A slow-moving river of millipedes crawling on the ground in unison was recently spotted in a mountainous area of Taiwan and the video of it is enough to make your skin crawl.

On April 27th, tourists visiting Hsüeh-Pa National Park in central Taiwan witnessed an unusual phenomenon that local guides have never seen before. While accompanying a group of seven tourists through an area west of Dalu Forest Road, Yang Xiaozhong, a tour guide with an experience of 11 years, noticed that the path he knew seemed to be covered with fallen leaves. At first, he thought the brown leaves must have been brought to the ground by heavy rains but then he realized that the foliage was actually moving. On closer inspection, the leaves turned out to be millipedes, thousands of them moving in the same direction, like a living river.

Yang quickly whipped out his phone and recorded the millipede river, because he had never seen anything like it in all his years at Hsüeh-Pa National Park. He later told reporters that the mass of moving arthropods was up to four meters wide and appeared to stretch over 50 meters in length. The guide said that the tourists started getting goose bums and freaking out just looking at the millipedes from a distance, and they insisted that they walk on the gravel road from then on, just to be sure.

The guide said that the bizarre phenomenon made him think that it could be an omen of a natural disaster, and he’s definitely not the only one. After videos of the millipede river went viral online, people started calling Hsüeh-Pa National Park staff to ask if this was a normal occurrence or if it could be a sign that a major earthquake is going to happen. After all, they say animals have a sixth sense about such things.

 

The videos of this millipede migration apparently made such a big impact on people that the Hsüeh-Pa National Park had to put out a statement apologizing for sparking a craze and reassuring everyone that the millipede river was a perfectly natural phenomenon most likely caused by environmental or weather changes. The park also apologized for its employee posting the video that caused so much panic, promising to avoid such situations in the future.

Back in 2021, we featured another unusual phenomenon known as Pleń described as thousands of larvae of a certain species of gnats that migrate by assembling into one large mass and crawling on the ground as one single being.