I Killed an Entire Generation of Pill Bugs
If you watch my videos or follow my IG, you know I put together a terrarium in my 75 gallon fish tank. I thought I wanted something to live in there besides plants, but I didn’t want to buy something like a lizard that required heat, or a frog that required crickets or mealworms (which, believe it or not, are hard to find consistently here in town and I’m NOT going to breed crickets - they stink!), so I thought I’d play it safe and grab a bunch of isopods from the backyard. You may have grown up calling them pill bugs, rolly-polies, or doodlebugs (something totally different, btw), but if you’re talking about the little many-legged bugs that roll up into a tiny ball, you’re talking about isopods. At one point I’d considered putting a betta in there, so I have a large pasta bowl with rocks in the bottom and water. I decided against the betta but left the bowl with water in there because, hey, extra humidity for my plants.
I added a whole bunch of pill bugs a day for several days. I’d go to the yard and look under rocks and potted plants, and just relocate them into my terrarium. Besides, they eat decaying plant material so it’s kinda like they’re keeping everything clean inside the terrarium. I got a hygrometer to make sure the humidity stayed high, I opened the top up during the day to allow for air circulation, and I misted the plants each night. Isopods are kind of nocturnal. You might see them during the day but they’ll come out of hiding at night. It’s kind of fun to look around in the tank and see how many you can find; that was the whole point of me scouring my yard for them.
A couple of days ago, I went to check the humidity level a couple of hours after the grow light turned on, and I was shocked and horrified at what I saw. There were 12 tiny little pill bugs, drowned in the bottom of the water bowl. I think I screamed.
Never before had I seen one near the bowl, and I’d kept everything watered enough so that they didn’t need to get water from a bowl but, for whatever reason, they went all lemming and jumped into the pool with no way to get out. I felt horribly guilty and cried. I felt like an idiot for not anticipating that being an issue. It seemed so weird to me that everything was fine for weeks, but just one day they all did the same thing and died. So I fixed it by filling the bowl up to the rim with pebbles and then adding water. Now, any isopod can just walk straight across it without drowning.
Oh, and I went back out to get more pill bugs and replenish the population. They’re doing well.
