ysabetwordsmith | Photos: Antique Jar Terrarium Build Part 5: Microfauna (Reply)

Today I collected some microfauna and added them to the antique jar terrarium. I think I got about a dozen isopods, which are locally called pillbugs, and in other places may be called woodlice, sowbugs, potato bugs, roly-polies, and so on. I also caught a couple of tiny millipedes, two earthworms, and maybe some springtails. See Part 1: Washing, Drainage, and Barrier, Part 2: Mixing Substrate, Part 3: Adding Mosses, Part 4: Dead Wood and Leaf Litter, Part 5: Microfauna.

Note: This post contains pictures of small creepy-crawlers. If that's not your idea of fun, skip it.

This is the starting point of the antique jar terrarium after Part 4: Dead Wood and Leaf Litter.

This is the starting point of the antique jar terrarium.

One of the larger land snails was crawling on the glass.

One of the larger snails was crawling on the glass.

These are a few of the pillbugs I caught. Three of them are curled tight. The fourth is running like hell. It continued to do laps the whole time I was trying to take pictures. I suspect these are two different species as the dark gray ones are curled into spheres while the mottled brown one is running and has slightly flared edges on its carapace.

I originally collected them in a deep cup with a white inside. Here I've placed a few into a plain white frisbee. It gives them a little room to spread out but has a rim to contain them, and most things show up well against the pale background.

These are a few of the pillbugs I caught. Three of them are curled tight. The fourth is running like hell. I suspect these are two different species as the dark gray ones are curled into spheres while the mottled brown one is running and has slightly flared edges on its carapace.

The fourth one is actually capable of conglobation, it just prefers to run instead. I hope that I managed to get multiples of each type. I know I got a bunch of the dark gray ones, but I'm not sure about the lighter brown kind that runs.

I used the small spatula to scrape back the leaf litter, then used the cardboard funnel to dump all the microfauna more-or-less toward that back area. Some landed on the moss. Here you can see the two earthworms and one of the dark gray pillbugs.

Then I put the leaf litter back where it was. You can still see one of the earthworms trying to burrow through the central moss.

If you look toward the right where the leaf litter meets the moss, you can see that one pillbug running around the edge.

This is the terrarium with microfauna in place, and indeed, you can see one running around the front.

These are from another experiment I started yesterday:

This is the cup of sphagnum moss that I'm trying to culture. Starting with a bag of dried sphagnum moss, I wet it and wrung it out until damp, then put it in a cup.