Third go at this and I have lost four bull millipedes over about eight months. They arrive, seem fine for weeks, then I find them curled up and gone. No obvious pattern to it.
Setup is coco coir about eight centimetres deep, misted every couple of days, bits of carrot and cucumber twice a week, room temperature. I have a heat mat on the side I turn on when it gets cold. What am I getting wrong, because clearly something?
Second thing: eight centimetres is nowhere near deep enough for a bull millipede. They moult underground in a little chamber and they need to bury themselves completely, which for the larger species means several times their body length.
And the moisture target is damp like a wrung-out sponge, with a gradient so one side is wetter than the other and they can choose. Misting every couple of days wets the surface; what you want is substrate damp through.
Take the heat mat off entirely. Room temperature is right and overheating kills them.
Two more that fit your pattern of fine for weeks then gone. Calcium: they need it for the exoskeleton, so put a cuttlebone or crushed eggshell in there. And moulting: if one goes underground and disappears for weeks, that is normal and digging it up during a moult can kill it. Soft, vulnerable, no second chance.
Also check where your leaves come from. Pesticides, sprays, treated soil and scented products all do for them, so collect from untreated ground and freeze or bake the litter before it goes in.
@oak_leaf_litter · 3d ago · 3 replies
Three things in that description and the big one is the food. Millipedes mainly eat decaying leaves and rotting hardwood. Carrot and cucumber are treats, not a diet, so animals living on coir with vegetables twice a week are slowly starving while looking fine.
You want a constant supply of leaf litter, oak or beech, and rotting hardwood on and in the substrate. That is the actual meal. The vegetables become an extra rather than the point.
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@lost_four_now · 3d ago
So plain coco coir is basically an empty room to them rather than substrate?
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@oak_leaf_litter · 2d ago
More or less. They eat the substrate as well as live in it, so coir alone gives them nowhere to burrow usefully and nothing to graze on. Mix it with organic soil, decaying hardwood leaf litter and rotting wood and the whole enclosure becomes food.
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