Porcellio scaber 'Yin Yang' Isopods for Sale UK

This page used to describe an animal with black, orange and red patterning. That was wrong, and it had been wrong for a while. 'Yin Yang' is a pied woodlouse: irregular blocks of white broken across a dark ground, no orange in it anywhere. The description had drifted off another morph's copy, we have corrected it, and the photographs are what you should trust.

What you are actually buying

Underneath the trade name this is Porcellio scaber, the common rough woodlouse, the same species that lives under every damp log in Britain. The pied pattern is a selected line rather than a species difference. You will meet the identical animal sold as 'Pied', 'Piebald' or 'Pied Panda', chiefly in the UK, and American sellers list it as Piebald without ever using the Yin Yang name at all. No breeder or origin is recorded for the line anywhere I can find.

Worth knowing what kind of morph it is, because the categories get muddled. Pied works by pigment loss in patches, so the pattern is blocky and irregular and no two animals match. That is different from the spotted morphs like Dalmatian and Moo Cow, which put small discrete spots on a pale ground, and different again from the pigment-reduction morphs like Whiteout and Ghost, which lose colour across the whole animal rather than in patches. Expect variation between individuals, and expect some of the offspring to come out closer to wild type. Nobody has published breeding ratios for this line, so I will not quote you one.

Keeping them

This is the easy end of the hobby. Adults come in around 15 to 18mm, they are hardy, they breed quickly, and they will forgive most beginner mistakes. An ordinary room does the job, roughly 17°C up to 26°C, and nothing here needs heating in a British house.

Run a moisture gradient rather than a wet box. Damp at one end, dry at the other, around 55 to 70 per cent overall, with decent ventilation. Five to eight centimetres of substrate is plenty, built on topsoil with decayed hardwood and leaf mould stirred in, then topped with a generous litter layer and some bark to shelter beneath.

Two things this species genuinely wants. Calcium is a permanent fixture, either cuttlebone or crushed limestone. And Porcellio are protein-hungry in a way that Armadillidium are not, so a pinch of fish flake or dried shrimp once or twice a week keeps a colony productive rather than merely alive. One more thing to note about the genus: they do not roll into a ball. A startled scaber does not curl up, it runs for the nearest edge.

Who it suits

Beginners, cleanup crews and anyone after a patterned isopod that asks nothing complicated of them. They work well in a bioactive vivarium and they multiply fast enough to keep up with the job. If you would rather have several patterns in one culture, the scaber mix is the lottery version, and the wider Porcellio range has the larger Spanish species for later on.

Every culture is packed over wet sphagnum in a vented pot, that pot boxed within a second wall of card. Posting stops on Thursday so nothing of ours idles through a Sunday. It travels tracked, next-day, ahead of 1pm. We tuck in a few spares above your count, and we guarantee they reach you alive.