Live and learn... It is strange that I have lived for so long without ever noticing how the woodlice come out at night, in large numbers - hundreds creeping over the wooden fence around the garden, with local concentrations of a score or more, including babies. And scattered more thinly - dozens of the seldom-seen millipedes. And quite a few spiders, too.
I saw them only by chance - having forgotten to do some reorganising of the squirrel feeders during the day, I went out with a hammer and a head torch - and saw the above. Always had been there, presumably, but unknown to me.
All of them freeze when a light is shone upon them - clearly, in darkness is their (relative) safety; albeit, they are presumably one of the reasons why so many small, insectivorous, mammals are nocturnal.
The everyday world is apparently full of many yet unnoticed, or still undiscovered, things: some of them almost under-my-nose.
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One day long ago, my small daughter and I found these creatures in our compost heap, and we played with them for a while. My wife didn't mind. A point in their favor is that they seem not to make themselves at home in our houses or on our persons. But she did ask me not to call them woodlice. Fortunately in America we can also call them "pillbugs", from their habit of rolling themselves up in a ball.
We Americans also call asses "donkeys" and cocks "roosters".
@Karl - Most of the woodlice around here are Not the pill type; but some of them are.
Donkey is also used in England - apparently 'rooster' was a deliberate US euphemism to avoid saying cockrel/ cock; but the original is still used here, and the smutty double entendre is still enjoyed by young kids; and in the 1970s musical version of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDea7pfVUXI
Interesting that light induces them to stand still rather than scatter like cockroaches. Maybe motionlessness makes for camouflage.
Interesting...I'd never encountered the term "woodlice" before. Like Karl, we always called them "pillbugs," though on the upper east coast, people refer to them as "sowbugs."
And you're so right,Bruce...so many things are out and about at night, it's remarkable. One of my favorite things to do at night is take a flashlight outside and shine it across the grass. The eyes of wolf spiders reflect green in the light, and it's interesting to count how many there are in a given patch of ground. Then I start thinking about the things up in the woods behind my house, and what might be peering at me at that moment, and then the coyotes start howling up on the ridge...
@ap. Well they sort of freeze and cringe, then scuttle for cover...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodlouse#Common_names
Yank here, I think we call those "rolly pollys".
Sounds charming. Here in Taiwan it's cockroaches and shrews!
I grew up calling them "woodlice" in New Hampshire, "pillbugs" in Maryland and Ohio.
I'm a west coast guy, (born and raised in Vegas) I also think "rolly polly" is a silly name that older women told me they were but it stuck.
In the UK, only a small minority of woodlice are of the kind that can roll into a ball - a source of regret during my childhood - so presumably they didn't get names based on that trait.
I used to go "spider hunting" with my nephew at his rural home where there were many, many critters out at night. Spider hunting meant hunting for spiders, but the "for" meant "in the service of." We'd find spiders that looked particularly interesting or beautiful, and then we'd find suitable prey and deliver the goods . . . and then watch Charlotte go to town. Sometimes, we'd just use the flashlight to lead moths to their doom. Hey, spiders have to eat, too.
And we do, indeed, call them pillbugs in Ohio.
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