Roly Poly

A roly poly. Not a great picture, but a really cool creature.

My kids have no fear of bugs. When they were little and a bug would wander through the house, they used to freak out. I was all calm and a super-dad and I showed them there was nothing to be afraid of. I'd pick them up and put them outside to go live their little buggy lives in peace. I'm not sure I thought things all the way through (common theme with my parenting) because now my kids pick up everything and want to talk to them and carry them around. I don't mind bugs, but I don't like them enough for it to be cool to carry them inside and sit down on the couch with them and have a conversation.
Lately the kids have been picking up roly polies, or pill bugs, or whatever other name they have in your part of the world. They're pretty neat. They're easy to catch, and they curl up in a protective ball, and they're harmless, and they're everywhere. I'm expected to be the resident storehouse of information about all things, so when I was asked more about them I had to choose between looking it up, or making it up. The older my kids get, the harder it is to make things up and have them believe me, so I chose to look it up. As it turns out, roly polies are actually woodlice, and woodlice aren't bugs at all. No, woodlice are actually terrestrial crustaceans. That's right, they're land crabs. They breathe through lungs located in their back legs, and they need to be moist to keep breathing through those legs. How weird is that? They primarily eat dead plant matter and are responsible for a huge percentage of the plant recycling that's done on earth. One source estimated that as much as 80% of all plant material makes it's way through a woodlouse at some point. Roly polies are cool.
I'm probably stretching things by including roly polies as a pet post. They're just so neat though, and I had made it through 36 years without really learning about them, I thought I should share. Anyway, my kids pick them up, and talk to them, and bring them in the house, they're practically like kittens. Go flip over a rock in your yard and find a roly poly, a land crab, and pick them up. They're pretty neat.