Deadly Centipede 'King' Rules Over a Poison Hellscape Cave
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:
Deadly centipede 'king' rules over a poison hellscape cave:
A venomous centipede is the top predator in a pitch-black poison cave that hasn't seen daylight in more than 5.5 million years.
Located in Romania, Movile Cave is over 65 feet (20 meters) below the surface, and its warm, moist air is low in oxygen and thick with toxic gasses, which feed chemosynthetic bacteria. Yet despite these seemingly hellish conditions, the cave hosts a diverse community of spiders, scorpions and other arthropods, along with snails, earthworms and cave leeches.
Now, scientists have added a newfound species to the list: a centipede that they named Cryptops speleorex, "which can be translated to the 'king of the cave,'" researchers said in a statement.
[...] The "king" measures no more than 2 inches (52 millimeters) long, but it is the largest of the cave's predatory arthropods "by far," ruling its domain with deadly bites, the researchers reported in a new study, published online Dec. 16 in the journal ZooKeys.
Since Movile Cave's discovery in 1986, few people have explored its dangerous depths. The air is high in hydrogen sulfide, methane, ammonia and carbon dioxide, and oxygen is in short supply, with levels in some parts of the cavern as low as 7% (the average oxygen level aboveground is typically about 21%). Though the air temperature is a relatively comfortable 70 degrees Fahrenheit (21 degrees Celsius), relative humidity is 100% and air circulation is close to zero, the scientists wrote.
Entering the cave is fraught with danger, leading explorers down a long, narrow shaft and through winding limestone tunnels that finally open into a main cavern with a lake, the BBC reported in 2015.
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