Pulling a boat line out of the 79th Street Boat basin on the Hudson River recently resulted in a pier squiggling with isopods. They had clearly found the rope, submerged since the spring, to their liking.
Isopoda are an order of crustaceans. Most are aquatic, but you may be more familiar with the terrestrial type, the woodlice (pillbug and roly-polies).
So there are over 10,000 species of isopods known. Shout out if you know any these…
My recent introduction to isopods has been in the hermit crab pet communities – apparently people keep them in hermit crab tanks to help clean. They’re the only living being that the communities recommend co-housing with the crabs. (We recently got a rescue hermit crab and then took two more of our friend’s crabs and I’ve learned a lot about captive land crabs from the Caribbean in that time!)
People sell isopods in all sorts of varieties on those hermit crab pet forums.
Thanks for this information!