Critters
Common pill bug
Armadillidium vulgare
Fine in a closed jarGrazes plants
The classic pill bug that rolls into a ball. Hardy and a steady breeder.
What the simulation uses
- Eats litter
- 1.5 mg/day each
- Dead leaves one animal shreds a day, turning them back into soil.
- Eats mould
- 0.2 mg/day each
- Mould one animal grazes a day, keeping fuzz and grey mould down.
- Colony at most
- 400 per m²
- How many the floor can feed when food is plentiful; less food, fewer.
- Starving loses
- 2 % a day
- How fast a colony thins when the jar cannot feed it.
- Eats
- decaying plant, leaf litter, fungi, animal waste, dead animals, seeds, seedlings
- Foods it lives on; the jar feeds it from whichever of these it has.
- Humidity
- 60 to 90 % RH
- Air moisture it needs.
- Temperature
- 10 to 27 °C
- Comfortable range; beyond it the colony suffers.
- Doubles in
- 90 days
- Time for the colony to double with plenty of food.
- Lives
- 730 days
- How long one animal lives.
Care
- Size
- 8.5 to 18 mm
- Moisture
- Moist
What kills it
- desiccation (main survival limit)
- flooding
- sustained heat above ~30 C
- freezing below 0 C induces dormancy
Description
Each brood can bring up to 40 young, with up to three broods a season. Adults reach 1 to 2 cm and live up to three years. Keep the soil from drying out, and watch tender seedlings, which this group likes to nibble.
Also called pill bug, roly-poly, common pill woodlouse.
Estimated, where sources were thin: temp_c optimum; humidity_rh_pct; generation_days; population_doubling_days; clutch min.