‘They are such neat, busy little folk’: the unexpected superpowers of the common woodlouse
The woodlouse hasn’t needed to make many design refinements over the years because it found such a useful niche from the start. Illustration: Petra Korlević/The GuardianView image in fullscreenThe woodlouse hasn’t needed to make many design refinements over the years because it found such a useful niche from the start. Photograph: Henk Wallays/AlamyThe common rough woodlouse, Porcellio scaber, is more widespread and found in South America and Australia too but it does not curl up in a ball.
- ▪The woodlouse hasn’t needed to make many design refinements over the years because it found such a useful niche from the start.
- ▪Illustration: Petra Korlević/The GuardianView image in fullscreenThe woodlouse hasn’t needed to make many design refinements over the years because it found such a useful niche from the start.
- ▪Photograph: Henk Wallays/AlamyThe common rough woodlouse, Porcellio scaber, is more widespread and found in South America and Australia too but it does not curl up in a ball.
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| Original publisher | The Guardian — Science |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/aug/03/common-woodlouse-invertebrate-of-the-year |
| Publication time | Mon, 03 Aug 2026 11:00:16 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-03T11:15:46.270Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-03T11:15:46.270Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | YWYskFc4PqKp · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
The woodlouse hasn’t needed to make many design refinements over the years because it found such a useful niche from the start. Illustration: Petra Korlević/The GuardianView image in fullscreenThe woodlouse hasn’t needed to make many design refinements over the years because it found such a useful niche from the start. Illustration: Petra Korlević/The GuardianInvertebrate of the year 2026Insects‘They are such neat, busy little folk’: the unexpected superpowers of the common woodlouseThis detritivore – known by a range of colourful names – tidies up our world and can withstand toxic pollution Revealed: the top 10 invertebrates of the year Patrick BarkhamMon 3 Aug 2026 07.00 EDTSharePrefer the Guardian on GoogleChucky pig. Slater. Monkey pea. Roly-poly. Boat-builder. Butchy boy. Cheeselog.
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