Armadillidium klugii 'Pudding' Isopods

Pudding is the Clown with the red taken out of it. Everything else holds: the same species, Armadillidium klugii Brandt, 1833, the same chocolate to black body, the same three rows of yellow and white spots running down the back. What changes is the skirt along the lateral plates. On the Clown that skirt is red and it is the first thing anybody notices about the animal. On Pudding it is transparent white, and the swap is the single clean differentiator between the two.

Red runs through the rest of the klugii we keep to one degree or another, from the Dubrovnik and Omiš localities through to Yellow Fellow and Skeleton-Nebula. Pudding carries none of it anywhere, which is unusual enough within the species to be the whole reason the line is kept separate. The species belongs to the Adriatic coast, clustered in Dalmatia and running from Croatia down into Montenegro, with records reaching southern Albania and western Greece. It is a big pillbug too, 21mm at the species maximum and 15 to 21mm for adults on this line, and it conglobates fully, shutting into a hard closed sphere with nothing left showing.

What comes out when you push one

Two secretions come out of this animal, from two separate sets of glands. The uropod glands at the rear give a viscous, slightly opaque, odourless fluid that can be drawn out into threads, sticky where you might expect runny. The glands along the lateral plates give something else entirely, watery and pungent. Neither poses a problem to a keeper, but a colony being rummaged through can announce itself, and the sticky thread plus the smell is a more interesting bit of chemistry than the hobby usually credits it with.

An intermediate isopod

Pudding is slow to establish, and that on its own rules it out as a first isopod. Losing a few adults across the opening weeks while the group settles is normal, not a warning sign, though it reads as failure to anyone who has only kept the forgiving species. Leave the colony be, resist the urge to dig through and count, and it comes right and turns moderately prolific. If you want klugii and this would be your first isopod, put a season of something easier behind you first.

Build 5 to 7cm of nutritious base substrate for them to burrow into, then bury the surface under dried hardwood leaves and lay bark across the top of that for cover. The litter is both roof and standing meal, so it needs replacing as it disappears rather than topping up once a year. Calcium sits in the enclosure permanently, a cuttlebone or oyster shell, never as an occasional offering. Past that, a little dried protein each week and the odd piece of vegetable, both put down on the dry side where they will not turn before the colony finds them.

Warmth is the straightforward part. 21 to 27°C covers the range, 23 to 26°C is the band they do best in, and a night fall to 16 to 18°C does no harm whatsoever. Moisture is what decides whether a colony works. Hold the enclosure low to moderate overall and put a strong gradient across it, one side damp and the other noticeably drier, with enough ventilation to keep that difference real instead of theoretical. They will walk to the water when they want it. Our Armadillidium care guide goes into the setup in more detail, and the wider Armadillidium collection is there for comparison.

Every colony leaves here packed the same way. It sits in a ventilated deli tub on damp sphagnum, and the tub is then walled into an outer box of double-thickness card so that nothing can shift about on the journey. Sending runs Monday to Thursday and stops there, on a tracked Royal Mail next-day service due before 1pm. Each group ships with a few animals over the number ordered, under our live arrival guarantee.