Porcellio scaber 'Ghost' Isopods

Take the plain grey woodlouse from under every British plant pot, drain the colour out of it, and you get this: a pale, spectral version of the most ordinary isopod there is. This is Porcellio scaber 'Ghost', a washed-out morph of the common rough woodlouse, sold as the Ghost or Ghost Scaber. It carries far less pigment than the wild grey-brown type, so the body reads as a soft, ghostly grey-white with a faint luminous quality in good light. Everything else about it, though, is pure scaber: the same species you have turned up under logs and pots your whole life, just quietly bleached.

Look closely and the low-pigment colouring is the only thing that has changed. The Ghost keeps scaber's pebbled, roughened shell, its flat oval build and its familiar 15 to 18mm adult size, so you get all the texture of the wild woodlouse in a pale, spectral shade. It sits a step apart from its sister morph, the Whiteout: where the Whiteout is a fuller, more opaque white, the Ghost stays paler and more translucent, a soft washed-grey rather than a solid one. Like every Porcellio, it cannot conglobate, so it will never roll into a ball. It scurries and clamps flat against bark instead.

Keep it because it gives you an unusual, atmospheric colour on top of one of the toughest isopods in the hobby. P. scaber is European, hardy and famously forgiving, the species most keepers cut their teeth on, and the Ghost inherits every bit of that resilience. It is fast, prolific and hard to discourage, which makes it both a rewarding beginner Porcellio and a hard-working cleanup crew for a bioactive tank. If you are building a scaber collection, it sits naturally alongside the varied Scaber Mix, the warm reddish Rust and the dark Lava, all the same species in different coats. Browse the wider Porcellio collection to see how they compare.

Care is about as easy as isopods get. Ordinary room temperature suits them, anywhere from 18 to 24°C, with no heating needed year-round in most UK homes. Aim for moderate humidity around 60 to 70% and, crucially, build a gradient rather than one flat level: keep roughly three-quarters of the enclosure damp and leave the last quarter dry, so the animals can choose. Give them medium-to-high ventilation, as Porcellio dislike stagnant, stuffy air, and line the floor with leaf litter, rotting hardwood and cork bark for cover and grazing. A layer of flake soil worked into the substrate adds the decaying wood content they feed on.

Two things matter more for this morph than for most. Keep calcium constantly available, through cuttlebone, crushed eggshell or limestone, so the colony moults cleanly, and remember that scaber is decidedly protein-hungry: offer a little animal protein regularly, such as fish flake or dried shrimp, and the breeding females in particular will thank you for it. Get those two right and breeding largely takes care of itself. Females carry their young in a brood pouch and release fully formed miniatures, and a settled Ghost colony builds up quickly and reliably, among the most productive Porcellio you can keep. A thriving springtail culture alongside them mops up mould around the protein and rounds out the cleanup crew.

Every Ghost we send is captive-bred here and packed with care: a ventilated tub cushioned in damp sphagnum, boxed inside a double-walled carton for the journey. We dispatch Monday to Thursday by tracked next-day Royal Mail, aiming for delivery by 1pm, and every order carries our live-arrival guarantee along with a 20% overcount as standard, so you receive a little more than you ordered.