derek. a friend. This is Dr. Derek Henan. Say,

hi, Derek. Hi, thanks for having me, Ellen. Of course. Thank you so much for being on. I'm really

hyped today to talk about probably, I would say, one of my favorite arthropods. They're arthropods, right?

Well, objectively, one of the best animal groups. So, yeah, they're arthropods.

I will, like, I am so reluctant to ever call anything my favorite anything because it feels unfair, but it's like, hmm. It's totally fair today. We can say that. While they're in the spotlight today, I think it's fair for me to say this is one of my favorite arthurpods. Arthur pods. We're talking myriopods today. But before we talk about Miriopods, let's talk a little bit about you. Can you let our listeners know how you got into the work that you do with these really cool, many-legged friends? Sure. You know, I get that question on that, oh, how did you get into such a, like, you know, people see it as like a random or uncommon group and it really just came down to kind of random chance so I when I was an undergrad in college I had the opportunity to go to a weekend workshop that focused on myriopods

mainly milopedes and centipedes so I okay, sure, it was like the only one that

wasn't full yet. So I went down and learned about them and I just got really excited about them.

And I was like, okay, cool. Yeah, I want to like learn more about these. And it just sort of snowballed

from there. So I just kind of fell into it. And I had originally gone into college wanting to

eventually go into marine biology,

but I'm from Ohio and the ocean is a bit far away. So eventually I just fell into, oh,

there are bugs in my backyard and I can like go check them out whenever I want. So at that point,

it was just kind of fate. I had to learn more about these multi-legged critters.

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