The woodlice in my bathroom
A continuation from my previous post: 'The spider in my shower'
Previous post in this series: The spider in my shower
Inspirational post: Killing the moths
A few days ago I was cleaning out my bathroom and I saw a woodlouse crawling along the floor. I’m kinda used to seeing them around the house, especially in the conservatory, which makes sense due to it being a bit colder and damper than the rest of the house. I sometimes see them in my bedroom, on the walls, if I leave the window open, and I usually deal with them by getting a paper and scooping them up and releasing them outside.
But to be honest, even saying this, this makes me uncertain if this was even the correct move. As Bella says in her post:
Also, some part of me knew that the moths were very unlikely to survive outside my flat, having adapted for indoor living and being not very weather resistant — but I mentally shrank away from this fact. As long as I wasn’t killing them, I was good, right?
I think that although woodlouse are not as fragile as moths, I don’t actually know if they were surviving where I left them. I had this dilemma before in my spider post.[1]
So anyways, I attempted to deal with this woodlouse in the same way that I had before, but unfortunately it scurried off into a crevice in the wall. I decided it wasn’t worth my time to try and extract them from there, so I let the woodlouse be.
But then today I saw 3 woodlice in the same place. I knew that this would likely turn into a problem as they were multiplying, and therefore I should aim to get rid of them as soon as possible. This reminded me of Bella’s post on moths – how she tried to humanely get rid of them by taking them out of the room individually, but then lead to an infestation, so she had to kill them to actually get rid of them. Her reflection was that she should’ve tried to get rid of them earlier to prevent the suffering of all the ones she had to kill later. So I applied this mindset today.
I initially tried to scoop up the bigger 2 (there was 2 adults and 1 baby I think), but they too ran into the crevice. I couldn’t really do anything about this so I tried to vacuum them up, which I hope is a quick and hopefully less painful death, and then quickly killed the baby. I felt really awful doing this, even when I try and justify it to myself that I was preventing future suffering, it didn’t feel right at all.
Whilst writing this post, I did some more research into woodlice. I was always fascinated by them as a child, as they would be under every rock I overturned in my garden. I also liked how they could roll up into a ball, but today I found out that only some particular species can roll up into a ball. Additionally, it turns out that not only is it a defence mechanism, but they also conserve moisture that way, which I thought was very cool.
Another thing which never occurred to me, is that woodlice are not insects, they are actually terrestrial isopods which is a type of crustacean.
To conclude, I think I made the right call here, but I can’t shake the gut feeling of how it didn’t feel right.
There is a difference however, with the Spiders and the Woodlice. Woodlice multiply, Spiders do not.↩︎
Ok, hot take, put some Pollyfilla in the crevice