PostPods is a small invertebrate breeder in Castleford, West Yorkshire. I breed or grow almost everything on this site myself, and I post it Monday to Thursday to anywhere in Great Britain by tracked Royal Mail, with a live arrival guarantee on next-day orders and at least 20% more animals in the tub than you paid for.
My range of isopods for sale runs to over 200 species and morphs and covers the whole experience curve: hardy starters like the Dairy Cow (Porcellio laevis) and the Dwarf White; display morphs like the Panda King, the Magic Potion (Armadillidium vulgare) and the White Shark; and the Cubaris that take most of my own attention, the Rubber Ducky and the Vietnamese Crabby among them.
The genera here include Cubaris, Armadillidium, Porcellio, Porcellionides, Oniscus, Trichorhina, Venezillo, Trachelipus, Troglodillo and Ardentiella, which the hobby knew as Merulanella until it was reclassified, along with a growing set of rarer other species for collectors after something off the beaten path. Whether you are building a cleanup crew for dart frogs, crested geckos or a bearded dragon, or you simply want something small and interesting to keep for its own sake, it is in there. Browse every isopod I stock, or start with the beginner range.
The range has grown well past woodlice. There are captive-bred springtails, the other half of any bioactive cleanup crew. There are millipedes, from beginner species up to the UV-reactive Hawaiian Glow and the Pink Dragon. There are cockroaches, including Madagascar hissers, the Emerald, and the Simandoa cave roach, unrecorded in the wild since 2002. Beetle larvae and land snails sit alongside them.
The drygoods range is chosen to go with the animals rather than padded out: fermented flake soil, UK-sourced broadleaf leaf litter, cork bark, lotus pods, cuttlebone and limestone for calcium, and top-opening acrylic enclosures from Exotic Enclosures.
PostPods is me, with my fiancée Claire, my daughter and my brother behind it. Claire works every show with me and is usually the one who remembers your name the following year. On a busy week the three of them are the reason your order still goes out on time.
The policy is simple: it is my pet until it arrives in the care of its new owner. The same husbandry, feeding, temperature, humidity and packing standards apply right up to the moment you open the box. Nothing here is drop-shipped and nothing goes out that I have not seen. If a colony is not thriving in my care it stays listed as out of stock until it recovers, rather than going out as an order I would not want to receive myself.
Every isopod order goes out with at least 20% over the stated count, because counting live animals is imprecise and I would rather the error ran in your favour. Every order carries a care sheet for the species you actually bought, not a generic one, and every order sent Royal Mail Next Day carries a live arrival guarantee: tell me within 6 hours of delivery if something has arrived dead and I will replace it, credit it or refund it. I post Monday to Thursday on Royal Mail Tracked 24 and Next Day by 1pm, with a 10am cut-off for same-day dispatch, so nothing sits in a depot over a weekend. If the forecast on your route drops below 3°C or climbs above 26°C I hold the parcel back and email you, because a late delivery is better than a dead one.
There are over three hundred care guides and articles on this site and every one of them is free. I write them. A lot of isopod care information online is copied from other isopod care information online, and some of it is simply wrong: temperatures repeated from American sources without conversion, species sold under names reclassified years ago, advice written for one genus applied to another that needs the opposite conditions.
If you are starting out, the beginner's guide to keeping isopods in the UK is the place to begin, and pairing isopods with springtails covers building a cleanup crew that works. For Cubaris, where most of the hard questions live, there is a full care guide.
If you would rather just ask, email me. I answer these myself, and no question about keeping an animal alive is a daft one.
I have kept exotic animals for over 23 years. It started with a corn snake when I was 10 and the list kept growing: an alligator snapping turtle, Bosc monitors, dozens of tarantulas, scorpions, and eventually a Burmese python.
The python is what led me to isopods. As he grew, so did the mess he made of a 2.4 metre vivarium, and Claire, who already kept isopods in her chameleon enclosure, suggested I stop relying on springtails alone. I gave in and picked up some Dairy Cows. I barely saw them for weeks. A couple of months later there were thousands, and the vivarium was spotless.
What hooked me was the next question. If a Dairy Cow looks that good, what else is out there? Through a Facebook group I met Tom Marsh, who took me under his wing and introduced me to the world of exotic isopods, and the same kid who had obsessively collected Pokémon cards was suddenly collecting pods instead. PostPods began as my own Pokédex, a way of tracking every species in my care, and turned into a way of handing back what I had learned.
The longer version, including what I got wrong at the start, is on the about page. What has come in most recently is under new arrivals.
Dairy Cow, Powder Orange and Zebra are the three I point most people towards, with Dwarf White if you want a small, fast cleanup crew rather than a display animal. All four are hardy, forgiving about humidity, and breed readily enough that a starter group becomes a colony without much intervention.
A ventilated tub, a few centimetres of substrate they can eat (flake soil, white-rotted hardwood and topsoil, rather than coco coir, which holds water but feeds nothing), a layer of leaf litter, cuttlebone for calcium, and a damp end and a drier end so they can choose. That is the whole setup for most species, and the drygoods range here is built around it.
15 to 20 for a breeding colony of a hardy species. That all but guarantees both sexes, gives you some genetic spread, and means the odd loss does not set you back. For the slower premium Cubaris and Ardentiella, 10 to 15 is a realistic start. For a cleanup crew in an occupied vivarium go higher, 50 to 100, because the host animal will eat some.
Most of the common species are fine in an ordinary UK room all year and simply breed faster at the warmer end of their range. The tropical cave Cubaris want their room kept warmer through the colder months. If you add heat, use a cable or mat on the side of the tub or along the back of the shelf, on a thermostat, never underneath, so the animals can move away from it and the substrate does not dry out. Every listing shows the ideal range for that species.
Yes, and they work better together than either does alone. Springtails graze mould and the fine debris that isopods cannot deal with, while isopods break down leaf litter, waste and shed skin. Give them plenty of leaf litter and a damp end to the enclosure and both will look after themselves.
Yes. Everything on this site is bred or grown here in the UK unless its listing says otherwise, and the few wild-collected lines say so plainly on their own page. Nothing is drop-shipped, and nothing goes out that I have not seen.
In ventilated deli tubs on damp sphagnum moss, inside an insulated double-walled box with packing to stop the tubs moving, labelled live invertebrates, this way up. In cold weather a heat pack goes in the box; I never use cool packs. If the forecast anywhere on the route is below 3°C or above 26°C, I hold the order and email you rather than risk it.
I post Monday to Thursday, so nothing spends a weekend in a depot. Order before 10am on one of those days and it goes out the same day; after 10am it goes on the next posting day, and that includes next-day orders, so if you need a parcel on a particular day, order before 10am the day before. Live animals travel Royal Mail Next Day by 1pm or Tracked 24, and the occasional order goes on a Friday or Saturday at my discretion. The detail is in the shipping policy.
Yes, on every order sent by Royal Mail Next Day, which is the service I recommend for live animals; Tracked 24 orders travel without it. If anything arrives dead, tell me within 6 hours of delivery with a photo of the animals in their packaging and I will replace them, credit you or refund you, whichever you prefer. The guarantee covers the quantity you ordered rather than the 20% extra I add, and it cannot cover a parcel that was missed or left waiting. The full terms are in the live arrival guarantee.
No. I post to England, Scotland and Wales only, and I cannot send live animals to Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland or overseas. I would rather say so up front than take an order I cannot fulfil.
