Here is a somewhat pleasant (mis)adventure from several years ago
(Some background: here in arid CA it is never cold enough to snow, although temperatures can drop precariously close on wintery nights; we thus even have katydids year-round)
On the first weekend of Jan 2015 I decided to stop biting my nails over a perceived lack of interesting invertebrates and dig through some forest logs with a large chisel.
It worked, ...somewhat. The logs were almost completely empty of woodborers but I located a wrinkled and surprisingly small ironclad (approx. 1 cm) under a rock.
I put it in a small box with three small pillbugs but it often feigned death for hours when disturbed.
Later I found a few interesting pancake-shaped woodlice in another wooded area. I misidentified them as Trachelipus rathkii after miscounting their lungs.
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| the animals later turned out to be Porcellio dilatatus |
Sometime later I also took home a small (approx. 1 cm) red-anteriored carabid (Calathus ruficollis) for breeding experiments. I failed to find any conspecifics but kept it anyways.
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| This pic makes the front end unnaturally non-glossy and the legs too red |
Unfortunately, arthropods are delicate organisms (despite their resilience). After living with some Zophobas adults for a while, the carabid broke several of its legs mysteriously; I had to relocate it to a small cup of forest woodchips. It lived for a long time in this pathetic state and quietly died in the summer. The Porcellio did well with the pillbugs and later I added some shimmery gray Porcellionides, but due to an under-ventilation error several pillbugs and all Porcellio perished (pillbugs need more fresh air than the others, so presumably they died first and then released poisonous vapors). The small ironclad simply went limp a number of days after capture; in hindsight it probably could not tolerate the moisture desired by the woodlice in its box.
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| (in reality the Porcellionides were not orange, it is just bad lighting) |
