A species of poisonous millipedes so numerous they stop the trains from running in Japan have been discovered to be living an unusually long life cycle.
Researchers from Shizuoka University in Japan were working to discover what led to entire train tracks being swamped by millipedes only once a decade.
Since 1920 it has been observed by Japanese train drivers that the invertebrates would form a “dense blanket” over the tracks, forcing them to wait until the millipedes cleared the tracks.
Research theorises that the millipedes are living in an approximate eight-year cycle whereby a new brood will trek to a new habitat to eat food, lay eggs and die.
Eight years later, the new brood will travel again looking for food – and it just so happens they pass over train tracks.
If threatened or killed, the millipedes are known to emit the chemical cyanide, famously fatal to humans in concentrated amounts.
This content first appear on 9news