I wanted to share with you what we have been doing at the Eldridge Environmental Education Center. Me and my friends started a millipede farm! We also have some roly-poly bugs in there, too! We collected from the area. We found them by turning over rocks by Salt Creek! You could find them in your backyard, too! They live in our soil and help break down detritus. That's the fancy word for dead leaves and sticks and stuff.
Here is a picture of our tank. We put in soil that we found in the area, alot of dead leaves and a decomposing turkey tail mushroom. Turkey tails are those fungi that you see growing like little steps up the trunk of a tree.Millipedes and pill bugs (another word for the roly poly) are herbivores. That means they don't eat meat. If you look closely at them you can see that there bodies are in segments - or little parts. Not all one part like us (mammals) are. They are very different animals but they have the same defense - curl up into a ball. When they get nervous they curl up into a little ball and they stay very still. (You can see this if you try to pick them up.) Animals that like to eat bugs lose interest in eating if a bug is not moving and looks dead. So curling up into a ball is a pretty good strategy to avaoid being eaten!
Here is a picture of a millipede tickling my face. I named him Max.
Millipedes and pill bugs are part of a big group of animals called arthropods. These are animals that wear their skeleton (their hardest parts) on the outside of their bodies! A skeleton on the outside is called an exoskeleton. We are mammals so we have an endoskeleton! Exo- in front of words means "outer or outside" and Endo- means "inner or inside".
Tune in next time for more juicy details of our farm's residents!
Eco.
