Armadillidium Peraccae Isopods

Three countries, and the trade names none of them correctly. Armadillidium peraccae is recorded from the south-eastern coast of Italy, from the northern Aegean islands of Thásos and Lésvos, and from the coast of the Sea of Marmara, which puts it in Turkey. Almost every listing you will find, ours until today included, calls it simply Greek, and two of those three countries never get a mention.

The name

Tua described it in 1900 and named it after Mario Giacinto Peracca, who was thirty-nine at the time and very much alive. Peracca was a herpetologist. He worked on lizards and frogs and published on the reptiles and amphibians of South America and Africa, but he did collect this one: Tua's description says the very numerous type specimens, from San Cataldo and the Rauccio wood near Lecce, Otranto and Bari, were gathered by Count Peracca himself, and dedicates the species to him for it. He lived from 1861 to 1923.

The animal

Broad, heavy-set and up to 18 to 20mm on Tua's original series, with a coarse tuberculate back that reads as trilobite more than woodlouse. The base colour of the captive line is a bluish slate-grey (wild animals run greyer or yellower, and the Bari population is plain yellow), and on paler individuals the blue lifts and catches the light. It conglobates fully, it climbs well, and it spends the day clamped under bark in groups rather than dug in.

The same year, 1900, Tua also described Armadillidium gestroi. The two animals want broadly similar treatment, which is unusual enough among Armadillidium to be worth knowing if you keep both.

Keeping them

Middle of the road, and that is the appeal. Hold it around 45 to 55 per cent, built as a gradient rather than a single figure, damp at one end and drier across most of the floor so the colony picks its own spot. It is one of the drier-kept Armadillidium, an animal of hot, dry Salento summers that does not thrive in high humidity, which makes it an easy addition to a shelf already running other Mediterranean species. Our full peraccae care guide covers the gradient, diet and breeding in detail, so this listing will not repeat it.

One thing worth repeating even though the guide covers it: give it bark. Flat cork, slabs of it, stacked with gaps, because that is where the colony will live and a tub without it just looks empty. On temperature it wants 18 to 24°C, and ordinary room temperature in most British houses sits inside that band for most of the year, so nothing needs plugging in.

Feed the ordinary detritivore mix, with white-rotted hardwood and hardwood leaf litter as the staple, protein a few times a week, and cuttlebone or limestone permanently available. It breeds readily once it has settled and a starter group builds into a working colony without much intervention from you.

A good choice if you want a large, structural-looking pill woodlouse that does not ask for special treatment, and a straightforward one to slot in alongside cultures you already run. Our other pill woodlice sit under Armadillidium isopods. For a second species with a very narrow published range, look at corcyraeum.

All captive-bred here. We never post livestock on a Friday, so a weekend order leaves on the Monday. Animals travel bedded on moss in a vented cup inside a corrugated outer, and Royal Mail get them to you the next working day ahead of 1pm. There are always a few more in the tub than you paid for, and live arrival is guaranteed.