Silverfish
Lepisma saccharinum
— Where the name comes from
Lepisma comes from lepís, lepídos, the scale: the body is covered in silvery flakes that come away at a touch and stay on the fingers, and it is to those that it owes both its scientific name and its Italian one, along with its darting movement. Saccharinum says instead what it eats: sugars and starches, which it finds in the glue of books, in paper, in wallpaper paste.
— Facts
- Group
- Insects · Insecta
- Order
- Silverfish
- Habitat
- Bathrooms, kitchens, cellars, archives: anywhere dark and damp
- Range
- Worldwide, in the wake of human beings
- Size
- 10–20 mm, with three long tail filaments
- Diet
- Starches and sugars: glue, paper, cotton, flour
- Lifespan
- 2–8 years, with over sixty moults
— Characteristics
- 01
It has no wings and never had any: its lineage predates flight.
- 02
It goes on moulting as an adult, which no winged insect does.
- 03
It survives months without food, so long as there is damp.
— What sets it apart
It is a fossil walking across the bathroom floor. Its group split from the other insects before anyone invented wings, some four hundred million years ago, and it has never had them — it has not lost them, as fleas have: it never possessed them. From this follows its other oddity: it goes on moulting all its life, even after reaching adulthood, up to sixty or seventy times, because maturity and the end of growth are two things only the winged insects have learned to make coincide.
