Desert woodlouse
The desert woodlouse is a woodlouse that lives in the hot desert, the driest home of any crab relative in the world. It walks on 14 legs with its body held high above the hot sand. Mum and dad dig a deep burrow together and look after their babies as a family.
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Fun facts
Its family burrow goes 40 to 50 centimetres down, where the sand stays cool and damp.
One parent guards the door while the other goes out to find food.
Each family knows its own members by their smell.
If it cannot find its burrow, it searches in a widening spiral until it finds the door again.
In some places there are hundreds of thousands of them on a field the size of two football pitches.
Most asked questions about Desert woodlouse
?Can woodlice live in the desert?
Yes. The desert woodlouse survives by living deep in a cool burrow with its family.
?What does the desert woodlouse eat?
It eats the leaves of desert bushes, and it even eats damp sand to get water.
?How big is the desert woodlouse?
It is about 22 millimetres long.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Hemilepistus reaumuri
- Named by
- Milne-Edwards, 1840
- Group
- Woodlice
- Family
- Trachelipodidae
- Classification
- Malacostraca > Isopoda > Trachelipodidae
- Lives on
- Africa, Asia
Where the facts come from
- Hemilepistus reaumuri (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 Hemilepistus_reaumurii_02.jpg : Vil0443 (Ferenc Vilisics) derivative work: Stemonitis ( talk ). CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same 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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