# Anyone else having trouble with isopods eating live plants and orchids?



## Bfrog

I have very active microfauna in my vivariums, lots of different springtails and some temperate isopods. The woodlice are eating my live plants and orchids. I thought they only ate dead plants. There's plenty of leaf litter and dead wood and sticks to eat, I'm not sure why they're eating the live plants instead. Anyone else have this problem? I probably just let the microfauna get too established before adding frogs.

Thanks for any thoughts or solutions.


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## Ed

For the isopods to be interested in the leaf litter, it has to have begun to decay.... until that happens they are going to go after other food sources. As one example see 

Rushton, Stephen P., and Mark Hassall. "Food and feeding rates of the terrestrial isopod Armadillidium vulgare (Latreille)." Oecologia 57.3 (1983): 415-419.

You need to feed them something else or resign yourself to their predation on your plants until the leaf litter becomes more acceptable to them. 

As a side note, if you collected the isopods yourself, you shouldn't add freshly caught isopods to the enclosures as they can carry viruses which (note the qualifier) *may * be able to jump hosts (Iridoviridae). 

see Weinmann, Nadine, et al. "Experimental infection of crickets (Gryllus bimaculatus) with an invertebrate iridovirus isolated from a high-casqued chameleon (Chamaeleo hoehnelii)." Journal of veterinary diagnostic investigation 19.6 (2007): 674-679.

Just, F., et al. "Occurrence of an Invertebrate Iridescent‐Like Virus (Iridoviridae) in Reptiles." Zoonoses and Public Health 48.9 (2001): 685-694.

Papp, Tibor, Dirk Spann, and Rachel E. Marschang. "Development and use of a real-time polymerase chain reaction for the detection of group II invertebrate iridoviruses in pet lizards and prey insects." Journal of Zoo and Wildlife Medicine 45.2 (2014): 219-227.

The best practice is to culture the isopods and using the offspring once you are relatively free of viral infection.. 

some comments 

Ed


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## cam1941

This is definitely a problem I have had to deal with as well. Luckily in my set up they have been eating my oak leaf creeping fig which by the time this started happening was well established. They are doing me a favor by trimming it for me 

There's not much you can do but provide them with a more enjoyable food source while removing as many isopods as you can. I just keep a thick slice of sweet potato in there, which seems to keep them happy. If your lucky the potato will sprout which keeps it from going bad so that they can completely finish it before it rots.

Also, I have created a new culture that I put them in after trapping them inside the set up. I just check the cocohut inside there once a week. I take out the hut and shake it into the culture. There are usually 15 huge ones hanging out in there (I have giant canyons).

Hope this helps and its def an under reported problem which may be dependent on the species kept? Not sure...


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## boabab95

Not sure what leaf litter you're using, but I tend to put leaves that decompose faster when first setting up tanks to feed the microfauna sooner. Sometimes I'll add fish flakes, though I usually skip it. Small bites in the plants makes it look more natural anyways 



Ed said:


> The best practice is to culture the isopods and using the offspring once you are relatively free of viral infection..
> 
> some comments
> 
> Ed


Is there really any way of knowing this without testing the isopods? Wouldn't the offspring become infected from living in (relatively) close quarters to the WC parents?


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## Bfrog

These are cultured isopods from cultures I started, but I had the wild parents in one container and started a new culture from the offspring and I added them to the vivariums months later (I cultured them with ABG soil and magnolia leaves). I had no idea about the virus though... that's very interesting and good to know regardless. Thanks!

I think the problem is definitely what you stated, Ed. I seeded the soil when I set up the vivariums, not allowing for enough decomposition before adding the isopods. So when the leaves were finally decomposing, it didn't matter because the decomposition must have not kept up.

Next step, I'll give them something else to eat. Thanks for the help!

Boyd


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## Pumilo

Once upon a time I grew a bug or two. 
The species definitely makes a difference. Giant oranges will definitely torn on your live plants when hungry. In my own experience, and others have reported this to me, too, giant oranges often take a liking to one particular type of plant. I had several vivs in which they loved jewel orchids. Wouldn't you know it, they like the slowest growing plant in the viv. They couldn't turn on the Selaginella, or a fast growing vine. It's got to be the jewel orchids. 
Bite marks looking natural...yeah, that's not always what happens. If they decide the slower growing plants are tasty, they eat that sucker to the ground and beyond! 
Giant oranges in thumbnail tanks got to be problematic for me. The adults are too big to eat, so the population eventually goes a bit crazy. I had to start taking measures to eradicate the giant oranges in most of my vivs, as all I kept were thumbnails and pumilio.

