Common shiny woodlouse
The common shiny woodlouse is a flat, shiny, grey-brown little crawler with lots of legs. It loves damp, dark places, especially under old rotting wood. It is not an insect at all: it is a land cousin of crabs and shrimps.
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Fun facts
Unlike some woodlice, it cannot roll itself up into a ball.
It changes its skin in two halves: first the back half, and a little later the front half.
The pale patches on its back are little stores of calcium that it uses to make its new skin hard.
Babies are bumpy with orange markings, so they look quite different from the smooth grown-ups.
It is one of the woodlice people see most often all over the world.
Most asked questions about Common shiny woodlouse
?Is a woodlouse an insect?
No. Insects have six legs, but a woodlouse has fourteen. It is related to crabs and shrimps.
?What does a woodlouse eat?
Mostly rotting wood and dead leaves. It helps turn old plant bits back into soil.
?Can the common shiny woodlouse roll into a ball?
No, it cannot roll up completely. That is a trick of the pill woodlouse, a different kind.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Oniscus asellus
- Named by
- Linnaeus, 1758
- Group
- Woodlice
- Family
- Oniscidae
- Classification
- Malacostraca > Isopoda > Oniscidae
- Lives on
- Europe, North America
- Also known as
- Common woodlouse
Where the facts come from
- Oniscus asellus (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by Katja Schulz from Washington, D. C., USA. CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.
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