Excuse my French, but I was wondering if anyone could help me to identify some droppings (i.e. shit) I found in my apartment.
Basically it looks like small grains (size like a grain of salt), black and grey in color which were all concentrated in one area - perhaps 20-30 pieces.
Upon touching they crumbled and turned into dust, so I assume these are excrements from some insect (or rodent?).
Cleaned it up on Saturday and so far there aren’t any new ones.
Does anyone know what it is / where it comes from? Cockroaches or … ?
My wife is fanatical about floor cleaning and she claims to see cockroach shit from time to time, so that may be waht you found. I’ve discovered what I believe is mouse shit occasionally, but that’s closer to the size of a rice grain.
The culprit is the tropical house gecko. Although mice and gecko droppings are similar, the former have a little white sediment on the tip. WHen I first arrived here I thought my house was overrun with mice!! :shock: But it turned out it was just overrun with geckoes.
I think house lizard shit looks different, it’s more oval shaped and soft.
Also seen mouse shit before, it’s not it (and I am sure I would notice a mouse, have a very sensitive hearing).
I misread the original post, thinking the droppings were the size of rice grains. I should be more careful.
Mouse and gecko droppings are larger than grains of salt, so Rascal probably has insect (most likely cockroach) droppings.
Carpenter Ants produce small piles of what look like coarse black pepper. They can do as much damage as termites, but are fortunately easier to eradicate, because unlike termites, they come out to forage like regular ants, and only burrow to make nests in the walls. If you’ve seen ants crawling about, this is probably the problem. To get rid of them you will want to use a slow acting poison that they can take back to the nest so they get the whole colony. Regular insecticides only kill the ones you see. Look for permethrin or fipronil based poisons. The chemical names will be written on the packages. Don’t bother with boric acid as it doesn’t track back to the nest.
Spider, big big spider. The ones with hair on their legs.
I had one living inside my arm chair but didn’t know it. I found the small dropping like pepper grain underneath it so I sprayed some insecticide and hopla there it was, a big dead spider.
I also found similar dropping at the head end of my bed, under it that is.
Cockroaches have droppings like rice grains.
Geckos droppings have the tell tale white tip on it and they can stick it anywhere, even on the wall.
Cockroach shit looks exactly like little tiny crumbs of hash but tastes absolutely horrible when smoked. And you need to do loads before you get a hit.
Yes, could be one of spiders that’s as big as a plate, with big fat hairy legs, and eyes on stalks that watch you, and blink at you, and salivating jaws that can bite through chair legs.
You asked: “I was wondering if anyone could help me to identify some droppings (i.e. shit) I found in my apartment.”
Basically it looks like small grains (size like a grain of salt), black and grey
Well, mouse droppings are more the size of rice, and they would not crumble and turn into dust.
And…have you heard of ‘Hanta virus’? Carried by mice, caught by humans who breath near the droppings, so…touching them is not a good thing!
Anyway, I don’t live in Taiwan, so can’t really say. I spent last December there, teaching many, many seminars to people who wanted to learn how to train their dogs, in a kinder way…it’s called Clicker training.
