it-lives-in-between

An interest in collecting and rearing small organisms is truly the real-life Pokemon experience. There’s literally just one stretch of sidewalk I always know is the hotspot for tiny garden snails when it is over 40f and damp outside. There’s just one lake where every few scoops of sunken, rotten leaves yields like 100 pond snails but just one snail-eating leech. The lake has too many fish and birds for me to find a lot of tiny, swimming crustaceans but a loosely connected grassy pond a ways down is teeming with seed shrimp in the summer, daphnia in the fall, and copepods in the winter. On only the brief window of both wet and hot weather each year I can find carnivorous subterranean slugs but they are most abundant, for some reason, at one particular apartment complex I discovered back when I was doing food deliveries. 30 minutes into the mountains is a vernal pool, what most people would just call a “rain puddle” in what’s almost just a parking lot, but there’s no easier place for me to find caddisfly larva and another kind of seed shrimp.

Alright, teach me your ways. Been following you for years, I might as well go all in at this point. So advise me on where to begin my descent into caring for and fostering the lovely creepy crawlies.

The easiest things to keep are always going to be detrivores! If you find it in dead leaves, rotten wood or mud chances are it’s a scavenger that can subsist on those same materials. Many small slugs, millipedes and isopods for instance will live for generations in any container of soil, leaves and wood that remains moist, so the most important thing is to not have such a ventilated lid that it dries out! People tend to overestimate how much air tiny creatures need; even rubber Tupperware with pinholes in the lid can be enough to keep an isopods colony going for years with no new food materials added!

Even just in taking a jar of water from a ditch you can find aquatic snails, diving beetles, true bugs crustaceans, nematodes and other worms..honestly there is SOO MUCH!!! And they're really easy to keep. I keep mine in a cool area with moderate sun and sometimes feed them lettuce.

lettin one walk on you is so brave but I bet it feels silly

@onenicebugperday I need more information…

I thought is was a vole or a shrew at first

this baby Blue Heron killed the dinosaurs.

I still don’t know that this is.....

I want to kiss bugs but they're so small 😭