Slaters (also known as woodlice)

First published in Column 8 on the 11^th March 1992

To avoid the atrophy of the brain as I grow older, I continue to ask questions. Thus I often puzzle as to why slaters climb walls, especially in the morning.

Some gardeners may not think the peculiarities of slaters are worth considering. However, to me the slater is a much-maligned creature, worthy of more attention than it usually receives.

I’ve always had a lot of time for the slater, although I know many gardeners regard them as a pest. I think this view is wrong. (Is it true that the Chinese intended eradicating slaters next?) Slaters are humble creatures, never making a show of themselves.

You will not find them, like spiders, insisting on putting their webs across doorways to catch your hair first thing in the morning. You won’t find them going crazy in the rain like worms and spreadeagling across pathways. Slaters prefer anonymity and humbly hide themselves under the nearest something, be it wood, rock, or even weed.

Perhaps their treatment as pests gives a partial answer to my question: Maybe slaters are being driven up the wall? Condemned to live in rotting wood, or compost, they may have little self-esteem.

How would you feel in their shoes, reader, supposing they wore any? Since they don’t, they must courageously clamber barefoot through your compost. A slater never knows when some burly black beetle will tread on his toes, or when he’ll slip in the slime left by a slug, or find the earth move under his feet as a worm power-drives his way past.

And think of the things slater’s feet get into – rotting apples, mouldy carrots, the unspeakable remains of things that have already passed onto a better compost pile.

My dictionary barely defines them under ‘slater’ – that word belongs officially to a person who puts slates on roofs. Slaters appear as an afterthought – ‘another name for the woodlouse.’

No wonder they’ve changed their name by deed poll. When you check out the woodlouse, the description is of any of the various small terrestrial isopod crustaceans having a flattened segmented body and occurring in damp habitats. (I thought dictionaries were supposed to explain words.) A crustacean is of the mainly aquatic class Crustacea, which includes the tortoise, lobster and water flea.

In spite of being related to magnificent creations like the tortoise and lobster the slaters’ family escutcheon doesn’t do them any good.

So why should slaters be the namesake of a man who puts slates on a roof? Is it their colour, or the design of their shells?

Perhaps some primitive and imaginative entrepreneur once considered slaters might have an ant-like potential for working together: he envisaged thousands of trained slaters lifting slates straight up the walls of the house. Perhaps slaters now climb walls because of some deep instinctive memory of what might have been. On the other hand, maybe they’re merely checking to see if the slates have been put on right.

I’m glad slaters are small. Knowing that they’re related to lobsters might inspire people with peculiar palates – the sort who delight in dropping lobsters into boiling hot water and seeing them sizzle - to attempt to fatten them up. If people can eat frogs’ legs, a hardly sizeable delicacy, why should they stop at slaters?

Meanwhile, I ponder on slaters’ penchant for heights, and marvel that any creature could drop the equivalent of a 50-storey fall (as the slaters sometimes do when I’m trying to redirect them) and survive.

 

A slater (Armadillidium vulgare)
courtesy Franco Folini, Wikimedia Commons 

Armadillidium vulgare. Hmm, the first part of their scientific name is impressive, although speaking it out loud, with its 'dillidium' in the middle is a bit like a children's nursery word. But 'vulgare' - how rude. There's nothing vulgar about the slater/woodlouse. Plainly those who named him had no real sense of his excellent purpose in the world.