I’ve Re-homed my Bugs

Murrmurr

Murrmurr

SF VIP
Location
Sacramento, California
Recently I’ve been surprised to see that whatever food I drop into the roly-poly (isopod) house – a rotting lettuce leaf, little chunk of sweet potato, a sprinkle of fish-flakes or crushed eggshell – would disappear within a couple of hours, so I was pretty sure there were lots of them and even though there was plenty of leaf-litter and raw bark for them to munch on, I started worrying they weren’t getting enough to eat. And when that’s the case the adults will sometimes eat the young; a disturbing thought.

It’s probably stupid to worry about roly-polies but they’ve been with me for several months, I took them from their native land and I sort of feel responsible for them. I didn’t want to take them back where they came from, which is my youngest son’s house, bc the grandkids would want me to stay and visit or they’d want to come home with me and I had other plans for that day and the next, and I didn’t want to release them here bc the soil and landscape isn’t really isopod-friendly, plus an exterminator comes every month. So I called my other son’s wife (their kids are grown and gone) and asked if she would mind taking custody of my roly-polies?

She wasn’t aware that I had “pet” bugs so she was a bit taken aback and was quiet for a few seconds and then she asked me What do they do? Reasonable since she has a little veg garden and some fruit trees and a bunch of expensive plants in her yard. What isopods do is clean up. I told her they’re known as the clean-up crew of the bug world; they eat rotting, decaying stuff, mostly vegetation (but also eggshells and some other things that have calcium and protein in them).

This intrigued her bc she keeps a compost pile. She asked me if I thought they’d be happy there. Well, I think that’s a nicely symbiotic solution and I tell her so. When I transferred the isopods from their little house to the edge of the compost pile I was amazed at the number of babies and that some of the adults were huge. At least then I knew I was feeding them the right stuff but probably not enough of it. But I had no idea the colony got that big bc they hide in the substrate and under the pieces of bark and stuff. There were lots of eggs and larvae too.

Anyway, I’m sure they’ll live happily ever after in Kristine’s compost pile and they'll earn their keep for sure.
 

I had to look up isopods because I had no idea what roly-polies are. We call them slaters and we have the common grey ones in our compost bin. I quite like them.

Just a thought though. Moving ctitters from one area to another can create problems. I used to keep tadpoles after I found some frog spawn in my garden. I gathered it up and placed it in water in a plastic dish. Hundreds of tadpoles hatched out and I then had to find out how to care for them and what to feed them. They turned out to be a very common variety and I learned that tipping them into a local waterway might not be a good idea, especially if the creek happened to be inhabited by rarer species that would be outbred by the common frogs and pushed closer to extinction.

I allowed my taddies to mature in the yard and after a while the sound of them could be heard at night, not just in my yard but for halfway down the street. I'm pretty sure the local birds dined on most of them, but that is nature's way, isn't it.
 
Warrigal said:
I had to look up isopods because I had no idea what roly-polies are. We call them slaters and we have the common grey ones in our compost bin. I quite like them.

Just a thought though. Moving ctitters from one area to another can create problems. I used to keep tadpoles after I found some frog spawn in my garden. I gathered it up and placed it in water in a plastic dish. Hundreds of tadpoles hatched out and I then had to find out how to care for them and what to feed them. They turned out to be a very common variety and I learned that tipping them into a local waterway might not be a good idea, especially if the creek happened to be inhabited by rarer species that would be outbred by the common frogs and pushed closer to extinction.

I allowed my taddies to mature in the yard and after a while the sound of them could be heard at night, not just in my yard but for halfway down the street. I'm pretty sure the local birds dined on most of them, but that is nature's way, isn't it.
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The place where I collected them and the place where I left them are in the same city so I feel pretty confident they'll survive and multiply. There are a lot of birds where the bugs now live, so a bug-boom shouldn't be a problem. In any case, they'd have certainly been doomed if I'd released them here. That said, I agree with you; you should do at least a little research before you release a capture into the environment. We have some river spoilage here because someone some years ago put some non-indigenous plants in one of the rivers and the plant absolutely flourished but wreaked havok on birds as well as fish, snails and amphibians, and even microbial life. By the time this was noticed it couldn't be corrected.
 

