- Joined
- Feb 25, 2016
- Messages
- 1,217
Isopods/pillbugs are generally easy to find. Where I grew up in the Chicago suburbs there wasn't much in the way of wild-life but one could reliably find pillbugs under wood, flower pots, etc., so long as it was warm enough. Now I live in a wooded area outside San Antonio and with warm weather nearly year-round plus a rainy season, there is quite a variety of flora and fauna and I amused everyone my first year here getting excited over lizards and walking sticks and the general variety (and size!) of the insects and arachnids.
Should be easy to find pillbugs here, right? Wrong.
I have looked several times over the past months, under piles of leaves and fallen wood overgrown with lichen and vines and epiphytes. I have looked after a week of rain when the world was warm and moist and seemed made for pillbugs. Still not a one.
Other types of arthropods abound (often literally bound, lol), yet not only isopods are strangely absent. As I go through these leaves and wood that seem a detrivore banquet I find... hardly anything. Sometimes I find ants. Often I'll see a wolf or grass spider. Sometimes I see nothing at all. If I dig in the dirt a bit, I'll find the occasional small centipede or millipede (not NEARLY enough millipedes to make me think they have displaced the pillbugs -- besides, the food is literally piling up...) and then lots of small empty snail shells. Sometimes I'll see living snails around here but that is rare and most often even they are recently deceased, having desiccated whilst trying to cross concrete.
So what is going on here? A disease or rather specific toxin? I am reminded of the scene from The Fellowship of the Ring where the presence of the ringwraith causes all the bugs, all life, to flee from its evil presence... What foul essence has entered my woods?
Should be easy to find pillbugs here, right? Wrong.
I have looked several times over the past months, under piles of leaves and fallen wood overgrown with lichen and vines and epiphytes. I have looked after a week of rain when the world was warm and moist and seemed made for pillbugs. Still not a one.
Other types of arthropods abound (often literally bound, lol), yet not only isopods are strangely absent. As I go through these leaves and wood that seem a detrivore banquet I find... hardly anything. Sometimes I find ants. Often I'll see a wolf or grass spider. Sometimes I see nothing at all. If I dig in the dirt a bit, I'll find the occasional small centipede or millipede (not NEARLY enough millipedes to make me think they have displaced the pillbugs -- besides, the food is literally piling up...) and then lots of small empty snail shells. Sometimes I'll see living snails around here but that is rare and most often even they are recently deceased, having desiccated whilst trying to cross concrete.
So what is going on here? A disease or rather specific toxin? I am reminded of the scene from The Fellowship of the Ring where the presence of the ringwraith causes all the bugs, all life, to flee from its evil presence... What foul essence has entered my woods?