If you have a cupboard under the stairs, or kitchen cupboards that have dark, damp corners, then the chances are that you also have some of these silverfish Lepisma saccharina lurking in them. These primitive wingless insects belong to an order known as the Thysanura and are often thought of as being living fossils, having first evolved over 300 million years ago. They are covered with silvery scales that are easily detached and they also move fast, which makes them difficult to capture intact; this one has lost part of one of its three tail appendages and also the tip of an antenna. They are most active at night, emerging to feed on whatever organic material they can find - spilled food, paper, even the glue from cardboard cartons. Sometimes they find their way into baths in bathrooms.
Although silverfish are present in most houses they don’t
often produce severe infestations because the females only lay about twenty
eggs during their lifetime, hidden in crevices until they hatch. They are, apparently, easy to maintain in captivity and will live for up to five years on
a diet of damp paper and a pinch of flour, with regular access to moisture.
The first detailed description we have of a silverfish was
recorded in Robert Hooke’s Micrographia
or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses
with Observations and Inquiries thereupon, published in 1665.
The book contains this copper engraving of the insect, which
is of stunning accuracy when you consider that Hooke observed it with lenses
that he ground himself for his simple microscope – modern microscopists still
marvel at his extraordinary skill and powers of observation. (You can see another example of his skill here).
Samuel Pepys was also mightily impressed and bought a copy
of the book on publication, noting in his famous diary on 20th.January 1665 ‘took home Hook’s book of
microscopy, a most excellent piece’.
Hooke called the silverfish ‘the small silver-colour’d bookworm’ and described, in his elegant
prose, how ‘it appears to the naked eye,
a small glittering Pearl-coloured Moth, which upon the removal of Books and
Papers in the Summer, is often observ’d very nimbly to scud, and pack away to
some lurking cranney, where it may the better protect it self from any appearing
danger. Its head appears big and blunt, and its body tapers from it towards the
tail, smaller and smaller, being shap’d almost like a carret’.
He described how it had ‘ conical body, divided into fourteen several partitions, being the
appearance of so many shells, or shields that cover the whole body, every of
these shells are again cover’d or tiled over with a multitude of thin
transparent scales, which, from the multiplicity of their reflecting surfaces,
make the whole animal appear a perfect Pearl-colour’
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