Armadillidium tirolense 'Lake Garda' Isopods for Sale

Lake Garda is in this animal's name twice, and only one of those is a trade label. Verhoeff described a pill woodlouse from the lake in 1934 and called it Armadillidium benaci, after Benacus, the Roman name for Garda. That name has since been sunk into his own earlier Armadillidium tirolense of 1901. So the hobby's "Lake Garda" and the scientist's benaci are pointing at exactly the same water.

Where it comes from

Armadillidium tirolense Verhoeff, 1901 is a pre-Alpine endemic. Nearly every occurrence record is Italian, spread across Lombardy, Veneto and Trentino-Alto Adige, with a handful from Tyrol accounting for the name itself, and most of the Italian ones sit on or beside Garda: Manerba del Garda, Riva del Garda. There is A. tirolense material in the Brussels museum and Riva del Garda material in Frankfurt.

That matters more than it sounds. Because the lake is effectively the type area of the sunk name, stock collected there is about as close to topotypical as anything in this hobby ever gets. It is a better provenance story than most locality names in the trade, which are frequently just whichever town was nearest the car park.

Appearance, with a caveat

Dark, close to black, broken up with bright yellow and paler markings. Past that we would sooner hedge than invent, because no published colour description of A. tirolense exists anywhere we can find. The vivid "neon yellow and white" framing circulating in the UK trade traces back to a single supplier's listing, and our own blog has previously described the same animal as dark with yellow spotting. Both readings can be true of different individuals in one tub, and pattern in this genus varies far more than shop photographs suggest.

Size sits in the same position. No published figure exists. It is a well-built animal, not a dwarf, and it conglobates cleanly.

Keeping them

The distribution does the work here. Pre-Alpine northern Italy, with records running up into Bagolino and Recoaro Terme, means an animal shaped by cold winters more than by Mediterranean summer heat. We read that as tolerance of the cooler end, and these should not need supplementary heat in a British house. Take 18 to 28°C as the working band. That is an inference from where it lives and not a published thermal tolerance, and we would rather say so than dress it up. Our article on how cold is too cold for isopods is the wider context.

Everything else is standard practice for the genus. A moisture gradient, wet at one end and dry across most of the floor, with enough cross-ventilation to keep the surface from going stale. Around 5 to 8cm of substrate, hardwood leaf litter, cork bark for cover, and cuttlebone available permanently. Feed the usual mix with protein included.

It is new enough to this country that there is not much shared keeping experience yet, so if yours behave differently to the above we would like to hear about it. Our other pill woodlice are filed under Armadillidium isopods, and if you want another animal with a real, checkable locality behind it rather than a marketing name, the Corfu endemic corcyraeum is the closest thing we keep.

Captive-bred stock, posted on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday and never later in the week. Each order sits on wet moss in a pot vented through the lid, packed inside doubled card, and reaches you the next working day before one. Expect a few spare animals in the tub, and a live arrival guarantee behind the lot.