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, published on the reptiles and amphibians of South America and Africa, and as far as anyone can tell never touched an isopod in his life. He lived from 1861 to 1923. The dedication was Tua's compliment to a colleague, not a record of work on woodlice, and you will see it written up the other way round in a few places.

The animal

Broad, heavy-set and around 17 to 18mm, with a coarse tuberculate back that reads as trilobite more than woodlouse. The base colour is a bluish slate-grey, 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 60 to 75 per cent, built as a gradient rather than a single figure, damp at one end and drier at the other so the colony picks its own spot. It is neither one of the dry specialists nor a swamp animal, 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, which is ordinary room temperature in most British houses 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.