The first image that sprang to mind as I picked up the snow-covered brick that lay under our garden hedge and discovered what lurked underneath, was of the Roman army’s testudo siege formation, of overlapping defensive shields. Scores of woodlice were packed into the brick’s recesses, presenting a united carapace of battleship-grey armour.
Almost immediately a few began to scuttle away and unable to put the brick down for fear of squashing them I held it and watched. Adults and young, awoken from their torpor by the glare of daylight, began to break ranks. In their haste to escape, some collided and rolled on to their backs, legs waving in the air, frantically attempting to right themselves by arching their bodies.
This crustacean community, into whose lives I had brought such chaos, included a few that were mid-way through moulting their armour, leaving the ghostly white half-shells of their integuments behind. After the stampede, as they tumbled over my hands and fell to the ground, only one – the largest – remained.
This venerable individual, a common shiny woodlouse, sat motionless as a fossil, its sawtooth outline and large-lensed compound eyes reminiscent of an extinct trilobite. The elegant curved symmetry and articulation of its armour plates, which swept down like skirts and almost brushed the surface of the brick, would have delighted an art nouveau jeweller. It could not tolerate the sun’s weak winter warmth; before long it too shuffled away to seek a dark place for the remaining daylight hours.
Woodlice are ubiquitous in damp corners of old houses, outbuildings and gardens, which may be why they have accumulated so many regional vernacular names, like bibble bug, tiggyhog and coffin cutter. But despite these affectionate labels our familiarity only extends to brief accidental encounters, like mine. Many details of the lives of these harmless scavengers, dominated by evolutionary echoes of their aquatic ancestry that allow them to wander freely only in the dank hours of darkness, are an enigma.
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