Armadillidium frontetriangulum 'Orange' Isopods

Look into a tub of these and the orange has dots in it. White and yellow flecks are scattered right across the animal, the same painted spotting the wild form carries, sitting on an orange ground instead of a dark one. Going orange usually costs an isopod its pattern, the colour flattening out into a plain wash, and that is not what happened here. This one reads as a patterned animal that happens to be orange.

Armadillidium frontetriangulum Verhoeff, 1901 comes from Corfu, and the wild type is the animal we sell as Painted Corfu, dark brown to black with exactly that yellow and white dotting laid over it. Set the two beside each other and the morph is the same paintwork on a repainted background. The species name points at the head, which carries a triangular forehead that gives the animal something close to a mantis face when you look at it head-on. Adults reach around 15 to 18mm. They roll up into a closed ball if you lift one, and they pass daylight hours under bark before working the leaf litter after dark.

Not the same animal as pallasii 'Orange'

The obvious point of confusion is our pallasii 'Orange', the other orange Armadillidium on our shelves with a Corfu line behind it, and the two separate cleanly once you know what to look for. A. pallasii is much the larger animal at around 24mm, and its orange is plain and semi-translucent with no spotting on it at all, the result of a hypomelanistic reduction in dark pigment, not paint laid over the top. It is also slower to settle and carries more risk in establishing. The frontetriangulum 'Orange' is the smaller of the two, it is spotted, and it breeds readily. One further distinction worth making honestly: frontetriangulum belongs to Corfu and nowhere else, while pallasii ranges a good deal wider and it is the Corfu population of it that we keep.

Conditions

Temperature sits between 17 and 26°C, so a normal UK room carries them through the year without heating. Humidity wants 50 to 60 per cent, and it works as a gradient, never as one flat setting: keep roughly a third of the ground moist, leave the other two thirds dry, and the colony will pick its own footing. Medium ventilation suits them, enough airflow to hold the dry side dry instead of letting it drift into a second damp one.

Underneath them, put down 5 to 8cm of a nutritious base layer, depth enough for a moulting animal to disappear into, and pile dry hardwood leaf litter thickly across it with bark on top for hides. The leaf layer is the permanent food supply, so top it up before it thins away. Work cuttlebone or crushed oyster shell down into the substrate and leave it there for good, then a little vegetable or dried protein now and then covers the rest. Every animal we sell is bred in our own UK cultures. They are hardy, prolific and quick to establish, so a small starter group turns into a working colony without much intervention, which is the main practical reason to choose this one over the larger orange pallasii.

They suit a keeper who wants colour without losing pattern, and they sit naturally beside the metallic Corfu Silver if you are assembling a Greek island group. For a look at how a plainer orange Armadillidium reads next to a spotted one, A. nasatum 'Orange' makes the comparison well. Our Armadillidium care guide covers the genus in detail, and the full Armadillidium range sits alongside it.

Posting happens early in the week only, Monday through Thursday, which keeps every parcel clear of a weekend in a depot. The tub itself is ventilated and the sphagnum inside it damp, and the whole thing rides in a box of double-walled board. Tracking comes as standard, and Royal Mail aim to have it with you by 1pm the day after posting. Counts are padded upward before the lid goes on, all of it backed by our live-arrival guarantee.