potential to harm'
Adventures in Fine Dining
Your August article about pill bugs ["How Now, Sow Bug?"] was a pleasant surprise for me and, I suppose, for many of my isopodologist colleagues. I would like to add some information on the uses of these special animals. While doing the field work for my Ph.D., I learned from an old woman from the Aegean island of Seriphos that in older times they used to make a powder from the rather big and massive Mediterranean species Armadillidum officianalis. This was eaten to cure stomachaches (I assume due to the high calcium concentration of its cuticula). Also, Chater (Isopoda, 2: 21Ð39, 1988: "Woodlice in the Cultural Consciousness of Modern Europe") cites a reference from Larousse Gastronomique on a sauce made from wood lice ("sauce de cloportes"), and he refers to the monograph "Oniscographia Curiosa" by Philip Fraundorffer (1700), which reviews the known uses of wood lice in medicine and elsewhere. Finally, it should be mentioned that the painter Paul Klee has devoted two pictures to these animals, Assel and Assel im Gehege (Assel is the German and Dutch word for wood louse).
A minor correction: The respiratory system of most species does not really involve a modified gill, "supplemented . . . with a tube system for breathing in air." Some of the pleopods (appendages of the pleon, or "belly") are either used as respiratory surfaces per se, or are modified to serve as a unique kind of lung that is hollow and functions in a way quite different than the tube system (tracheae) of insects.
