General Care Spanish Orange Isopods

A 10 gallon aquarium is a good size to house a colony in, but a smaller cage can be used if needed. The larger the cage you have, the slower it will dry out, so smaller cages have to have their moisture content checked more often.  (We also have an established colony in a 40 gallon long display cage with Giant Day Geckos in it.  That colony does really well, and the geckos eat some of the isopods every so often.)  Some people use Eco-Earth or Bed-a-beast, but we use clean soil like you buy at the store - NO ADDED FERTILIZER in the soil!  Use 1/3rd or so of the light soil (or 1/3rd Eco Earth type stuff) and 2/3rds doty wood (crumble lots of it up, but leave some as some bigger pieces, too). Put a few bigger pieces of soft wood with bark on the top of the soil and many of the isopods will hang out on the underside of these pieces eating the wood.  Put on or mix in some dried, dead, and pesticide-free oak leaves on/in the soil mixture for food, too.

Isopods need a MOIST (not wet with standing water) environment. They are actually crustaceans - not insects - and breathe through gills. If their gills dry out, they can't respire and they die. Even a couple of days in dry substrate can be deadly. We strongly recommend using doty wood (soft, crumbly, rotten hardwood) as part of the substrate. The rotten wood acts like a sponge and holds moisture without flooding the cage.  It is also a major food source for these guys. We also put a layer of damp sphagnum moss (NOT peat moss) over half the cage since it holds moisture, and they seem to like that area. We will often wet alternate corners of the cage with water so that the isopods will have a moisture gradient.  The cage we use has a screen top that we cover 75-100% with a thin towel to keep the humidity up while still allowing air flow. Make sure to check the colony every couple of days and add water as needed to keep the substrate properly moist.

Additional feedings should happen at least once a week or so with scraps of vegetables: slices of cucumber, apple pieces or skin, romaine lettuce or at least the stems, etc. Anything like that will work. Don't put in so much that anything rots - just something extra for them to feed on. We usually leave the lettuce but take the "soft" stuff like cucumber out after a couple of days if it isn't mostly gone.

We ship the isopods in a cup packed in damp sphagnum moss. You just dump them out of that cup into your set-up. It takes a couple of months for the ones we ship to finish growing up and produce young, but once those young reach adult size the colony will grow substantially in the next generation. We usually have to split a colony at least once a year if we didn't sell a lot of the extras in the mean time.

Once set up, the colony really only takes a couple minutes every few days to keep healthy. Enjoy!