What do YOU call these tiny land crustaceans?

Potato bugs for me (growing up in Northern California):
potato

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That’s a cricket! A Jerusalem cricket!

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we - my friends and I - called them “tankies”. Nothing regional or used by others - just our own nomenclature for these little armored beasties.

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Tatu-bolinha.

Tatu - Armadillo. These mammals are also called Tatu-Bola, an Armadillo that, as all the members of its species, can turn into an armored ball.

Bolinha is a diminutive of bola (ball). So, these arthropodes are tiny garden armadillos.

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I can only give you my German word. That animal is a “Kellerassel”. “Keller” means “cellar” or “basement”, and “Assel” means “isopod”.

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Rolypoly :purple_heart:

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Potato bug or roly-poly.

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Pillbug or roly-poly are the only ones I know, though I love how personal “hobbling Andrew” is, like “oh yeah, I know that chap, what about him?”

A bit baffled by all the cheese-related ones. Is cheese in England gray and segmented? Or just constantly infested with pillbugs?

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Sure, and people used to call whales fish. Didn’t make it so.

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reggie watts yes GIF by The Late Late Show with James Corden

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I call them isopods now, for the sake of clarity if nothing else, given the enormous diversity in names and how little overlap there is in usage. But as a kid they were “sow bugs” or “pill bugs,” though I was aware of “roly-poly” and perhaps a couple other names. I’ve never heard most of those names.

I’ve heard they actually are good eating, tasting like shrimp. But I suspect it depends hugely on their diet, which as detritivores, can be just about anything.

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I grew up in Newfoundland and they were in fact universally called “carpenters”, I guess from their habit of frequenting woodpiles.

Universally, that is, with one exception: my grandmother, who called them, and all other non-winged insects such as earwigs, “crawlers”.

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Took a lot of posts to get to the correct answer!

My wife took up raising pet isopods during the pandemic. It’s actually a thing I never knew existed. Takes all kinds.

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What kind of isopods? Wood lice, or something else? If it is something else, pics?

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My brother and I called them “ugga wugga bugs”, which we probably came up with on our own since nobody told us what to call them.

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Mirelurks.

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I think we have a few names for them in Michigan, but I always heard roly-poly. You’ve seen what they do, right? No other name possible.

When I was a kid, I figured they were related to sea creatures. I, umm, bisected one and the smell was unmistakably fishy to me.

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Ask a Cladist. There are no such things as fish.

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Isopods are a bigger group though – there are marine, freshwater, and terrestrial kinds, each adapted accordingly. This is just talking about the last.

Yeah, but notice how nobody bothers to say “true fish”, and yet your link still says “true bugs” rather than bugs and notes many insects commonly called bugs belong elsewhere? That’s because “true” is functionally part of the name. Insisting on technical meanings that nobody actually uses – note biologists generally call the group “Hemiptera” – is pedantry at its most pointless.

But sure, let’s imagine that somehow I knew about Pancrustacea, but am too ignorant to have heard of Hemiptera before. :roll_eyes:

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