I breed or grow almost everything on this site myself, here in the UK. The collection is closing in on 200 species and still growing, and my range of isopods for sale covers the whole experience curve: hardy starters like Dairy Cow, Porcellio laevis, and Dwarf White, through display morphs like Panda King and Magic Potion, Armadillidium vulgare, up to the Cubaris that take most of my own attention, Rubber Ducky 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 assembling 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 species I stock, or start with the beginner range.

More than isopods

The range has grown well past woodlice. There are captive-bred springtails, which are 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, which is extinct in the wild. Land snails and beetle larvae 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.

A family-run business you can trust

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 live arrival guarantee and a care sheet for the species you actually bought, not a generic one. I post Monday to Thursday on Royal Mail Tracked 24 and Next Day by 1pm, with an 8am cutoff for same-day dispatch, so nothing sits in a depot over a weekend.

New to this? Start here

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, the best isopods for beginners narrows the choice down, 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.

Isopods are small crustaceans, which makes them closer relatives of shrimp and crabs than of insects, even though they spend their whole lives on land. You may know them as pill bugs, roly polies or woodlice.

Dairy Cow, Powder Orange and Zebra isopods are the ones I point most people towards. All three are hardy, forgiving about humidity, and breed readily enough that a starter culture becomes a colony without much intervention.

Not at the moment. I do not hold the permits needed to post invertebrates internationally, so orders are UK only. It is something I would like to change.

Yes. Invertebrates can occasionally die in transit whatever anyone does, so I pack them to survive the journey and I stand behind them when it goes wrong. If animals arrive dead, tell me within 12 hours and I will put it right. If a delivery is missed and left waiting, I cannot guarantee it. Every order also goes out with a 20% overcount.

Often, yes. I think of the site as a Pokédex: every species in my collection gets listed, and it stays marked unavailable until I have enough to release some. If you want something specific and it is showing out of stock, ask me, because I am frequently happy to release a small number.

I post Monday to Thursday on Royal Mail Tracked 24 and Next Day by 1pm, and the cutoff for same-day dispatch is 8am on every one of those days. Orders placed after the cutoff go out on the next posting day, and that includes orders paid for next-day delivery, so if you need something to land on a particular day it is worth ordering before 8am. Through the winter, deliveries are occasionally held back when the weather turns, and if that affects your order I will email you rather than leave you to find out from the tracking.

I recommend starting with at least 10 to 15. Some species breed faster than others, but 10 to 15 gives you a reasonable chance of both sexes and a spread of ages, which is what a colony needs to establish.

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.