The wood louse (Porcellio scaber) is a slate-grey to yellow-grey, flat crustacean. The adults are about 15 mm long. They can only survive in high humidity, because they breathe through specialised dry gills. Wood lice have a very individual method of breeding. The females carry the fertilised eggs and eventually the freshly hatched young lice with them, in a breeding area on their stomach which is filled with fluid. The young insects are white at first, and then shed their skin several times. After about three months they are fully grown and will live for several years.

Wood lice cause very little damage, but they are often regarded as a nuisance. They mainly live on vegetables. In basements and living rooms they usually eat away only small areas of potatoes, other vegetables and fruit. In gardens they cause damage to seedlings and young plants. On the other hand in compost they are in fact useful. They have a similar function to earthworms.

Preventive measures and control

• Attract wood lice with halved bad potatoes and then take them outdoors
• Fill a clay flower pot with boiled potatoes and lean it against a wall
• When the wood lice have gone into the pot they are easy to take outside
• If there are a lot of wood lice at one point, you can sweep them up, and for example put them on a compost heap

The basic rules are:

• Keep rooms dry
• Clean rooms regularly and remove the wood lice, to avoid large-scale breeding
• Use insecticides (Crawling Insect Spray, Cockroach Bait Station)
• If all the recommended measures do not succeed in stopping the infestation, the reason may be that entry is possible through cracks in the foundations and outside walls