Year Recap

January wrapped up my first year of raising isopods, and the 2025 Spring season looks promising!

In the absence of being able to conduct isolated and scientifically accurate experiments to prove, I will simply share my observations and thoughts as a keeper.

I was not able to separate out all pods by individual morph, because so many of the recognizable traits show up in different combos and overlapping displays. More research needs to be done, but as of right now I have only been selecting the highest marked individuals of A. Vulgare and letting them breed on their own.

My babies born in captivity all showed the same beautiful patterns as their parents, ruling out that their diet has a direct impact on their color display. A handful of babies clearly displaying the Pastel morph also had bright yellow, nearly white spotting and stripes. The white border as the back plates overlap could indicate that the Pastel morph is actually an overgrowth of the shell plates. Of the few who displayed this highly expressed markings + Pastel moved visibly slower and more stiffly than their peers, and all of them died before reaching full maturation.

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One of the babies born in captivity with the Pastel / bright pattern combo who died before reaching full size.

There is a severe dearth of taxonomists researching or describing anything about isopod genetics and color / morph patterns. Almost all the information I can find is from fellow keepers offering anecdotal evidence.  After reaching out to the Entomology Department at UGA (they do not have a Herpetology Department) I was able to find a guide to identifying terrestrial isopods in the East Coast, USA, and was encouraged to email the author to find out more information about how to describe my local morphs. Sadly, the author died in 2017 and nearly all of his cited sources were his own work.

While many observations about isopods can be intuited from better documented information about other crustaceans, very little of it is formally / scientifically proven or validated.

Of course, being biased towards my local morphs, I would love to simply add their data to a national database or to anyone conducting research on isopod taxonomy. But if no one is doing that already, how can one contribute? I will continue to pursue ways to formalize the description of my local A. Vulgare. In the meantime, I will continue to use this site to post my observations and findings, and hopefully spread more love for my morph!

Aside from the A. Vulgares, I have been keeping small colonies of a few more species which are not native to my area. They provide some interesting behaviors to compare and contrast, and I will make captive bred babies available for adoption, but my focused research will only be on Armadillidium Vulgare.