Italian surgeons operating on an 82-year-old woman with a blocked small intestine found the culprit: a dense ball of undigested plant matter. Then, as they pulled the 5.5-centimeter mass out, a small live creature jumped out of it and crawled across the sterile surgical drapes.
Parasitology testing later identified the animal as a terrestrial isopod, a land-dwelling crustacean in the same order as the pill bugs and sow bugs found under garden rocks. The case is not new. Surgeons at S. Orsola-Malpighi University Hospital in Bologna, Italy, described it in BMJ Case Reports in 2010. Sixteen years later, the report resurfaced after Live Science revisited the case in August 2026, and news sites in France and Indonesia retold it in the weeks that followed.
