About PostPods

I am Daniel Brown. I keep and breed the animals PostPods sells, here in the UK, and I write the care guides on this site. If you are about to have a living animal posted to you, you should know who is packing the box.

Twenty-three years of animals, five of isopods

I have kept exotic animals for more than 23 years. Reptiles mostly, and for a good while I bred leopard geckos as a hobbyist. Isopods came late, and by accident.

In 2020 I had not heard the word isopod. I knew what a woodlouse was, but that was the extent of it. At the time I had a Burmese python called Seth, and my partner had a veiled chameleon called Pascal in a full bioactive setup. Seth was making a mess of his enclosure, and my partner suggested isopods as a cleanup crew. I laughed it off. I could not see how something that small would make a difference to an animal that size.

I got some anyway, in January 2021. Dairy Cows, as it happens. For the first few weeks I barely saw them, and then after a couple of months there were suddenly a great many, and the enclosure was spotless. They had done exactly what my partner said they would.

What actually hooked me was something sillier. I did not like the grey of a Dairy Cow against an albino Burmese python. It looked wrong. And that made me wonder whether isopods came in other colours.

They do.

The part where someone helped

Through the leopard geckos I already knew people in the invertebrate trade. My friend Tom Marsh at Exotic Empire had been supplying me with dubia roaches for years. I ended up on his website reading about isopods, saw the range of species and morphs for the first time, and started asking him questions. A lot of questions. He eventually traded me some isopods for a leopard gecko, and that was that.

I owe Tom the start of this. I still ask him things, though rather less often than I used to.

What I got wrong first

I had read that isopods do well in small tubs. I did not have any, but I did have a lot of 32 litre boxes, so I used those instead. That turned out to help more than I expected. The extra volume made humidity far easier to hold steady, and gave the animals room to hide and forage.

The mistake I made was fussing. I was so interested in the colonies that I kept opening them, moving things, checking on everything, and my numbers started falling. The fix was to leave them alone. Isopods breed and feed best when they are not being disturbed, and learning that changed how I keep every species. It is why so much of the advice on this site amounts to setting the conditions well and then having the patience to stop interfering.

How PostPods works now

The collection kept growing until selling and trading was the obvious next step, and PostPods came out of that. It has always been two things at once: a shop, and somewhere to explain how to keep these animals well. There are now over three hundred care guides and articles on this site, and they are free.

Everything is bred or grown on here in the UK. Nothing is drop-shipped, and nothing goes out that I have not seen. If a colony is not thriving in my care, it does not get sold, and it will sit as out of stock until it recovers rather than go out as an order I would not want to receive myself.

What you get from us

• 20% more than you order. Every isopod order goes out with at least twenty per cent over the stated count, because counting live animals is imprecise and I would rather the error ran in your favour.
• A live arrival guarantee. If your animals do not arrive alive, tell me and I will put it right.
• Packing built for the weather. Ventilated deli tubs on damp sphagnum moss, inside insulated double-walled boxes, with a heat pack when it is cold.
• Sensible dispatch days. Monday to Thursday only, by tracked Royal Mail next-day delivery, so nothing sits in a depot over a weekend.
• A care sheet for the species you actually bought, not a generic one.

Why I write the guides

A lot of isopod care information online is copied from other isopod care information online, and some of it is simply wrong. Temperature ranges get repeated from American sources without conversion. Species get sold under names that were reclassified years ago. Advice written for one genus gets applied to another that needs the opposite conditions.

I would rather be straight about what I do and do not know. Where I have kept a species for years, I say so. Where the hobby is genuinely uncertain about something, I say that too. If I get something wrong and you tell me, I will correct it.

Where to start

If you are new to this, the beginner's guide to keeping isopods in the UK is the place to begin, and dwarf whites or Dairy Cows are the species I most often point people towards.

If you already keep them, the Cubaris are where most of my own attention goes, and new arrivals is worth watching.

You can browse every isopod species we stock, or the wider ranges of springtails, millipedes and cockroaches.

Questions

If you want to ask something before you order, please do. I answer these myself, and no question about keeping an animal alive is a daft one. Get in touch here.

The longer version of this story, with rather more about Seth, is on the blog: PostPods, how it all started.