Starsky Isopods (Dryadillo sp.)

A near-black shell flecked all over with warm gold, as though someone had flicked a loaded brush across it. The speckling is irregular rather than patterned, denser toward the flanks and the back end, and the plates carry a fine granular texture that catches the light and gives some individuals a faint pearl sheen across the middle of the body. The eyes stay small and dark, the legs and antennae are pale, and the whole animal is a neat rounded oval that tucks into a tight ball when it feels exposed. It is one of the better looking dark isopods in the hobby and it does not photograph as well as it looks in person.

Worth knowing before you order: the gold arrives late. Juveniles come through mostly plain, showing the base colour with little or no speckling, and the markings build as they mature. Keepers also report a fair amount of variation within a single colony, so expect some animals to be spectacular and others to stay closer to grey. That is normal for this species rather than a sign anything is wrong.

What it is actually called

This is one of the more tangled names in the hobby, so it is worth setting out. You will see the Starsky sold as Merulanella sp. 'Starsky' across most of Europe, as Dryadillo sp. 'Starsky' and Sinodillo sp. 'Starsky' by the two UK sellers who carry it, and on older stock lists as Armadillo intermixtus 'Starsky'. Four genus names, one animal.

Merulanella is the one that is now clearly wrong. The 2025 reassessment of that genus left it holding three species, all of them from New Caledonia, which is why our Red Diablo and the rest of that group moved across to Ardentiella. The Starsky is not a New Caledonian animal and it is not a Merulanella.

Armadillo intermixtus is not much safer. Budde-Lund put that name up in 1904 on a thin description, and it currently sits flagged as a doubtful name in need of investigation. Hanging a living animal on it is not an identification so much as a placeholder.

That leaves Dryadillo, erected by Taiti, Ferrara and Kwon in 1992, a genuine genus in the family Armadillidae with a range across southern China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Vietnam and Indonesia. It is the placement most keepers have settled on and it is the one I list it under here.

I would rather be straight about the limits of that. Nobody has described this animal. There is no type specimen, no published locality and no paper that has looked at the trade stock at all. Every genus above is the hobby's own reading of what the animal resembles, and Dryadillo is simply the most defensible of them. If it is ever formally described the name may change again, as it has twice already.

Where it comes from

Unresolved, and I will not pretend otherwise. The German breeders who supply most of Europe give Thailand. Follow the old Armadillo intermixtus name instead and you land on Malaysia, where the original material came from. Dryadillo as a genus is mostly a southern Chinese and Vietnamese group. There is no collection record behind any of it, so Southeast Asia is as far as I am willing to go.

Size, and how long it takes

Adults run around 10 to 15 mm, so this is a species you keep to look at closely rather than for bulk. More importantly, it is slow. Keepers report juveniles taking somewhere between a year and eighteen months to reach adult size, and colonies building steadily rather than quickly.

At this price that is the first thing to understand. You are buying an animal that will take most of a year to show you what it looks like grown, and a colony that will not pay you back in numbers the way a Dairy Cow does. If that is not what you want, buy something faster and enjoy it.

Keeping them

On temperature the sources disagree, and by more than rounding. The German trade keeps them warm, up around 24 to 28C. Other keepers run 21 to 26C. I would hold the low to mid twenties, steady, away from radiators and direct sun, and never stand the enclosure on a heat mat, which dries and overheats the floor from underneath.

On humidity there is no figure published for this species at all, only a genus-wide range so broad it tells you nothing. What works with the rest of this family is a gradient rather than a number. Keep one end damp with sphagnum and deep leaf litter, let the far end run drier, give the box real cross-ventilation over the top, and let the colony pick its own spot. Warm still air inside a sealed tub is what kills these Asian species, not a few points either way on a hygrometer.

Build the floor on decaying leaf litter and crumbling white-rotted wood, with a scoop of flake soil worked through for nutrition. That layer is food as much as flooring and wants topping up as they grind through it. Keep cuttlebone in permanently for clean moults, offer a pinch of protein once a week, and start a springtail culture in the tub on day one. Everything they eat is in food and supplements.

Two behavioural notes. They are nervous for the first few weeks and will vanish when you open the lid, which settles with routine. And the young ones climb well, so the lid carries the whole burden of keeping them in. Check it before the tub goes on the shelf, not after.

Who it suits

Not a first isopod, but not an expert-only animal either. The trade rates it moderate and that matches what I would expect from the group. If you have run a Dream or a Hainan Black through a full year you have the husbandry for this already, and the Starsky is the bolder looking animal of the three. If you like this corner of the hobby, the two-tone Sinodillo 'China' and the Ember Bee sit close to it, and the rest of the range is on our isopods for sale page.

It is also genuinely hard to get hold of here. Only a couple of UK sellers list it at all, and it is usually out of stock when they do, so if the size you want is unavailable it is worth checking back rather than assuming it has gone.

What you get

Captive-bred stock, posted Monday to Thursday by tracked next-day Royal Mail in an insulated double-walled box with damp sphagnum and a heat pack when it is cold, and covered by a live arrival guarantee. As with every isopod order, you get at least twenty per cent more animals than you paid for.

I have kept exotic animals since 2003 and isopods since January 2021, and this is the sort of species where a straight answer beforehand saves everybody trouble. If you are weighing it against another Asian morph, ask me before you order.