Ghana Speckled Leg Millipedes (Telodeinopus aoutii)

Keepers report males coming out greener and females browner. It is worth knowing before you look into a mixed group and think you have been sent two species, though the claim traces to the same Polish keeping article as the size figures below, so treat it as a hobby observation and not a described character.

The species

Telodeinopus aoutii was described by Demange in 1971, and the epithet is a personal name, though Demange does not appear to have explained it anywhere we can reach. It is one of eleven species in the genus, all African, and it belongs to the family Spirostreptidae, order Spirostreptida.

The range is West African: occurrence records run to Benin, Togo, Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana. You will see it described as a west, central and east African species, and you will see it called the Kenyan millipede in one widely-copied source. Neither survives checking. There is no East African record for the genus at all, and a 2026 review of Ethiopian millipedes does not list it.

The size and segment figures circulating everywhere, 16 to 18cm and 68 to 73 segments, all come from one Polish keeping article that reached Wikipedia and spread outward from there. Treat them as approximate and not measured. Females run larger than males.

Identifying it

The legs. Long, banded white and brown, unmistakable against the olive to coppery body, and the single most useful character for telling this animal apart from the African Olive, which has plain reddish-orange legs and is a shorter animal. Both are Spirostreptidae, but in different tribes.

Those long legs go with the behaviour. This is a strong climber that spends more time on bark and branch than most of the big African millipedes, and it will use vertical space if you give it any. It is also nocturnal, which is worth setting expectations about, because one seller describes it as day-active and every other account disagrees. Expect an animal that emerges in the evening.

Keeping them

Substrate is the meal, not the flooring. A Czech laboratory reared this exact species on peat and decaying wood with maple, oak and beech litter, cuttlefish bone for calcium and a little fish food as a nitrogen source. Copy that. Give it 10 to 15cm of hardwood that has already broken down, mixed through with leaf mould and loam, keep cuttlebone in there permanently, and treat fruit and vegetables as extras and not as the diet. Never softwood or pine. Never heat from underneath, because an animal whose instinct is to go down will burrow straight into the element. Our millipede substrate guide goes into the mix in detail.

22 to 28°C, humid at roughly 70 to 90 per cent, with rotten wood, cork bark and branches above the substrate for the climbing. Threatened, it winds down into a flat spiral; the ball-shaped defence belongs to an entirely different group of millipedes. Its chemistry is benzoquinone-based, which stains skin brown and stings eyes, so handle it, then wash before touching your face. It is a nuisance and not a hazard.

One honest note on difficulty. Captive-bred European stock has a reputation for being hardy and prolific, but Orin McMonigle's Millipeds in Captivity describes wild-collected animals of this species as sensitive and hard to raise. Ours are imports, so treat the first few months as the real test. If you want a large African millipede with a gentler reputation, the African Giant is the usual starting point, and the full range is in millipedes for sale.

These are wild-collected, so no captive-bred claim from us on this listing. What we will promise is the packing: an air-holed pot, moss kept damp, two walls of card around the outside. Out on the first four days of the week, with Royal Mail delivering the morning after, before one. Live arrival guaranteed.