Armadillidium vulgare 'Gem Mix' Isopods

The Gem Mix is the one Armadillidium vulgare listing that is not a single morph at all. It is a curated culture of several colour forms kept together as one colony, so a scoop of the tub is a small lottery: classic dark wild-types next to the warm Orange Vigor, the speckled Magic Potion, and, depending on what the parent colony has been throwing, the odd yellow, cream, white or purple-tinged individual. Rather than a uniform display you get the species' whole colour range in one go, which is a different and rather addictive way to keep them.

That makes it two things at once. For a keeper who just wants a lively, varied tub, it is the full vulgare palette without buying five separate cultures. For anyone with an eye on breeding, it is a ready-made genetic starting point: keep it running, watch what appears, and you can begin isolating your own lines from a mixed base. Either way it stays cheap and easy to keep, because the base animal is the common pill bug and the variety is doing the heavy lifting rather than any single rare gene.

Because it is A. vulgare throughout, the care is about as forgiving as the hobby offers, which makes the Gem Mix a strong first culture for someone who wants more to look at than a plain grey colony. They are true roly-polys, conglobating into a tight ball when startled, hardy across a wide range and prolific once settled. If you would rather commit to a single pure line, morphs like the warm T+ Albino breed true on their own, while the mixed colony stays a moving target by design.

Set a colony up in a six to ten litre tub with a clip-lock lid and cross-ventilation on opposite walls. Like all pill woodlice they prefer a moisture gradient to a uniformly damp floor, so keep one end lightly moist under sphagnum and leaf litter and let the other run drier, with good airflow over the top. Normal heated room temperature suits them the year round. For substrate use a living base of flake soil, rotted hardwood and organic topsoil at least five centimetres deep, topped with magnolia and oak leaf litter and cork bark; keep a coco-coir-only base out of the mix, as it holds moisture without feeding anything, and leave cuttlebone or crushed eggshell in for constant calcium.

Feeding is the standard detritivore spread: leaf litter and rotting wood always down, soft veg such as courgette, squash and sweet potato a few times a week with leftovers removed promptly, and an occasional little protein to keep the colony productive. As with any Armadillidium they will graze soft plants in a bioactive setup, so plant tough. Breeding needs no special effort, and it is where the Gem Mix earns its name: females release live miniatures in the usual way, and as each brood matures you never quite know which colours will come up, which is much of the fun.

Pair them with a springtail culture to keep mould in check, or see the rest of the range in the Armadillidium collection. Every order is captive-bred, packed in a double-walled box around a ventilated tub of damp sphagnum and posted Monday to Thursday by tracked next-day Royal Mail, with a 20% overcount and a live-arrival guarantee on every parcel.