Murrmurr said:
Recently I’ve been surprised to see that whatever food I drop into the roly-poly (isopod) house – a rotting lettuce leaf, little chunk of sweet potato, a sprinkle of fish-flakes or crushed eggshell – would disappear within a couple of hours, so I was pretty sure there were lots of them and even though there was plenty of leaf-litter and raw bark for them to munch on, I started worrying they weren’t getting enough to eat. And when that’s the case the adults will sometimes eat the young; a disturbing thought.

It’s probably stupid to worry about roly-polies but they’ve been with me for several months, I took them from their native land and I sort of feel responsible for them. I didn’t want to take them back where they came from, which is my youngest son’s house, bc the grandkids would want me to stay and visit or they’d want to come home with me and I had other plans for that day and the next, and I didn’t want to release them here bc the soil and landscape isn’t really isopod-friendly, plus an exterminator comes every month. So I called my other son’s wife (their kids are grown and gone) and asked if she would mind taking custody of my roly-polies?

She wasn’t aware that I had “pet” bugs so she was a bit taken aback and was quiet for a few seconds and then she asked me What do they do? Reasonable since she has a little veg garden and some fruit trees and a bunch of expensive plants in her yard. What isopods do is clean up. I told her they’re known as the clean-up crew of the bug world; they eat rotting, decaying stuff, mostly vegetation (but also eggshells and some other things that have calcium and protein in them).

This intrigued her bc she keeps a compost pile. She asked me if I thought they’d be happy there. Well, I think that’s a nicely symbiotic solution and I tell her so. When I transferred the isopods from their little house to the edge of the compost pile I was amazed at the number of babies and that some of the adults were huge. At least then I knew I was feeding them the right stuff but probably not enough of it. But I had no idea the colony got that big bc they hide in the substrate and under the pieces of bark and stuff. There were lots of eggs and larvae too.

Anyway, I’m sure they’ll live happily ever after in Kristine’s compost pile and they'll earn their keep for sure.
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You know roly polies and butterflies are the only bugs I simply can not kill. I feel sorry for roly polies. And I adore butterflies.
 
MarciKS said:
Because they seem so helpless.
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I gained a new respect for them while they lived here. After all, they managed to grow a pretty strong community living inside an empty plastic Red Vines (the candy) tub that was inside my house for several months, without natural light. And did you know they could have done that whether I just happened to have put male ones in there or not? It's certain they were almost all female bc, in nature, the majority of them are, and they can make babies all on their own if needs be. We probably step on them by the hundreds every time we take a walk in the park, but they just roll up into their tight ball of armor till it's over and carry on eating rot all day and pooping out fertile earth.

Do not feel too sorry for the Roly-Poly, my dear Marci, for she is a mighty little warrior indeed!
 
One day I was feeling particularly strange and as I sat on the porch pondering my life a butterfly came and hovered in front of my face. Close enough I could hear it's wings moving. It hovered there long enough that I felt like it was trying to communicate with me. I just sat there and let it do whatever it was gonna do. It was the most wonderful thing that's ever happened to me.
 
MarciKS said:
One day I was feeling particularly strange and as I sat on the porch pondering my life a butterfly came and hovered in front of my face. Close enough I could hear it's wings moving. It hovered there long enough that I felt like it was trying to communicate with me. I just sat there and let it do whatever it was gonna do. It was the most wonderful thing that's ever happened to me.
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Wow, that's awesome. A friend of mine had a noteworthy butterfly encounter; his wife had just past away a few days earlier when he went to work one morning to see a very large green butterfly on the window sill of his store, and as he unlocked the door it opened its wings to show very distinct heart-shaped markings on each one. It sat there through most of his shift.
 

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