Trachelipus cavaticus (ex Crete) Isopods for Sale

The species name on this listing is not a real name, and saying so beats quietly patching it. There is no Trachelipus caveatus. The animal is Trachelipus cavaticus, described in 2004 by Schmalfuss, Paragamian and Sfenthourakis in their survey of the terrestrial isopods of Crete and its surrounding islands. Our page has carried the correct spelling in the title and flagged the mix-up in the body copy for as long as it has been up. It is the URL that is wrong, and that needs changing with a redirect behind it.

The description is worth having in full, because it is unusually detailed for an animal you can buy. The holotype is a male of 13.0 by 8.0mm, collected from the Cave of Kournas in the Chania prefecture on the third of March 1987, and lodged in Stuttgart. The species is known from caves in western and central Crete: Kournas, the Arkalospilios cave on the Akrotiri peninsula, the southern flank of the Lefka Ori, several systems near Rethymno, and a cave at Alykes.

The stock and the species share an island

That is rarer than it may read. Most animals we sell carry a trade locality nobody can check - a mountain name, a province, a road number - and here the animal came from Crete and the species is Cretan and nowhere else. When a page says 'ex Crete' about a Cretan endemic, it is telling you something true.

What the paper actually says

Maximum recorded dimensions run to about 15mm long. The animal is a light brown of variable intensity. Its only Cretan relative, T. kytherensis, was collected alongside it at Kournas, and the authors separate the two by the head margins, the shape of the median lobe, wider and flatter epimera, longer and frailer legs, and eyes of around twelve facets against roughly twenty. Their own comment is that most of these differences read as adaptation to cave life.

It does not roll. The 2004 diagnosis places the genus among the clingers, and the family is absent from the published survey of which isopods can sphere up. Flattening and gripping into a crevice is the entire defensive repertoire.

Context for how unusual that is: the 2004 survey brought the number of terrestrial isopod species known from Crete and its satellite islands to fifty-five, and this was one of the new ones in it.

Worth noting that the two species were collected together at Kournas, in the same place at the same time, which is what makes the comparison in the paper so clean: the authors were not contrasting a cave animal with a surface one from somewhere else, but two animals sharing a site.

Conditions

18 to 24°C, cool and steady, no heat mat. Humidity high and consistent, around 70 to 85%. That is our shelf setting and an inference from the cave records, not a measurement. Cross-ventilate through mesh on opposing sides, because at this humidity still air is the risk. Substrate 5cm with heavy leaf litter over it, limestone chips, and stacked flat stone with tight gaps underneath.

The two UK sellers who list this animal disagree on both figures, which is the clearest possible sign that neither has measured anything. Ours are shelf settings arrived at by keeping it.

We guarantee the animals are alive when the parcel reaches you. Sending happens Mondays to Thursdays, next working day, with the animals in a perforated pot on damp moss inside doubled card, and 20% more of them than your order says. Temperate woodlice generally are worth a browse on the genus page.