Why are pillbugs important?

By Chelsie Vandaveer

July 14, 2004

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They hide during the day under flowerpots, rocks, or boards and emerge under the cover of darkness to scavenge for meals. As omnivores, they are important as recyclers eating such things as plant debris and bird droppings. They are innocuous; not capable of biting or stinging. With an estimated 4000 species worldwide, they are variously called pillbugs, roly-polies, sowbugs, or woodlice. They are terrestrial isopods (Order: Isopoda, Suborder: Oniscoidea); crustaceans related to lobsters and shrimp. Unlike their aquatic kin, they have completely left the watery world for a land existence.

The pillbug's success at surviving on land is due in part to physical adaptation and in part to behavior. The pillbug is covered with a jointed exoskeleton that contains calcium, a hold over from their aquatic ancestry. The body has seven segments, each with a pair of functioning legs. The pleon (tail end) has six narrow segments with five highly modified pairs of limbs, pleopods, gills that allow the pillbug to breathe in an atmosphere.

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Females have a special pouch, a marsupium. The eggs are not abandoned, but carried until they hatch and the young have undergone their first molt. The young do not leave home; pillbugs live in familial colonies.

Gill breathing requires a humid atmosphere and pillbugs dehydrate when the relative humidity drops below 50 percent. Pillbugs are seldom found in homes since trapped with heating or air conditioning, they will die. If they are only briefly dehydrated, pillbugs can rehydrate when the humidity increases by absorbing moisture from the air.

Pillbugs are very tolerant of heavy metal contamination in the environment. They survive where earthworms, snails, and other recycler animals are poisoned. Ingested metallic ions are crystallized and stored in their hepatopancreas. Pillbugs are useful not only for starting the creation of soil at contaminated sites, the amounts of toxic metals present in the isopods gives scientists an estimation of amounts of metal contamination at a site.

With the aid of their unique adaptations, it is their behavior—hiding in dark, damp places, feeding at night when the humidity is higher, and living in colonies—that allows pillbugs to survive. Although they evolved from aquatic animals, oddly, pillbugs can drown if their habitat becomes flooded.

(Compiled from: "Sowbugs and Pillbugs", Louise Kulzer, 1995, Bug of the Month; "Anatomy of the Terrestrial Isopod, Armadillidium vulgare", Richard Fox, 2000, Lander University; "Pillbugs", Jonathan Wright, Department of Biology, Northern State University, South Dakota, 1997 and "Sowbugs and Pillbugs", Michael F. Potter, University of Kentucky Entomology, 1998)

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