Giant Banahoa Isopods (Fillipinodillo sp.) for Sale

The name on this page is a misspelling and we have kept it anyway. There is no place in the Philippines called Banahoa. The mountain is Banahaw, a volcano straddling the Quezon and Laguna border in southern Luzon, and the Philippine keepers who first moved this animal spell it that way. Somewhere on the route to the UK a vowel turned over, and now several British shops sell it under a name that exists nowhere else. We have left it alone because it is what people search for, but you should know the word points at a real mountain and that the spelling on the label is ours, not the island's.

The animal is Filippinodillo sp. - one L and two Ps, after Schmalfuss described the genus in 1987. Our own product titles and collection address still carry a second L, which is on the same fix list as the vowel. It is a large isopod in Armadillidae, a family of rollers. Ours close up fully with the antennae tucked inside; no published description of conglobation exists for this animal, because no published description of this animal exists at all. The genus holds four described species, one of which is Australian rather than Philippine, and our animal is none of the four. What we sell is undescribed: no type specimen, no published measurement, no collection locality in any museum. The link to Mount Banahaw comes from the people who collect them, and we have no way to check it.

Worth knowing that the genus label is a hobby convention, not an identification anybody has checked. The same tag gets applied to animals sold as Cordova, Dingalan, Bumble Bicol and even Sabah, which is in Malaysia and not the Philippines at all. No taxonomist has been near any of them.

What they look like and how big they get

This is what ours look like here, and it is the only description we can offer, because none exists in print for the genus. Juveniles carry a dark central stripe down the back between lighter and darker fields. As they grow the pattern breaks into a marbled, camouflaged brown, and old adults go almost black. Our previous copy called the patterning rusty-toned, which we would not say now. Our older copy gave 15 to 25mm. Sellers elsewhere now quote up to 30mm, and ours sit at the upper end of the old figure. Nobody has measured a series, us included, so treat the whole span as impression and not specification.

Keeping them

Ours sit at 22 to 26°C on a deep substrate, at least 8cm, with about two-thirds of the floor kept damp and the last third allowed to dry out. Give them moderate airflow. Stagnant humid air is the failure we see most often in tropical tubs here, and mesh on two sides of the lid deals with it. Leaf litter deep enough to bury a finger in, several pieces of cork bark, and rotten hardwood scattered through the substrate will keep them fed between feeds. Add cuttlebone and leave it in permanently, because a big rolling isopod moulting at this size wants calcium on hand at every moult.

They are slower to build numbers than a Porcellio, which is the usual trade-off for size. A settled culture produces steadily; it will not explode. We would not put this one in front of somebody who has never kept isopods, but anybody who has run a tropical species through a year will find nothing surprising here.

If this one appeals, the rest are worth a look. Our Filippinodillo pages cover the others we hold, including Leopard Bee and Nakar. Whether the three are the same species under different trade names is not something anybody has established, and their colours differ, though the reported sizes overlap almost entirely, so we would not assume it either way.

We will not call this line captive-bred. It reached the hobby as a Philippine import, and saying too little beats saying something unsupportable. Cultures leave us early in the week, packed in an air-holed pot on moss kept damp, boxed in twin-wall card. Twenty per cent goes in over your count, and they are guaranteed to arrive alive.