Armadillidium vulgare 'T+ Albino' Isopods

Say "albino" and most people picture something white, which is what makes the T+ pill bug such a pleasant surprise: it glows. Armadillidium vulgare 'T+ Albino' comes in warm pale-orange to sienna, washed with wispy yellow and gold and often carrying a soft yellow band down the centre of the back, so the whole animal looks lit from within rather than drained of colour. Set against dark substrate it has a honey-and-amber warmth quite unlike the wild grey pill bug, and unlike its near-white sibling too.

The name needs unpicking. The "T" is borrowed from reptile keeping, where it stands for tyrosinase. That is a melanin enzyme, and no isopod has been shown to colour itself with melanin at all: what pigments a woodlouse is a different class called ommochromes. So the label is a trade name and not a mechanism. What it describes is real enough, an animal that has dropped the dark pigment but kept the warm one, so instead of turning white it turns orange and gold. Its counterpart, the T- (tyrosinase-negative) albino, loses the warm pigment too and comes through near-white, so between the two you can keep the warm version and the cool version of the same idea. Plenty of keepers do exactly that.

Underneath the glow this is ordinary A. vulgare, the most widespread and best-understood pill bug on the planet, which means the care is as forgiving as isopods get. They are true roly-polys, sealing into a tight, gapless ball when disturbed, and they carry all the hardiness of the wild type. That makes the T+ a lovely first "special" isopod, a step up in looks from the plain grey without any step up in difficulty. They sit alongside the other vulgare morphs such as the speckled Magic Potion and the two-tone Jelly Bean, and the rest of the genus is in the wider Armadillidium collection.

Keep a starter group in a six to ten litre tub with a clip-lock lid and cross-ventilation drilled into the sides. These lean drier rather than tropical, so hold a moderate humidity with a gradient: one lightly damp end under sphagnum and leaf litter, the other left to run drier, with airflow over the top to head off mould. Normal heated room temperature suits them the year round, somewhere around 18 to 24°C. For substrate use a living base of flake soil, well-rotted hardwood and organic topsoil at least five centimetres deep, and steer clear of a plain coco-coir base, which holds damp but offers nothing to graze.

Cap the substrate with a generous layer of leaf litter, magnolia and oak both ideal, add cork bark for cover, and leave a calcium source such as cuttlebone or crushed eggshell in permanently, which keeps moulting clean and the warm colour crisp. Feeding is easy: leaf litter and rotting wood as the constant base, soft veg like courgette, squash and sweet potato a few times a week with leftovers lifted out promptly, and an occasional pinch of protein to keep a breeding colony productive. Being a true Armadillidium they will graze soft plants in a planted setup, so plant tough if you want the greenery to survive.

Breeding is steady rather than explosive. A settled group kept warm, fed well and given constant calcium carries young in the female's pouch and releases live miniatures that show the warm tones early; keep the colony morph-to-morph and, since the trait is recessive, the offspring come through as T+ albinos too. There is more on how these colours work in our note on isopod genetics, colours and morphs. Every order is captive-bred, boxed double-walled around a ventilated tub of damp sphagnum and posted Monday to Thursday by tracked next-day Royal Mail, with a live-arrival guarantee and a 20% overcount as standard.