Status: Real
Recently the South Australia Sunday Mail reported on the case of Mrs. Foote,
an elderly woman who is under attack by millipedes:
AN elderly Kapunda woman says she feels as though she is living in an Alfred Hitchcock movie - under attack by thousands of writhing millipedes... "Every morning, I get a broom and have to sweep my way out of the front veranda to go and pick up the newspaper, I'm sick and tired of sweeping up." Mrs Foote said the creepy crawlies now encircled her house, despite numerous calls to the Light Regional Council for help.
The reporter probably got a chuckle out of the lady's name, but the millipede invasion itself is real. Australian newspapers are reporting that regions in South Australia are suffering from massive invasions of Portuguese millipedes. The Advertiser shares a few facts about this pest:
The Portuguese millipede first appeared in South Australia in 1953 at Port Lincoln. It probably came from either the eastern states or direct from Europe. Millipedes were not recorded in Perth until the 1980s... The Portuguese species found the cool, wet winters of Adelaide so suitable that its numbers increased rapidly... In the 1970s, the numbers of millipedes in the Adelaide Hills were so huge that people would remove bucket-loads of millipedes from their houses every day. The Belair-to-Adelaide railway line was regularly stopped because the oil from squashed millipedes made the track too slippery to carry the trains... The then Department of Agriculture tried a number of biological control methods, with a parasitic nematode the most successful. Since the release of the nematode in the late 1970s, millipede numbers have slowly reduced, although they are still the most common animal in the suburban garden.
(via
the rambler)
Comments
But I sympathise with Mrs Foote as I know exactly how she feels.