Centipedes

The most demanding group on the site, not because the keeping is complicated but because the animals never stop testing it. Every centipede here is fast, strong for its size, and armed with a genuinely painful venomous bite, and the giants can force a poorly secured lid. There is no docile species; the enclosure is the entire husbandry, and the lid is the enclosure.

For keepers who accept those terms, the group offers some of the most impressive invertebrates anywhere: Southeast Asian and South American giants approaching a foot, vivid regional colour forms, and North American natives that provide the same experience at smaller scale and lower stakes.

The market runs almost entirely on wild collection and import timing. Captive breeding is rare across the whole group, so availability arrives in pulses when shipments land, and specific colour forms appear and vanish unpredictably; the practical rule is to buy the form you want when you see it. Price is driven by verified size, colour, and origin, with the closed-export South American species structurally scarcer than the Asian trade staples. Names on listings are softer here than anywhere else on the site, since old lumped species persist in titles, so read the photographs before the label.