Armadillo officinalis 'Brown' Isopods

Before the terracotta-red Red Brick, there was the brown. Armadillo officinalis 'Brown' is the wild-type colour form of the famous "hissing isopod", the natural warm brown the species wears in the wild, often with a scatter of subtle orange-toned spotting across a big, solid, characterful body. It is the same remarkable animal as our Red Brick, one of the very few isopods that can make an audible sound, just in the understated original colour rather than the selected red.

The sound is the party trick. Armadillo officinalis stridulates, rubbing parts of its legs against its shell to produce a faint hiss, and in a settled group the effect builds as the colony grows, an oddity almost no other isopod offers. Add a calm, sociable temperament, a substantial size and easy care, and you have a species that is as much a talking point as a keep. It belongs to the true Armadillo genus, distinct from the common pillbugs, alongside the dry-loving blue-grey Armadillo tuberculatus.

Care is straightforward for a keeper with a little experience. Being a Mediterranean animal it wants a moderate humidity with a gradient rather than a wet box, somewhere around 55 to 70%, one damp end under sphagnum and leaf litter with the rest allowed to dry between mistings, and medium ventilation. Normal room temperature suits it the year round, and a spacious tub suits it better than a cramped one, since these are social, active animals that do best in a group with room to roam. The hiss is worth building a colony for: the stridulation grows more noticeable as numbers increase, so a larger, settled group is both more audible and more active than a handful of animals, and they are long-lived and slow to mature.

Give a colony a good-sized clip-lock tub with cross-ventilation, then a living substrate of flake soil, rotted hardwood and organic topsoil at least five centimetres deep for burrowing. Being a true pill woodlouse it conglobates, rolling into a tight ball when disturbed, so it appreciates the same calcium-rich, well-covered setup as the other Mediterranean rollers. Keep a plain coco-coir base out of the mix, and leave cuttlebone or crushed limestone in permanently, which matters for a large animal's moults.

Top the substrate with a generous layer of magnolia and oak leaf litter and plenty of cork bark and hides, which the colony will cluster under. Feeding is the usual unfussy detritivore routine: leaf litter and rotting wood as the constant base, soft veg such as courgette, carrot and squash a couple of times a week with leftovers lifted promptly, and a little protein now and then, keeping in mind that the Armadillo genus needs far less of it than the hungry Porcellio do.

Breeding is reliable in a spacious, stable setup: females carry young in a brood pouch and release live miniatures, and a group given warmth, calcium and steady food builds into a self-sustaining, quietly hissing colony over time. Compare it with the bolder Mediterranean morphs like the striped Zebra, or pair it with a springtail culture to keep mould down. Every order is captive-bred, boxed double-walled around a ventilated tub of damp sphagnum and posted Monday to Thursday by tracked next-day Royal Mail with a live-arrival guarantee and a 20% overcount as standard.