Porcellio scaber 'Whiteout' Isopods for Sale

We sell four pale woodlice and they get confused with each other constantly, so before anything else, here is how to tell this one apart.

Which white one is it

Whiteout is the solid one. An opaque yellowish-white to cream body, a translucent skirt around the edge, and white eyes, which is the character that settles it in a second. Some individuals carry a faint V marking across the back. Ghost is the same species but paler and more see-through, washed grey instead of cream, with normal dark eyes. Snow White is a different animal altogether, Porcellio laevis, smooth-backed where this one is rough. And Bolivari Ghost is a third species again, P. bolivari, and a good deal larger.

Get the eyes and the texture right and you will never mix them up again.

The animal

Porcellio scaber Latreille, 1804, the common rough woodlouse, native across central and western Europe and now more or less everywhere else people have carried it. Scaber means rough, and running a finger over the back tells you why.

Adults reach around 17 to 18mm. Worth a note on that: the trade generally says 18, while the British Myriapod and Isopod Group's recording figure for the species is 17. Neither is wrong, they are just measured by different people for different reasons.

'Whiteout' is a colour line fixed by selection, not something conjured out of nowhere. Wild P. scaber throws pale, orange, yellow and brown individuals on its own; what breeders did was take a pale variant and keep it consistent. That is worth saying because it also means the line can drift if you let it, and picking your breeding stock matters.

One thing to watch on a pale colony

If animals in a white culture start turning blue or violet, that is not a new morph. Terrestrial isopods including P. scaber can carry an iridovirus, and infected animals go a bright blue or lavender before they die. It is far more visible on a pale morph than on a wild-type grey one. Isolate anything that changes colour rather than breeding from it.

Keeping them

Easy, and a fair first isopod. 17 to 26°C, so an unheated room is fine. Moisture on a gradient of roughly 55 to 70 per cent: damp at one end, dry over most of the floor, and good airflow throughout; this is not a species that wants a sealed wet box.

A little over five centimetres of substrate under hardwood leaf litter, with cork bark to hide beneath. It cannot roll into a ball, as nothing in Porcellio can, so it clings and runs instead. It is protein-hungry and will strip its own moults and each other if you let the protein run out, so offer silkworm pupae or something like them twice a week, and keep calcium in permanently.

Very prolific. A small starter group turns into a working culture quickly, which makes this a sound choice for a first bioactive clean-up crew as well as a display animal. More of the complex is in Porcellio isopods.

Captive-bred. Orders leave us in the first half of the week, never a Friday, on a next-working-day Royal Mail service that arrives before one o'clock. Animals ride on a moss bed in a punched cup inside a stout outer box. We count generously, and live arrival is guaranteed.