Millipede Care

This is a basic care guide for beginners, for more advanced tips and tricks please see the Advanced Millipede section for links and videos.

Enclosures

Please note: Some species require humid environments, others like the Orthoporus, want dryer, arid climates with sand and clay, please research what your millipede will appreciate and thrive in, we also mention their preference on their individual shop pages.

Horizontal or vertical? That's a big topic among milli keepers, as a wider area gives them space to explore, and leaves more room for surface hides where they can still be seen, where vertical enclosures can have much deeper substrate offering more food sources, and more area to dig themselves under and hide. If you can have best of both worlds, we encourage that.

Whichever one you choose it's important to have substrate that's as deep as the millipede you're housing is long, so they can fully burrow when it's time to sleep or molt.

You can use glass tanks or plastic tubs, just be sure there's proper ventilation, but not enough that your enclosure will ever dry out. If using a mesh lid, throw a towel over the top so it doesn't dry out quickly.

Humidity and moisture is very important to most millipedes, they can dry out overnight, and drying out is a common millipede killer. Proper moisture and humidity is however very simple to maintain, you want the lower layers of substrate to be nice and moist, almost wet, and the surface layer can be more dry with the occasional misting. Humidity can be monitored with a hydrometer, you'll want it to be around 65-80%. Water can be poured onto the substrate, onto moss and on any wood hides, they will suck up water and slowly release it over time to create the humidity millipedes crave.

Room temperature (65-78F) works for all millipedes, and a nice humid tank will be a few degrees warmer than the room it's in, which will encourage growth and activity.

Substrate

Their substrate is probably the most important factor to the millipede home, it's not only where they dig, it will be most of their diet! Avoid coco based substrates as this is a waste product that consists of mostly lignin, which millipedes cannot digest, they can become impacted and it can kill them.

You want top soil or organic compost, free of pesticides and fertilizers, with a good mix of organics like rotting hardwood and leaves, don't use soft wood materials like pine. Keep in mind millipedes eat the organics, not the dirt, so you want your mix to be mostly organics if possible, the more hummus, mull, crushed wood and leaves the happier your millipede will be! You want the substrate to be as deep as your longest millipede is long, so yes, if your millipedes grow to be 16 inches, you need 16+ inches of substrate! Spread a good amount of leaf litter on the top layer of substrate, like you're simulating the top layer of a dense forest. Millipedes love to eat this layer and it also provides them with comfort via top view blocking, which protects them from potential predators.

A mistake a lot of new substrate recipes make is mistaking dead wood with rotting wood. Rotting wood will be light and spongy, and crumble apart with barely any pressure. This wood has been introduced to fungi that eats away at the tough lignin that keeps wood together, and leaves the delicious cellulose that millipedes want.

Preferably the leaves will be a variety of stages of decomposition, millipedes simply won't eat green or yellow leaves, and different species seem to prefer different stages of decay, so it's best to give a variety and they'll choose what to eat.

When collecting such materials from the wild, avoid areas that may have been treated with any pesticides, and you'll want to remove as many critters from these materials as you can.

To do this, you can either spread the materials out on a non-soil surface such as a table or pavement, and let them sit in the sun for a few days, and many of the creatures that live within will evacuate.

Another option is to bake the materials in an oven at low temperatures, 200F for an hour will kill anything living in it, though this potentially reduces the nutritional values of some materials, especially leaves.

Freezing wood is less effective, as many creatures burrow into the center of wood to survive through winter.

Diet

Millipedes eat the substrate you provide, it's why the quality is important.

Offer protein once a week in the form of fish flakes, dog foods, dried meal worms or blood worms, you can get these from the fish food section of pet stores, you'll get a feel for how much to give them when you do it a few times, if they're eating all of it, add more next time, or if there's leftovers, give less next time. You don't want it to sit around very long as it may mold or attract unwanted pests.

You can offer them non-citrus fruits and vegetables once a week or so, but make sure to remove it after around 12 hours, otherwise it'll bring in pests like fruit flies or mites.

Favorite treats for millipedes are cucumber, carrot, squash, zucchini, apple and sweet potato, they don't seem to care much for leafy greens like kale or spinach until it's become rotten, but we don't want to leave it in there that long.

A good strategy for these supplemental meals is to place it in the evening, then remove any excess the following morning, as they'll come out to forage over night.

Tank mates

Other millipedes that are roughly the same size make great tank buddies if everyone's care requirements are similar, and they'll even form colonies and sleep in piles under bark huts or in dens. No millipedes are cannibalistic or territorial, they won't fight each other.

Springtails are great millipede cleanup crews, they'll munch on mold, intruder pest larvae and millipede droppings and won't hurt your millipedes even during a molt.

Avoid snails as tank friends, snails will climb on millipedes and slime them, this can irritate them and make it difficult to move all their legs.

Isopods should NOT be kept with millipedes, as millipedes will dig down and begin molting, their shedding exoskeleton is dead organic matter, this will attract isopods to their location, and millipede exoskeletons are protein based and haven't hardened yet when they're still fresh. Millipedes are immobile and defenseless in this state, and the isopods will cause the death of the millipede.