I'm always slightly perplexed when I hear someone talking about woodlice as if they were garden pests. My garden is full of the critters, but I've never even had need to raise my voice at them.
I'm always slightly perplexed when I hear someone talking about woodlice as if they were garden pests. My garden is full of the critters, but I've never even had need to raise my voice at them. They crowd around the flowerpots, under logs and stones, up against the fence and they trample—audibly—inside the compost bins. But they never get into any trouble. I wonder if I'm asking for trouble by wondering what all the fuss is about?
It's the time of year when they start coming indoors. Always an odd decision I feel. They inevitably end up tucked into the edges of the carpet around the skirting board, dry, dusty and very dead. They just haven't learned that central heating is all the rage nowadays. They come indoors to avoid the excess moisture and damp, a painful irony given they are nearly the only terrestrial crustaceans alive today, and that in the normal course of events they need cool damp places, otherwise their rather inefficient cuticle lets them dry out too quickly. Unlike insects which have a virtually water-proof skin based on the carbohydrate/protein mix of chitin, woodlice are still using an evolutionarily rather antiquated formula based on calcium carbonate, the main constituent of chalk.
My pictures are really just an excuse, because I think these creatures are rather beautiful. The normally grey rough woodlouse (Porcellio scaber) sometimes takes on a lovely rose tone; if it were a plant it would be given its own special cultivar name. And I'm always thrilled to find a woodlouse in the middle of moulting. Unlike insects and spiders, which rid the whole outer skin at once, woodlice remove first the back half, then, a few days later, the front half. This is the smooth woodlouse, Oniscus asellus, just slipping off its pullover to complete the change.
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