In article , "observer"
wrote:

I have seen those sowbugs eat fresh plants many times.I have heard it is
their last ditch effort to get something to eat.They would rather eat
decompsed material.Also some wood ashes sprinkled around the plants may keep
them away.

That's exactly it. If a garden (or greenhouse) is unusually tidy wood
louses & pillbugs have no choice but to resort to living plant material in
their diet, though their little digestive systems can digest mainly only
decomposing matter. Also in gardens seriously imblanced (usually from
non-organic practices & especially the use of pesticides) the garden will
loose its healthy balance of predator-insects, scavenger-insects, & those
which actually do attack healthy plants as their primary mission. Wood
louses are almost impervious to insecticides (since they're not insects) &
when they discover themselves to be practically the only little things
left alive, they begin to expand their population like mad, & when running
short of their preferred decaying matter as food, begin to fill other
ecological niches that were vacated by vanished insects. At that point
they become quite harmful especially to seedlings; then gardeners respond
with even more insecticides & make things even worse.

If anyone begins to notice their garden is seriously overpopulated with
wood louses & centipedes, but damned few actual insects, the landscape is
probably toxic from the plethora of unwholesome chemicals sold for garden
uses. Sometimes it isn't the gardener's fault; there are landscapes
toxified by industrial activity even if the industry that did it closed
shop 20 years ago (there's a suburban area of Tacoma, quite near their
zoo, where the soils are uniformly so toxic that the government recommends
dusting children off before letting ones kids back in the house, as if
that ever happens, & veggies cannot be grown there for eating --
woodlouses & centipedes & the occasional ground spider is about all one
finds under boards & rocks), or there are small properties that cannot
escape the over-use of pesticides & other chemicals by all the surrounding
neighbors.

As a general principle, when wood louses become harmful, it means
something larger is wrong in the garden that has resulted in behavior
unnatural for wood louses.

I don't know if the wood ash method works, but it might. Woodlouses have
gills & anything that intefers with their gills kills them, which is
foremost a lack of moisture. I've used them to feed vivarium animals, &
discovered that woodlouses can live for days in an aquarium completely
submerged, crawling around on the surface of aquarium gravel as though
they were themselves aquatic critters. Yet they don't last long in a
desert terrarium unless they can find & squeeze into a damp spot.

-paghat the ratgirl

"samuel l crowe" wrote in message
...
Just came in from the flower garden (9:30pm) where I was checking on my
Hostas. The pill bugs (rollie pollys) are eating them. Some folks say pill
bugs don't eat alive plants, but they do!!!!

There was at least 50 on one leaf, shoulder to shoulder mulching away. All
18 hostas are being eaten. I sprayed them with neem oil, hope it works.

--
Sam
Along the Grand Strand of Myrtle Beach SC



--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com/