Armadillidium klugii “Dubrovnik” juveniles and mutant Armadillidium gestroi

she is their queen

these Armadilldium vulgare come from an isolated population I found on a riverbank in the city. both females and males (unusual for this species) had warm, golden-brown to dark brown coloration, and one male had beautiful white patches in addition to the gold.

unfortunately, all of the wild ones were infected with a fungal parasite, and I only got one brood out of one female (pic 4) before they perished. surprisingly, two of the precious babies ended up piebald, so I’ll be able to breed more of all of these rare color forms!

a gold and the piebald gold male from the originals. either pollution, weather, or the fungus has resulted in the wild river population disappearing entirely, so I feel lucky I was able to collect some while I could!

today’s isopod is Armadillidium vulgare “Orange Vigor,” an orange mutation of the common pillbug or roly-poly.

they still show yellow scrawls and varying shades of base color like the wild gray form, with males tending to be dark and patternless and females brighter and with more markings.

a little post on molting in isopods:

uniquely among arthropods, isopods shed their skin in halves: first the back, and then the front (biphasic molting). for terrestrial isopods, this helps to split up the energy strain of molting across the body and allows them to recover and eat their exuvia quickly to regain calcium. most terrestrial isopods usually complete the molting process in a day or two, with some time separating the halves.

if you see an isopod that’s a slightly different color on its different halves, it’s probably not a mutation, but just in molt. conversely, an isopod that shows very different coloration from normal ones probably isn’t just teneral.

unlike insects, centipedes, and some other arthropods that often show wildly different colors when teneral (soft-shelled), recently molted isopods keep the same coloration they have between molts, like this piebald P. scaber demonstrates. an isopod in premolt may appear chalky due to the exuvia separating, and a teneral isopod could appear a bit pale and matte like the A. vulgare. isopods with a wax coat like P. pruinosus take time to secrete a new one, so they may appear half-powdery and half-shiny sometimes.

young isopods gain a lot of size with each molt, and this can sometimes result in them having much larger teneral back halves until their head catches up.

in some bizarre coincidence I found mutant albino isopods from three different species this last May! complete albino isopods have no pigmentation at all, not even in their eyes

Armadillidium nasatum, Trachelipus rathkii, Porcellionides pruinosus

I keep a few very small isopod species! these guys are Reductoniscus costulatus, the third smallest of my micro isopods. they’re bumpy and eat wood. the Elumoides I have are even smaller at adult size:

(Reductoniscus costulatus & Elumoides sp. “Miami”)

the largest costulatus is an adult, and the Elumoides is a real whopper of a female. they don’t get larger than that!

interestingly, I think the two families they belong to (Armadillidae, Eubelidae) convergently evolved the ability to roll into a ball for protection.

today’s various isopods

another new isopod I got recently are these Armadillidium maculatum “Yellow Zebra.” the most common wild forms are spotted and striped with black and white, but this selection has been bred for yellow markings and consistent striped pattern.

trying to identify worms but they aren’t being easy… they are quite photogenic though. pretty sure the huge brown one is a different species from the smaller red one