Critters
Dairy cow isopod
Porcellio laevis
Open jar onlyGrazes plants
A big, fast, hungry isopod. Strips litter quickly and nibbles soft plants.
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, rotting wood, moss, lichen, animal waste, fungi
- Foods it lives on; the jar feeds it from whichever of these it has.
- Humidity
- 55 to 85 % RH
- Air moisture it needs.
- Temperature
- 18 to 30 °C
- Comfortable range; beyond it the colony suffers.
- Doubles in
- 45 days
- Time for the colony to double with plenty of food.
- Lives
- 912.5 days
- How long one animal lives.
Care
- Size
- 12 to 20 mm
- Moisture
- Moist
What kills it
- complete drying
- stagnant saturated substrate
- overcrowding with no food (cannibalism)
Description
Growing up to 2 cm, it eats heavily and will chew moss as well as soft plants. It belongs in a big or lightly planted enclosure rather than a small closed jar. Keep food on hand, because hungry, crowded colonies turn on each other.
Also called dairy cow, swift woodlouse, smooth slater.
Estimated, where sources were thin: clutch_or_offspring; maturity_days; generation_days; lifespan_days; temp_c; humidity_rh_pct.