Under a Rock

I'm going to be spending the morning with some elementary school students at Sheep Pasture as a substitute teacher. The group will be cycled through three stations, and I had my choice of birds (complicated), turtles (too hands on), and isopods. So not knowing anything about isopods that became my choice. Isopods, it turns out, are woodlice, pill bugs or sowbugs. Isopods are crustaceans that live on land. They have more legs than spiders, ten or eleven pairs. They lose water to the environment quickly since their shell is not as impervious as insects exoskeletons so they have to hide out in dark, wet places. They have lungs on their back legs and carry their eggs in a pouch called a marsupium. They grow like a lobster by shedding their shell, but unlike a lobster they moult in two stages-back half first followed a couple of days later by the front. That's it for the ordinary woodlouse, but not for the members of the  family Armadillidiidae. These are the real pillbugs and I hope you caught the armadillo in the name because,like the mammal, they  can curl up in a ball to protect themselves. According to wikipedia, kids down south keep pillbugs as pets. They live for about three years in a wet, limited light environment, have that funny roll up in a ball thing, eat debris, and don't spin a squeaky exercise wheel in the middle of the night. Wikipedia adds that folks with pet tarantulas also keep pill bugs since they find tarantula poop and "leftovers" delicious. My job, apparently, is to fake a southern accent and convince kids to put the isopods in little bug boxes for observation.

Of course, what they didn't tell me is that under the same logs as the isopods are centipedes and millipedes. Millipedes eat the same kind of plant debris as the isopods, but their defense mechanism is to secrete a corrosive slime that can irritate the skin-some also shoot out hydrogen cyanide gas! Don't touch the millipedes, kids. The carnivorous Centipedes are worse with a poisonous bite that can be painful and cause the same kind of life-threatening reaction as peanut butter. The turtles and their salmonella were beginning to look better until I remembered how many logs I've turned over in my life without being bitten by a centipede. Note to self: check with nurse about epipens.