Mary Jo DiLonardo has worked in print, online, and broadcast journalism for 25 years and covers nature, health, science, and animals. The roly-poly, or pill bug, is a terrestrial crustacean that looks ...

We all run across the pill bug in our gardens. At the first sign of danger, the tiny paranoid crustacean suddenly turns into a ball — in hopes danger will have passed when he unrolls. That roly-poly ...

ORLANDO, Fla. — When sex chromosomes among common pill bugs go bad from disuse, borrowed bacterial DNA comes to the rescue. Certain pill bugs grow up female because of sex chromosomes cobbled together ...

A couple of years ago, my wife and I had a garden built in our back yard. It runs along our fence and is approximately 84 feet long and 8 feet deep with a fruit tree at each end. We had great success ...

Hungry pill bugs were placed in a petri dish containing liverworts with no or over-generated oil bodies, and compared their herbivory. The liverworts without the oil body were eaten by pill bugs, but ...

A research paper titled Biological Organisms as End Effectors explores the oddball approach of giving small animals jobs as grippers at the end of a robotic arm. Researchers show that pill bugs and ...