Wildlife: Woodlice

This week I was watering and pruning the plants in my garden and due to the flood I caused with the water the animal ecosystem was altered and several little animals came out in search of solid ground, among them I can name: ants, centipedes, snails, slugs and even several woodlice. In this Bulletin I will present some morphological characteristics and habits of some specimens of these animals that roll up to form a kind of "ball", I am referring to another animal of the Arthropoda Phylum, those that have a segmented body and paired legs on each side of the body, we will see several photographs of the Common Woodlice.

The diversity of body shapes and sizes of the Crustacean Subphylum covers a wide geography across all the continents of the planet, in the deepest places in the oceans and seas, as well as on the Earth's surface and more located towards our daily environment such as the rooms of our home and even in gardens where they can adapt and lead their life habits naturally. The common cochineal belongs to the Armadillidiidae Family and lives in humid places, although it can withstand dry environments in tropical and temperate zones, which is why they are considered a species with wide resistance and adaptability to variable environmental conditions.

The Armadillidiidae family is very large and one of its fundamental characteristics is that they can roll on inclined surfaces or by the action of the wind by curling their body into a ball, whenever they are disturbed or see that their life is in danger. Their feeding habits are based fundamentally on vegetal material, fresh or decomposing, and they also require a source of calcium minerals to be able to sustain their exoskeleton, that kind of shell that covers the soft parts of the animal.

In this Newsletter I will emphasize that the Armadillo officinalis species is also a species of ISOPOD that groups this terrestrial crustacean among more than 4,000 different species, mostly aquatic. These animals grow between 1 and 3 centimeters in length and reduce to half that when they curl up into a ball. It takes approximately one year for the young animal to become an adult. If you are a nature lover and want to have these species near your home, you can even breed them, since it is a very robust and easy-to-reproduce species, since a female can have several litters per year, each with up to 200 young woodlice. Like most species of woodlice, the Armadillo officinalis can also curl up into a closed ball in case of danger, protecting part of its body with its shell, although leaving its antennae exposed. They also make a buzzing sound to try to scare away predators or scare off the attacker!

The color of the scale insect is gray and sometimes black, depending on the species. Its morphological pattern is an oval body that turns into a sphere when it rolls up. On occasion, they have been confused with an Eluma caelata due to their similarity, but the latter has its pair of compound eyes equipped with a photoreceptor cell to distinguish the differences between the intensities of the light around it.

Cochineals have 7 pairs of pereopods, the first pair being subchelate, meaning they are very different from those of a spider, which are chelate. Several sections of their body can be distinguished: 1) antennae, 2) head, 3) eyes, 4) pereopond, 5) pleon, 6) coxae, 7) pleotelson, 8) uropod and 9) mouth, among other parts of the body. Let's see them in the following photographs:

As I mentioned at the beginning of this Newsletter, the Cochineal belongs to the Subphylum Crustacea, like the crab or the shrimp, with the difference that these have 5 pairs of limbs of different sizes and functions, while the Cochineal belongs to the Genus Armadillidium of the Order Isopoda, related to the equal size of its legs, which scientifically are known as Pereopods, what I mean is that it has 7 pairs of pereopods of equal size, somewhat symmetrical.

As far as we have detailed, this type of animal is not considered an INSECT, but rather a crustacean! It can be a small controller of vegetation at a micro level in our garden. The female of this species takes care of her offspring inside a kind of marsupial, until they can feed themselves in a quantity that varies between 100 and 300 new individuals.

In places with a dry environment, they spend more time sheltering than eating and generally avoid activities that require more energy, in order to preserve the moisture of the body and avoid unnecessary dehydration.

There is a wide variety of species of cochineals that you can study in other articles: 1) Armadillidium vulgare 2) Armadillidium nasatum 3) Armadillidium depressum and the most representative of the species 4) Armadillidium officinalis Each of them can be differentiated considering the place where they live and certain spots or coloring of their body.

Finally, I wanted to leave some photographs of our little Cochineal when it was moving freely and I blew on it several times so that it would adopt its defensive position, turning into a small ball, let's see:

I have prepared this work with photographs taken with my Sony camera and Xiaomi cell phone, so I release the copyright so that you can use the images freely. All the text is original from @aqua.nano after an exhaustive search for information on this animal species.

My native language is Spanish, so I have used Google Translator to translate it into English and share it on the steemit.com platform.