Armadillidium nasatum 'White' Isopods

A body the colour of pale cream, and two dark eyes set into the front of it. That is what looks back at you out of a tub of Armadillidium nasatum 'White', and the eyes are the part that decides what the animal actually is. Pigment has been bred down out of the shell over generations and left alone in the eye, which is the signature of a reduced-pigment morph. An albino would have lost it from both.

That distinction matters, because the hobby runs two near-identical names for two different animals. A true 'White Out' is solid white with white eyes, a real albino. This is not that one. If white eyes are what you are after, A. vulgare 'T-Albino' is the honest article in a species that rolls a closed ball, while the Porcellio scaber 'Whiteout' is another animal people sometimes arrive looking for by mistake, a flat, non-rolling woodlouse from another genus altogether. The White is a selective breeding project in reduced pigment and nothing more complicated than that.

Colour aside, this is Armadillidium nasatum Budde-Lund, 1885, the nosed pillbug. The name comes from the nasus, a plate at the front of the head that points forward over the face. The British Myriapod and Isopod Group describes it as reminiscent of the peak of a base-ball cap. Losing pigment does not blur the feature, so a White seen in profile still shows the thing the species is named for. Adults finish at 12 to 16mm. The wild-type nasatum is the parent form here, and we run the Dalmatian and Orange lines out of the same species.

The ball never quite shuts

Disturb one and it rolls, but it stops short of a seal. A. nasatum manages partial enclosure only, and the antennae stay out through a small gap at the front where an A. vulgare would close flush. Nothing is wrong with the animal in your hand; it is how the species is built. Away from that they are busy, sociable and out on the surface far more than most pillbugs, which is half the argument for keeping a pale morph of this species instead of a shy one.

Dry ground, not a wet box

Wild nasatum live in drier ground than most woodlice, and they have naturalised in UK greenhouses off the back of that adaptability. The figure people quote, roughly 45 to 80 per cent, is a tolerance band rather than a preference, so it should not be read as permission to keep them damp. Give the tub two ends instead. About a third of the floor area kept moist, the remainder left dry, and ventilation good enough that the dry side stays dry and does not simply end up less wet. Temperature barely registers as a problem at 15 to 28°C, which any UK room manages all year without help.

Underneath, 5 to 8cm of a nutritious base substrate. Bark on the surface for cover, dry hardwood leaf litter heaped over that as the standing food supply, and calcium left in permanently, cuttlefish bone or crushed shell, topped up as it goes down and never taken out. Vegetable scraps and a weekly pinch of dried protein finish the diet. This is UK captive-bred stock, hardy, forgiving and quick to multiply, with sub-adults breeding before they reach full size, so a small starter group becomes a working colony in short order. Our guide to keeping Armadillidium goes further into the setup, and this one sits among the rest of the Armadillidium we keep.

Colonies travel in a ventilated deli tub with damp sphagnum for the journey, sat inside a double-walled box. We post at the start of the week only, Monday through to Thursday, tracked next-day by Royal Mail with delivery before 1pm, so no parcel of ours is stuck somewhere across a Saturday and Sunday. Spares go in on top of whatever count is ordered, and live arrival is guaranteed.