Why everyone’s talking about... Woodlice

GARDENERS across the country are complaining that their strawberry crops are being ruined by granny grunters. Granny grunters? Yes – one of more than 250 colloquial names for woodlice, which have a bad reputation for munching soft fruit. Indeed, they have more aliases than the American rapper Puff Daddy.

A survey last week by researchers at the University of Edinburgh identified a list of regional names for the beasts that sound more like hipster craft beer brands: chuggyslices, hoggeldeydogs, cheesy bobs, Billy Buttons, doddamees, flumps, pishamares and gramfer-griggle…

Why so many silly names?

Linguistics l ecturer Warren Maguire says: ‘ No other life form seems to have anything like that many regional names.’ He s uggests i t may be because c hi l dren f i nd these creepy-crawlies fascinating and invent names for them. Some refer to the creatures’ ability to curl into a ball ( eg ‘monkey pea’) and others to their smell (‘chiggypig’). The odour comes because they don’t urinate, but expel waste through their shell as ammonia vapour.

Any other bizarre biological party tricks?

Females have two genital openings, one each side of the body, yet some species can reproduce without males. They have 14 legs, and of the 50 or so types found in Britain, some have two pairs of lungs, some seven and some none. All quirks from 160 million years of evolution.

They l ook l i ke i nsects but resemble mini armadillos with their ‘armour’ (an exoskeleton made up of segments or ‘plates’). They are crustaceans – related to crabs and lobsters.

Are they any use to humans?

Their voracious appetite helps make compost. Celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley- Whittingstall once made woodlouse fritters on his TV show A Cook On The Wild Side, and they have been used in quack medicine: live woodlice in a bag tied round the neck were said to cure smallpox, and it was thought that 300 of the critters stirred, alive, into 12 pints of mild ale together with raisins, rhubarb and fern roots would cure rickets. Spoiler alert: neither of these works.