Porcellio Nicklesi (True Form) Isopods

"True Form" is our label, not the hobby's. Everywhere else in the world this animal is sold as plain Porcellio nicklesi with no morph name attached, and we added the words to stop it being confused on the shelf with the two coloured lines we also keep. It is the unmorphed animal, and it is the one the species was described from.

The species

Dollfus described it in 1892 from Valencia, first placing it inside Porcellio bolivari at subspecies rank. It was lifted to full species later on, which was a change of rank and not a fresh description, so the 1892 authority still stands without brackets. Note the spelling: nicklesi, with a C. The version doing the rounds with the C missing is a misspelling that has propagated through shop listings, ours included, and we are still unpicking it.

It has barely been recorded. Cifuentes' 2021 survey of Andalusian terrestrial isopods calls it very scarcely cited and lists it from El Alquián and Turrillas in Almería, the Sierra Nevada, and Siles in Jaén, adding Almería as a new province record. Beyond Andalusia it turns up in Barcelona, Cuenca, Huesca and Valencia. Dry inland and coastal Spain, under stones, in ground that spends much of the year hot and hard.

What it looks like, honestly

There is no published colour description of the unmorphed animal. None. The trade generally calls it grey, but that rests on a single sentence in one American listing, and a second American seller describes plain nicklesi as a soft, translucent orange. So instead of certifying a colour, here is what is reliable: a broad, slightly bumpy body around 20mm, closer to 30mm if you include the uropods, and those uropods are the feature. They are unusually long, they trail well past the back of the animal, and they are longer again on males, which makes sexing adults easy.

One more piece of honesty worth having. Robla and colleagues surveyed the Spanish woodlouse trade for Insect Conservation and Diversity in 2025 and found eight to thirteen Porcellio, many of them probably undescribed, being traded under the names of commoner species including P. ornatus, P. violaceus and P. nicklesi. That is a peer-reviewed reason to describe an animal instead of guaranteeing a name, and it applies to everyone selling this species, ourselves included.

Keeping them

Dry, and this is where colonies are lost. The genus reputation says southern European rock-dweller and the instinct is to keep adding moisture. It does not want any. Run the box at roughly 45 to 55 per cent, keep about a fifth of the floor damp and leave the rest arid, and give it real airflow rather than a sealed humid tub. Three to five centimetres of floor is plenty, because depth is not something this animal uses. Stack leaf litter, cork bark and flat stone instead: it wedges into gaps, it does not dig. 18 to 28°C.

Like everything in the genus it cannot roll into a ball, so it runs and jams itself into a crevice. Keep limestone in there permanently and offer protein regularly, silkworm pupae being the easiest way to do it. Breeding is seasonal, not continuous. Nobody has published a maturity figure at all; the six to nine months quoted around the hobby, on our own pages included, is keeper estimate.

Not a beginner animal. The dry regime runs against everything a new keeper is told, and a well-meant misting schedule will finish a colony faster than neglect would. If you want the coloured versions of the same species, we keep Tang and Orange Blaze, and the wider genus sits in Porcellio isopods.

Stock is captive-bred here. Livestock goes out Mon to Thu only, so nothing can sit in a depot across a weekend, and it reaches you the following morning, before one, by Royal Mail. Animals ride in a punched tub bedded with wet moss, inside corrugated board doubled over. We put more in than you paid for. Live arrival guaranteed.