Pallasii 'Corfu' Isopods (Armadillidium pallasii) for Sale UK

This animal carries four names, and the ones the taxonomists threw away are the ones that tell you what to look at. Armadillidium frontirostre and Armadillidium frontesignum are both junior synonyms of Armadillidium pallasii. One reads as forehead-beak and the other as front-marked, and both point at the same end of the animal.

The nose

There is a raised frontal plate above the face, a blunt shelf that stands proud when you look at the animal head-on. It is why part of the UK trade sells woodlice as the Rhino Horned Roller, usually still under the old name frontirostre. If you have seen that advertised somewhere, it is being sold under a synonym of this species. Whether every tub sold under that name holds the same animal is a separate question, and one we would not want to answer for anybody else.

Brandt published the accepted name in 1833, almost certainly for the naturalist Peter Simon Pallas, though he did not say so. Our stock came in from Corfu, which is where the trade name attached itself, but the range deserves straightening out: this is not really a Greek animal. Of the occurrence records held for the species, the overwhelming majority are Croatian, then Italian, then Ukrainian. Greece contributes a handful, and exactly one of those handful is from Corfu. Adriatic and Balkan is the honest description. Corfu is where these particular animals came from, not where the species lives.

Colour and size

The unmorphed animal is dark: a deep brown to purplish grey with lighter marbling that shows best on a clean substrate under decent light. It is a big Armadillidium, quoted at up to about 24mm, although no primary measurement has ever been published and 20mm is what several keepers actually report. The bright orange line we keep is a separate animal to look at and has its own page; if that is the look you are after, start there.

Keeping them

Build for a Mediterranean species, because that is what it is. Every humidity percentage you will see quoted for this animal, ours included, is trade guesswork with no published figure behind it, so work with a gradient instead of a number: one damp end, most of the floor drier, and enough ventilation that the surface is never sitting wet. Give it 5 to 8cm of substrate, leaf litter across the surface, and cork bark and flat stone to sit under. 18 to 28°C, so room temperature is fine in a British house and it wants no supplementary heat at all.

It conglobates fully and readily, which is half of why anyone keeps a large pill woodlouse. Calcium has to be permanently available, both worked through the substrate and loose on the surface to graze on, because an animal this size gets through a lot of it. Feed protein more often than you would for a small species. Past that it is undemanding, breeds steadily once settled, and keeps producing all year in a warm room.

A sensible first large Armadillidium, and a good one to put in front of somebody who thinks pill woodlice are all grey and 8mm long. If you want something in the same size class with a very different silhouette, the horned hauseni is worth a look, and the rest of the genus is in Armadillidium isopods.

Captive-bred. Orders leave here between Monday and Thursday in a ventilated pot with moss beneath the animals, boxed inside a double skin of card, and Royal Mail deliver the next working day before lunchtime. Counts are deliberately generous and never exact. The live arrival guarantee covers every order.