a little range map of A. gestoi, a species of isopod, that has a very narrow range in Italy but is popular in the pet trade. I made this for a friend who was creating the gestroi Wikipedia page and found accurate information about it. Process & ramblings under the cut.
I used MaxEnt, an opensource software from the American Museum of Natural History that uses occurrence point data of a particular species with raster data that covers various environmental factors.
GBIF occurrence point data was used. Some points that did not coincide with formal literature about this species' observed distribution and what seemed most probable on websites like iNaturalist were omitted from MaxEnt's calculations (i.e. an escaped specimen in the UK would be considered an outlier and not be counted).
The environmental raster layers used were gathered from WorldClim, in particular 30 second (~1km^2) and bioclimatic and elevational raster sets were used. In the future if I do something like this again, I'd like to try to find soil type rasters (that are that same dimensions) since isopods can be very particular about their substrates– in the case of A. gestroi they appear to be partial to limestone if I'm remembering correctly.
The map that MaxEnt farted out (the extremely colorful one that has a portion of Liguria) doesn't tell me exactly where I'm going to find these isopods, just what areas are most suitable based on the information I inputted. White dots are occurrence points.
Again, if I were to do this again in the future, I would like to find raster data of soil types. While working on this, my friend brought to my attention that there's very little information about this isopod that was accurate (with some popular sources claiming the species was from France?) Most of the information came from the pet trade itself.
Mostly, it just made me sad that this beloved little animal was woefully misunderstood by so many of the people who love it. Not to preach, but I couldn't help but think of, and I'm sure many are aware, of the history of taking plants and animals to keep inside our homes being fraught with the echoes of colonialism. Orchids, philodendrons, succulents, rubber-ducky isopods (which are one of the large factors of the isopod pet trade's boom, but are not even formally described as of writing this). Poaching and loving seem to go hand-in-hand in the trade of decorating our homes with plants and animals.
I don't know what the point to this last bit is. I like making maps, I had fun making this map, and I liked learning about this isopod with my friends, and the world continues to suffer at the hands of colonialism's continued cruelty and exploitation. Even for little isopods.
