Oniscus asellus “Mardi Gras”

It all started with a huge wall lizard order. A customer had ordered 500 animals and we had nowhere near as many in stock. So we set out to look for some. We, that’s my brother Stefan and me. My experience of looking for woodlice is as follows: They are found in much higher numbers in coniferous forests than in deciduous forests. That is the big difference to the other isopod species. For this reason, we went to the Swabian Alb to look for some in a beautiful overgrown spruce forest.

The internal challenge was whoever found 250 animals first would be the isopod king. You know when you start playing games like that out of desperation? We reckoned it would take us half a day to find the animals and we still had a lot to do. So our desire to do so was relatively limited. Surprisingly, after 2 hours we had found 600 animals in an area of 100 square meters. Stefan was quicker, but that’s just because he’s a non-smoker. At least that’s how I explain it to myself.

And as it was probably his lucky day, he found this beautiful Oniscus asellus “Mardi Gras” under a piece of spruce bark. We both stopped and looked fascinated at the glittering yellow-gold spots in front of us. We have both seen many Isopods before, but this surpassed anything we had seen before in terms of beauty and perfection.

Judging by its size, the Oniscus asellus “Mardi Gras” is already an adult. As our eyes didn’t get any better with age, we had to wait until we could put on our reading glasses in the isopod shop to determine the sex.

That was the first thing we did when we got back, grabbing the 3.0 reading glasses. Unfortunately, it was a female. The “unfortunately” is made up of the following fact: If you only have a single color morph, you can only cross it with a wild-colored counterpart. You can add countless females to a male color morph and hope that he will fertilize quite a few. You can therefore expect a much higher number of young isopods in the first generation than with a female color morph.

But you shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, you should rather saddle it. So we put them together with three male Oniscus asellus “wall lice” and several prayers in a 5 liter box and waited with bated breath to see what would happen.