What should you do with woodlice?

[pancreas]

Found a few. Threw some outside and then found another and threw it in the bin, because I couldn't be bothered to keep going outside. I then wondered if the woodlouse might actually like it in the bin. There is no way it can know that the bin contains my leavings. I shouldn't be worried that it doesn't wish to be seen as leavings—as if cognisance of something like that might impair its social position. Besides, it's saprophytic, isn't it? So it might have quite a full and happy life, eating the jerusalem artichoke skins in the short-to-medium term, and hoping that it doesn't get mashed by something in the longer term. Sex would be a problem. I could hunt down some more from the back and throw those in the bin too, I suppose. I can't fish the one in the bin out, now, it'll be all stuck in the middle of load of chicken bones.

It's not reasonable to live with them, so they have to go somewhere. What should I have done?

BTW they have 14 legs and are crustacea.

[Twit 2]

This is the ravings of a lunatic.

[Twit 2]

Just checked if there are any woodlouse emojis and there really aren't - gap in the market there.

Anyway, what you've done is perfectly above board. The woodlice can't feel anything, except pain...and love.

[earl_sleek]

Fry them up with some artisanal rice and cum

[Cerys]

Woodlice are beautiful little critters who deserve our love and respect.

[Glebe]

Woodlice are beautiful little critters who deserve our love and respect.

'Cerys is David Cronenberg' shocker!

[Dewt]

Don't call them roly poly bugs

[Cerys]

'Cerys is David Cronenberg' shocker!

As if you didn't already know.

[poo]

Stick em up yer bollox

[Voltan (Man of Steel)]

Hopefully, now it's been provided with a safe environment with plenty of food, it'll grow to maturity as so few do in the wild.

[steve98]

Fry them up with some artisanal rice and cum

I tried that (without the rice and cum), and they weren't at all nice: very woody (you won't be surprised to learn), like chewing the end of a pencil. You couldn't live on them.

[ZoyzaSorris]

A substitute for potted shrimp at a pinch

[Buelligan]

One should leave woodlice or slaters to their own mysterious ways.  They harm no one, they just clean up crap and keep the planet ticking over whilst being beautiful. 

[idunnosomename]

Cat bin lady from 2010 has let herself go

[ZoyzaSorris]

My appreciation for woodlice increased from an already substantial baseline once I attended a woodlouse, centipede and millipede identification workshop at the natural history museum and started being a bit more of a connoisseur of the different species.

Out of the five common ones (there are another forty in the uk that you are unlikely to see in house and garden) you have the common shiny and common rough woodlouse that make up your big two standard woodlice, with the rough woodlouse being the plain grey one that you are most likely to see in houses because it can handle lower humidity, your shiny woodlouse is the more obviously patterned one you'll often see pressing itself flat against the bottom of logs and stones to try and preserve moisture in dry weather.

Then you've got the charismatic striped or running woodlouse, the more streamlined agile little guys you'll often see at night climbing all over your plants.

And the truly adorable little bright pink pygmy woodlouse that you may well find in rotting wood and vegetation or in the mud under stones. Actually the most abundant woodlouse in the uk but often overlooked.

Last but certainly not least of course you have the pill bug or pill woodlouse, the one that can roll itself into a little ball like a nano armadillo (and not to be confused with the pill millipede which is unsurprisingly a millipede). I don't see as many of those these days as I used to in my youth but I think that's because they prefer the chalky souls of my original homeland.

Edit I meant chalky souls but chalky souls works too. Insubstantial and easily erased.

[Twit 2]

Baby birds are called bees.

[idunnosomename]

Dave likes to eat the cheeselogs

[earl_sleek]

They're alright, woodlice. Hard workers. corse you wouldn't want yer daughter to marry one.

[Camp Tramp]

I will set myself up as the god of Woodlice. They will worship me.

Incidentally, I've been told they taste like Prawns.

[Sebastian Cobb]

[tag]UB40's lesser-known b-sides[/tag]

[Emotional Support Peacock]

fricassée

[shiftwork2]

my leavings

Nicking this.

[Jittlebags]

Woodlouse sauce for fish.

http://www.foodreference.com/html/woodlousesaucer.html

[Gregory Torso]

Cannot believe you threw a woodlice in the bin. I'm reporting you to childline.

[Poobum]

Woodlice live for up around 2 years, you can't just treat them like ephemeral vermin, they deserve respectful consideration.

[Huxleys Babkins]

Woodlice are great little guys to find scuttling about until you realise their diet is rotten wood and that your floorboards are probably therefore fucked and, oh Christ, don't let it have got to the joists.

[Inspector Norse]

Pick 'em, lick 'em, roll 'em, flick 'em

[Blue Jam]

Woodlice are basically land prawns, fry them in a bit of garlic butter.

Come on, in these unprecedented uncertain times you can't be turning down free food like this.

[Gregory Torso]

I meant to post this in the thread before, because it's the first thing that came to mind when I read the title, but I got sidetracked by Eddie Large's death and someone driving a fucking 1970s cop car around with a speaker mounted on the roof of it playing "you'll never walk alone" at maximum volume right outside my house, so here it is.

Many years ago, I lived in a very seedy part of Lincoln, in one of a few converted rooms under the old racecourse grandstand - it's a mosque now, by the way, and probably much nicer inside. My room was dingy and damp and in terrible disrepair and there were woodlice absolutely everywhere.

One particular wall - the bit of wall I usually looked at because I didn't have a TV - was full of holes which provided a modicum of geometrical interest, as things that have been naturally made usually do. I would frequently see woodlice going in and out of those holes, conducting their secretive business, passing notes, a regular woodlouse samizdat that they thought I was too stupid to be aware of.

Then one night, sitting on my sofa, miserable and underfed, I realised I had had enough of this woodlice. One of them came out of a hole, circled all around the mottled warren of doorways, paused, looked at me as if to say "how you like me now" and clicking its fingers in a sassy gesture before retreating back into the same hole it had come out of. Time-wasting cunt!

I immediately went and fetched a balloon pump - one of those cheap plastic ones - and filled it with bleach. I then stood before the illegal colony of wall lobsters and peered into the largest opening. Perhaps I imagined it, in my starvation and murder lust, but I thought I could see hundreds of writhing, carapaced bodies in the darkness, all moving together in sinful abandon. What did they think they were doing?

As I pumped bleach into every single cleft and ingress of the plaster, woodlouse carcasses began to spill out, surfing on a white-blue tide of caustic death. A small, sticky hillock of what must have been nearly a thousand murdered woodlice rose from the floor. I swept it all into a bin bag, where filth like that belongs and went back to my box wine and sofa, the heady smell of bleach permeating everything and bringing a pleasant dizziness to my agitated mind.

Two weeks later, that whole section of plaster fell away. The bleach and the louse tunnels - and the general decay of the whole place - had proved too much.

But what did I see then, with the shroud pulled back, with the lid lifted, where the woodlice had been, in tiny mildew-and-lichen stitched words?

"we love you dad   x x x    w.l. (wood lice)".

And that's why I now never kill woodlice.

[idunnosomename]

Beautiful.