Beautiful pill woodlouse
Armadillidium pulchellum
The beautiful pill woodlouse is a tiny woodlouse from Europe. It is covered in little yellow dots, with red-brown edges on its back plates. When it is scared, it rolls up into a ball like a pill.
Fun fact: woodlice are not insects. They are crustaceans, cousins of crabs and shrimps, that live on land.
Lives in
Europe
Length
5 mm (0.2 in)
Can it hurt you?
Harmless
Harmless. It does not bite or sting. Put it back gently where you found it.
What does it eat?
Like other woodlice, it eats dead leaves and rotting plant bits, which helps clean up the ground.
How big is it?
How long is it?
💅small enough to sit on your fingernail🦶it has about 14 legs🍽️could run across a dinner table in 36 seconds
How big is Beautiful pill woodlouse compared to YOU?
Just maths in your browser. Nothing is saved or sent anywhere.
How fast is it?
A garden snail about 0.05 km/h (0.03 mph)
Beautiful pill woodlouse about 0.1 km/h (0.06 mph)
A tortoise about 0.3 km/h (0.19 mph)
A person walking about 5 km/h (3.1 mph)
cool stuff
Fun facts
1
It only grows to about 5 millimetres long, smaller than a grain of rice.
2
Its ball is not perfect. When it rolls up, it leaves a tiny gap.
3
The front plate of its back has a cut-off edge, which helps experts tell it apart from the common pill woodlouse.
you asked
Most asked questions about Beautiful pill woodlouse
?How big is the beautiful pill woodlouse?
Only about 5 millimetres long.
?Why is it called a pill woodlouse?
Because it can roll itself up into a little ball, like a pill.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Armadillidium pulchellum
- Group
- Woodlice
- Family
- Armadillidiidae
- Classification
- Malacostraca > Isopoda > Armadillidiidae
- Lives on
- Europe
Where the facts come from
- Armadillidium pulchellum (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by Gilles San Martin. CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. The sticker of this bug is drawn from this picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.
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