Field photographs of millipedes taken in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, by Wong Fook Yee. Every record is dated, located, and photographed in the wild.
Diplopoda is a class of arthropods in the subphylum Myriapoda. Millipedes are not insects: insects are class Insecta, with six legs and three body regions, and they are filed elsewhere on this site under Insects of Borneo. A millipede is no more an insect than a spider is.
The name of the class is the useful thing about it. A millipede's trunk is built of diplosegments — double segments, each formed from two embryonic segments fused together, each carrying two pairs of legs. What looks like a single ring is two.
This is the confusion worth clearing up first, because it is the one most visitors arrive with — and because this site itself had it wrong for years. The two are separate classes, about as closely related to each other as a spider is to a crab, and one character settles it in the field:
On a forest walk in Sabah the animal underfoot is usually a millipede, and it is worth stepping around. It cannot hurt you, it is doing the work of breaking down the leaf litter you are walking on, and — being blind and built for burrowing rather than running — it cannot get out of your way.
One practical caution in the other direction: look, but do not pick up. Many millipedes defend themselves chemically through pores along the sides of the body, and the order Polydesmida contains all the millipedes reported to produce hydrogen cyanide. Not all do: the giant pill millipedes have no defensive glands whatever and simply roll into a sealed ball. Either way, photograph them and put them back where they were, which is the practice throughout this site.
No name is given beyond the rank the evidence actually supports. Millipedes are identified below order chiefly on the gonopods — modified legs on the seventh ring of the male — which a photograph of a living animal on the forest floor almost never shows. Most records here will therefore stop at order. Each page states plainly what is known, what is not, and what would settle the question. A wrong name is worse than no name.
14 September 2008, 12:04. Bukit Gemok Recreational Forest Park, about 10 km from Tawau town centre.
A mating pair on a rock on the forest floor, pressed together and motionless, each about 70 mm
long, glossy black with a pale line along the edge of every ring. Four photographs over just over a
minute, including a close view of the underside.
Recorded as order Polydesmida — the flat-backed millipedes. Family, genus and
species not determined. These animals were filed on this site as centipedes until 2026;
the close-up photograph is what corrected it, and a fourth photograph of the same encounter was
recovered from the old centipede folder.
24 August 2007, 14:35–14:37. Ikutmaju Saw Mill, Merotai, about 30 km from Tawau. Found on the ground
among dry grass litter; a light touch and it rolled at once into a sealed ball roughly 30 to 35 mm
across, and stayed shut while it was photographed in the hand. Three unedited camera originals.
Recorded as order Sphaerotheriida — the giant pill millipedes. Family
Zephroniidae expected on geography but not determined; genus and species not
attempted. Unlike the flat-backed millipede above, this order has no chemical defence at
all — rolling up is the entire strategy.
Centipedes are not insects either, and the site's centipede index still sits inside the wingless-insect folder, misfiled for exactly the same reason the record above was. It has been left in place for now so that no existing link breaks. It is on the list.
All photographs © Wong Fook Yee. Page reviewed: 6 September 2026.