IHEARTBUGS Community

Trouble finding your clean-up crew?

It can be tough to find your "bugs" when you initially add them to your enclosure. Isopods are more active at night, so that along with the colony still being small makes it difficult to check on them. Here are a few tips to help you find them.

The easiest is to add natural elements like botanical seed pods to the enclosure. Isopods and springtails love them. They will colonize the seed pod due to the rich food source it provides and the protective hiding area the seed pod provides, and all you have to do is pick up the seed pod and flip it over. You will see your bugs hanging out. It doesn't matter what botanicals, they love them all. You can collect acorn caps, sweetgum balls, or magnolia pods in your area, or you can purchase seed pods online or sometimes you can find them at your local pet store. Just make sure they are collected from a pesticide-free area. All of our botanicals are pesticide-free, and we use them in our dart frog vivariums, isopod bins, and springtail cultures.

Another way to check for the clean-up crew is to put a very small (dime-size or smaller) piece of zucchini or squash in the enclosure, or a piece of dried protein such as a dried minnow, dried mealworm, a fish food flake, etc. in the enclosure. Those items will usually draw the bugs to the area of the food.