Spherillo sp. "Dream" Isopods

Most exotic isopods that look like this one get killed with kindness, sealed under a lid kept far too wet, so I will lead with the single most useful thing I can tell you about the Dream: it does not want a swamp. For all its jungle looks, Spherillo sp. 'Dream' comes from Vietnam expecting moderate humidity and moving air rather than a closed box of sodden moss. Get that one idea right and most of the rest of its care falls into place.

The Dream travels the hobby under an unusually long list of names. You will see it sold as Spherillo sp. 'Dream', as Cubaris sp. 'Dream' or 'Shrub', and, as the taxonomy has been argued back and forth, as Dryadillo sp. 'Dream' and Merulanella sp. 'Dream'. They are all the same animal, a small member of the family Armadillidae, and I list it here the way most keepers still ask for it.

It earns the name. The colouring is soft and variable, drifting between off-white, pale yellow, light brown and a smoky grey-green, scattered with rows of small yellow spots and finished with a paler skirt around the rim. No two look quite alike, and a mixed group in good light has a watercolour quality that photographs beautifully. Adults stay small, reaching somewhere around 12 to 15mm, so this is a species you keep to watch closely rather than for size. It is calm and mostly night-active, grazing across the surface after dark and tucking down into the substrate through the day, and like others in the armadillo, or pill, isopod family it will curl up when it feels exposed.

The care, then, is about balance rather than moisture for its own sake. Aim for a humidity of roughly 55 to 70 percent, damp at one end of the enclosure and drier at the other, with cross-ventilation so the air never turns stale; a soggy, airless box is the quickest way to lose a group. It likes to be kept warm, in the region of 22 to 26C and happier toward the upper end than left cold, so a warm room suits it far better than a cool windowsill. Never stand the enclosure on a heat mat, which dries and overheats the substrate from below.

Build the floor on a hardwood base of decaying leaf litter and crumbling white-rotted wood, with a little sphagnum worked into the damp end. That leaf and wood layer is food as much as flooring, and it wants topping up as the colony grinds through it. Beyond the substrate they take the usual isopod extras in small amounts, soft vegetables and the occasional pinch of protein such as fish flake or dried shrimp, and they need a steady source of calcium, so keep cuttlebone or crushed shell in the enclosure to reharden the shell after each moult.

If the Dream draws you into these soft-coloured Vietnamese exotics, it keeps good company with our Tri Colour, another former Merulanella from the same part of the world, and the Sinodillo 'China', which has been through the same run of name changes; you will find the whole range on our isopods for sale page.

The Dream you receive is captive-bred rather than wild-collected, which is how this species has been kept for years now and part of why it settles in so readily. I count every culture generously, adding around a fifth again over the number you order, and send them out in a ventilated tub with damp sphagnum inside an insulated, double-walled box, dispatched Monday to Thursday by Royal Mail next-day delivery, with a heat pack tucked in when the weather is cold and a live arrival guarantee on every order. After five years with isopods and a good deal longer with everything else that lives in a tank, I still rate the Dream among the prettier exotics you can keep, as long as you resist the urge to keep it wet. Give it warmth, airflow and a deep bed of leaf and wood, and it pays you back with one of the softest colour palettes in the hobby.