Filippinodillo Isopods For Sale

Filippinodillo are big, boldly patterned tropical pill woodlice, and the lines I keep are currently the Leopard Bee, the Giant Bumblebee, the Nakar and the Giant Banahaw. All four are captive-bred, and they are posted Monday to Thursday with the live arrival guarantee and a 20% overcount.

They suit a keeper who has already had a tropical colony do well, because they want the same things: warmth, humidity, moving air and patience.

What they are

Filippinodillo Schmalfuss, 1987 belongs to the tropical pill woodlouse family Armadillidae. Four species have been described, one of them from Western Australia, so despite the name it is not a purely Philippine genus. The hobby animals are undescribed forms sold under trade names, and nobody has established whether the Leopard Bee, the Nakar and the Giant Banahaw are one species or several.

Care

Warmth, humidity and moving air. The listings put them at about 22 to 27°C, which in an English home means a heat mat or heat cable on a thermostat on the side of the tub for most of the year. Keep the humidity up with a drier end to the tub, and give them vents on two sides: stagnant air is the one thing keepers of the genus agree they don't tolerate. A deep, nutritious substrate with plenty of leaf litter, decaying hardwood and calcium does the rest, and the accessories page has the components.

No published measurement exists for any of these lines. The Giant Bumblebee's adults run 20 to 25 mm, and that figure is mine, from my own animals.

If rare tropical isopods are your thing, the Cubaris page is worth a look too, and new arrivals shows what has just come in.