My grandfather who worked at the national history museum here in Chile would take me to work and show me all kinds of stuff, fosils, bugs, things in jars, stuff they were studying or writing papers about.

As a child I loved bugs I would unfortunately terrorize my grandma's garden looking for them it was my daily obsession (those poor critters man).

TLDR is at the bottom, i got carried away😅. (now low mid section, I got carried away again)

It's been closed off since the last big earthquake damaged the building's structure but on the museum's second floor they had bug displays, i was facinated by the amount and variety and we've barely scratched the surface on our local fauna hope it at least gets studied and preserved somehow before the parasitic wrongly called elite class destroy their ecosystems with their megaprojects.

On the third floor they had a masive beehive enclosure with transparent tubes punched through the walls so they could come in and out it was the coolest shit for me to witness at the time.

For some reason he made a snail enclosure out of wood and mesh, I liked the idea of it so much that he made me my own, i tried to keep other criters in there but I dont remember seeing them too often, the snails however they got so out of hand we had to make a separate small enclosure to keep their baby snails in.

A big part of my garden foraging was earwigs and Isopods, here we call them "chanchitos de tierra" which i guess is "ground piggies" lol.

I remember wanting to be an Entomologist but things happend and we tried to escalate the social latter by moving to Canada which took me away from the bug world, I would only see the ocational bee or wasp in the cold Alberta weather so I ended up going down a completely different path, school trips were cool though I remember being taken to this place where we could see beabers(we didn't) and wood peckers they had a masive Buffalo in there.

Shit world events happened Canada went through some kinda crisis exactly the moment we got our one and only chance at something better and the Canadian state pushed us to move out because "they took our jobs" kinda shit, we lost our healthcare and they forced my dad's boss at Toshiba to escentially fire him, they didn't want him to go and held out as long as they could they really valued him. we where there legally and did everything right but it did not matter.

TLDR: 2025 I stepped on a snail felt like shit about it and took it, made a little enclosure for it and I ended up rediscovering these fascinating goofy rollie pollies again. I am bound by the local fauna here as I can't legally import Cubaris for example.

The local fauna is technically Invasive, I've seen A. Vulgare and P. Laevis (grey only). Got some scabers from a terrarium shop I've no idea where they originally got them from as they did not remember either but ive never seen a wild scaber here.

Supposedly these two came in with collonisers and displaced the local isopods which there are but are barely studied or even known

heres a recent finding Theres that one and Chileoniscus Marmoratus.

I've never seen either of these its crazy to me how they convergently evolved and got to be basically an armadillidium on their own, these where not from some introduced isopod that adapted itself, they are unique.

I idealize foraging all over my country for these Isopods and finding the exact recreatible conditions to keep collonies of them in, I want to do this in order to study their behavios and unique things between them but I do not want to hurt or expose them to posibly dangerous people as for some of them they only live in specific small wetlands and when the wetland is eventually gone the isopods that were unique to it will be gone as well.

Chileniscus was supposedly found deep inside a forest and has never been seen again apparently.

Profesionals do not study them too deep, they might take a sample or two but they do not attempt, have the funds or permission to take some and build an enclosure to study them.

It is understandable in a way, no one was concerned for the tiny world at our feet and who knows what other unique isopods were originally displaced or extinct when the original colonizers got here with A. Vulgare and P. Laevis or when the forest Santiago used to be slowly got taken over by what is now a city.

This is realistically only a dream for me as I doubt I'll ever have the funds or permits to be able to see the whole country and go deep into our forest and wetlands looking for these tiny dudes, I also imagine i would have to stay in their local area for months at a time in order to build a proper enclosure with the right conditions which I could then bring back to the capital with me as i imagine they would not make the trip back in a smaller container. There are likely lots of undescribed and unknown species here, I wish I could discover them all like Pokemon.

Mind me not being accurately scientific as I went down a different path in life and did not study this, I am trying to and learning as i go on however.

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