Their preferred foods are soft decaying plants like grasses and leaves, but they may also eat mulch used in landscaping around the house. Although pill bugs may infrequently eat garden or other plants around a home, they rarely do so to the extent they cause damage. Should a gardener see pill bugs in the garden and suspect them of damaging their plants, while that is possible, more likely it is a slug or some other garden pest doing the damage. Pill bugs do have some rather peculiar feeding habits since they are known to eat their own feces, as well as feces from other animals.
Additionally, sometimes pill bugs will feed on decomposing animal flesh. Pill bugs are also known to consume heavy metal deposits during their feeding activities in the soil, and during this process they may help remove soil deposits of metals such as copper, lead and zinc.
A number of other critters such as birds, toads, spiders, some wasp species, centipedes and millipedes prey upon pill bugs to help support their nutritional needs. Pill bugs are important to the ecosystem as they are as decomposers that add to the overall quality of their habitat, as well as the remarkable bodily gymnastics they perform by rolling themselves into small, grey balls. They look like a shrimp crossed with an armadillo and they seem to have a different name everywhere they're found.
In fact, the scientific name for these little armor-plated, armadillo-like creatures is Armadillidium vulgare. With 12 known species of roly-poly bugs found in the United State alone, these tiny gray crustaceans yup, they aren't insects, but crustaceans, just like crab and lobster inhabit the northern and central parts of the country, as well as many dark, damp places across the world.
They're the only crustaceans that have adapted to living completely on land, according to the University of Kentucky Entomology. So, while you may not love the thought of these little critters rolling over your feet, they don't sting, bite or carry diseases, and there is a very real benefit to having them in your backyard garden. It all starts with the microbes within the confines of the roly-poly's innards.
These microscopic gut creatures actually help roly-poly bugs break down dead organic matter. Studies have shown the benefits of the roly-poly's detritivorous diet meaning they absorb nutrients from decomposing plants, animals and poop on soil.
The roly-poly's particular eating habits positively affected the ecosystem by increasing the mineral content of the soil, essentially turning organic matter into healthy soil. How does it work? A detritivorous diet increases the speed of decomposition in dead plants, animals or poop, increasing the bioavailability of nutrients in the soil.
This gives plants a higher chance of survival by providing better quality soil. It's not just what roly-poly bugs add to the soil, but what they take out too. Tab will move on to the next part of the site rather than go through menu items. Photo via Shutterstock. Who hasn't seen a roly-poly bug in the dirt and given it a quick touch to see it form itself into a little ball? That process that has entertained kids — and adults — for generations is a defense mechanism for the bugs, and it has a special name: conglobation, which is a big, fancy word that means "to form into a ball.
And while this ability to conglobate may be the most entertaining thing about these tiny critters — and where the term roly-poly comes from — there's much more to them than that. Here's a closer look at roly-polies and the role they play in the ecosystem. Roly-poly is a common nickname for these creatures, but it's certainly not the only name they go by. Some people call them wood shrimp or doodlebugs, and in England they have dozens of nicknames, including chiggypigs, penny sows and cheesybugs, according to the BBC.
The official name for these creatures is pillbug. They are also sometimes called woodlice, because they are often found under logs. Pillbugs are sometimes also referred to as sowbugs, although they are two separate species, according to the University of Florida.
One key difference between pillbugs and sowbugs is that pillbugs can roll themselves into a ball, while sowbugs cannot. That's right, pillbugs aren't insects. They are actually crustaceans, which means they are more closely related to shrimp, crabs and crayfish than they are to the ants and other insects that inhabit the same soil.
Roly-polies are terrestrial crustaceans and the only crustaceans that have adapted to living entirely on land, according to the University of Kentucky's College of Agriculture, Food and Environment. They breathe through gills like other crustaceans, but their gills must remain moist even on land.
And although they require a moist environment, they cannot live underwater. These bugs typically range between a quarter-inch and a half-inch long, and they have seven sets of legs under their segmented bodies. Roly-polies don't urinate because, quite simply, they don't need to.
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