what kind of milapede is this?

Question

it was about 2 inches long and orange/yellow and black while we where camping the children picked it up will it hurt them..that was 2 days ago they don't have any signs or symptoms.... my dad said they are deadly...we live in virginia

Answer 1

the kids are fine. If a poisinous animal were to efferct a person, you would notice it rather quickly. Although millipedes and centipeds are poisinous, most are very mildly posinois like a spider.

Answer 2

There are a lot of millipedes that would fit your
description. One of the common ones in your
area is Apheloria corrugata. Handling it is not
dangerous, and it certainly isn't "deadly", although
it might be if you ate a lot of them.

Millipedes generally produce repellent secretions
to ward off predators. They do not have a venomous bite. Some of the defensive secretions
contain cyanide, but in too low a concentration to
be dangerous to a human being.

Answer 3

it sounds kind of like a monarch butterfly caterpillar.
They are bad-tasting and toxic (birds stay away from them) because they eat from the milkweed plant whose sap is poisonous. The caterpillars incorporate some of the milkweed's poisons in their own bodies as a form of self-defense.

I don't think it's bad for the kids if they just touched them.. you'd probably have to eat them to get the poisons in you. In any case, you'd have noticed it by now.

check out these photos of monarch (and other) caterpillars:
http://www.richard-seaman.com/Wallpaper/Nature/Caterpillars/index.html

Answer 4

some are some aren't
i just typically try to stay away from them and centipedes because i can never remember which are poisonous