Very goofy yet carismatic crustaceans! They are a joy to watch scurry around doing their little crustacean things.

A natural variation of P. Scaber is calico - they will sometimes have orange/brownish and black spots all over their body. Someone then started selecting for clearer and more consistent spotting, and thus the lava morpho was born! which is what I have here.

In the months since I bought the small starter colony, their population exploded! They're insanely prolific and easy to care for.

Now that there's a lot of them they've gotten especially bold, and I see many of them out and about in any given time. They go wild when I feed them mealworms.

Pics coming soon!

I'd been dreaming of keeping a garden snail for a while - and then the gods of fresh produce (read: local greengrocers) graced me with a lettuce with a free embedded snail inside! Snails are hardy creatures, and :she didn't seem too bothered from having spent a few days in the fridge - so of course I had to adopt her.

I noticed her coloration was different to what I'm used to. That's because she's no common garden snail, she's a green garden snail!

The common garden snail is also called Cornu aspersum. This little girlie here, instead, is a Cantareus apertus. This is where she is on the big tree of life - as you can see, the two are more like cousins rather than siblings, which is pretty fascinating.

They owe their genus name Cantareus by the fact that they are... singers! It roughly means "singer" in latin don't @ me if you studied latin, I will never remember my declinations. This is because they :make a very unique sound when bothered! I've been caught completely off guard by that.

She's lovely: curious, inquisitive, bold, goofy. I just wish I'd researched more about her species before falling in love with her: apparently we share the common trait of being serial sleepygirls. Cantareus apertus seem to sleep for most of the year! She's now :aestivating buried deep in the soil of the tank I finally finished setting up for her. I miss her, but hope to see her back in the fall!

2025 Edit: Sadly, in late summer I discovered she didn't survive aestivation. It's hard to guess why: maybe she didn't have enough time to prepare her reserves for the summer, or maybe her health wasn't good in the first place. I'm leaving her section up, because she was adorable and a fun type of snail. I hope I was able to treat her right in the couple of months I adopted her for.

Non-so-fun-fact: dead snails SMELL!

I found these two tiny creatures while hunting for woodlice in my potted plants. I thought they were babies, but a kind discord user identified them as a Ferrusacia species. These little things are quite common in mediterranean countries, and they stay as small as a fingernail!
There's not much info out there about them - all I can say is that they're fast and cunning escape artists!

2025 update: these fellas are TINY, are diggers, and are hardly seen around. I was glad to still spot at least one in late 2024! It seemed to be doing just fine.

Bonus: I also found an equally tiny slug in their enclosure! It's an elusive creature that is usually mimetized in the moss, so I didn't notice it at first. No idea what species it might be!