I never had a problem with dwarf whites, dwarf purples, or dwarf grays.

There are newer ones in the hobby I can't comment on.


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## Ed

Bfrog said:


> I think the problem is definitely what you stated, Ed. I seeded the soil when I set up the vivariums, not allowing for enough decomposition before adding the isopods. So when the leaves were finally decomposing, it didn't matter because the decomposition must have not kept up.


Do you have a source of calcium in there for the isopods? If there is a shortage of calcium that may also be encouraging them to go after the plants. 

some comments 

Ed


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## Ed

I should also add that the leaves of some of the preferred leaves to use in the enclosures tend to be low in calcium and that is before they are boiled, steamed or otherwise processed to "make them safe" as those methods breakdown the cells of the leaves which can allow for faster leaching of minerals. As a result, it is possible that the isopods are also calcium starved. 

see for example Chandler Jr, Robert F. "amount and mineral nutrient content of freshly fallen leaf litter in the hardwood forests of central New York." Journal of the American Society of Agronomy (1941).

some comments 

Ed


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## thenatureterrarium

I know slugs and snails will eat your plants but I didn't know isopods would however I have always used dwarf grey isopods. Maybe it depends on the species of isopod.


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## Woodswalker

Ed said:


> The best practice is to culture the isopods and using the offspring once you are relatively free of viral infection..
> 
> Ed


What method is used to determine when isopods are free of viral infection? Is there a similar test for chytrid in isopods? 

So far, I've not seen or read anything about isopods carrying chytrid, but I seem to recall reading that there's a crayfish species thought to be an asymptomatic reservoir host in regions where dart frogs are native. Being crustaceans, I'm wondering about the possibility of isopods also presenting that problem. That's the only reason I ask the second question.

The first question I ask because I'm always wondering about where all the isopods in the hobby originate, and what has been done to keep them from being vectors of disease.


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## Ed

Woodswalker said:


> What method is used to determine when isopods are free of viral infection? Is there a similar test for chytrid in isopods?


You could send some out for analysis but iridoviruses tend to cause a color change of the isopods. Bd and BS (the amphibian chytrids) are not known to infect arthropods with the exception that Bd can live in the digestive tract of crayfish. 
see Brannelly, Laura A., et al. "Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis in natural and farmed Louisiana crayfish populations: prevalence and implications." Diseases of aquatic organisms 112.3 (2015): 229-235.

Inter Research » DAO » v112 » n3 » p229-235

McMahon, Taegan A., et al. "Chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis has nonamphibian hosts and releases chemicals that cause pathology in the absence of infection." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110.1 (2013): 210-215.



Woodswalker said:


> The first question I ask because I'm always wondering about where all the isopods in the hobby originate, and what has been done to keep them from being vectors of disease.


Originally they were wild collected and then cultured in captivity and disseminated to other hobbyists. There is actually an active isopod hobby group where people cultivate them in and of themselves (check out facebook) and those people are aware of the risk of iridovirus infections wiping out their cultures. Now it isn't that uncommon for people in the "bioactive" (I want to add a negative comment here but am at a minor loss for words) to go out and collect them and chuck them into their enclosures. 

some comments 

Ed


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## Woodswalker

Everything in the hobby was collected from the wild at some point. I suppose a better phrasing might be to simply state that it's difficult to tell how long any particular line has been in cultivation, and where the original individuals of each line were collected. That makes me hesitant about them when I think too much about it. 

To where might one send some for analysis?


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## JoeKitz

Would Giant Orange be ok with Azureus, Tinc, and Leucs, or is it pushing it too far for my plants?


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## Andrew Lee

The giant orange isopods should be able to establish a stable population, seeing as that most tincs will prefer the babies over the adults. Can't say anything for leucs though. As for the plants, just give them a constant source of food and calcium(as Ed stated, calcium deficiency could drive their plant consumption) and I don't think them eating plants should be a really big issue. I hear they usually eat live plants as a more last-resort type thing.


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