Spiky Treasures of the Canary Islands

Hello and welcome. 🙂

I have fallen in love with micro-arthropods ever since I started keeping things like Mezium affine and Rhyscotus texensis. If they have neat body structures/colors, I could care less about the size and, if anything, it allows you to keep that many more of them! Let me speak to you a tale of how I gained one of my most prized minute species to date.

We must go back weeks and weeks in the time machine once again to meet the moment when I was having a specific chat with someone who will be downright famous over here because of how much he will show up, Anthony Molnar.  We were discussing how a dazzling isopod species I had my eye on had unexplainably crashed for him. No one is quite sure why this ever happened, but he didn't lose every individual. Some time later, his colony thankfully recovered and before I knew it, he had some available. As you can imagine, I locked in a group without hesitation. 😁 Soon enough, I got my box and opened it to find 7 out of the 8 Porcellio sp. "Spiky - Canary" had arrived in perfect shape! Let me talk to you more about these tiny knights in spiky armor.

Porcellio sp. "Spiky - Canary" is an isopod that has yet to be identified down to species-level and comes from the Canary Islands. It has some of the most pronounced texturization of any species in the hobby and so Canarian Spiky Isopod might be a fitting label if common names mean anything to you. Of course, if there's another highly-textured species from the same location, this would be moot. LOL These guys are on the smaller side of the scale for isopods topping out at about 2/3 the size of Porcellio scaber. They begin life white and eventually transition to a slate grey color with purple and/or brown hues showing up in between.

I have my thriving colony set up in a 16 oz. container at the moment with 20 large pinholes poked in the lid for ventilation. The substrate is a mix of compost soil, topsoil, perlite, and cypress mulch, which I keep moderately moist and at around an inch and a half in depth. Besides that, there's a piece of bark in there for hiding, some dead leaves for hiding/consuming, and a baby carrot and piece of cuttlebone for munching on.

Spikier than they are large!

Mixed-size individuals

Enclosure

I hope you all enjoyed and exit with a greater appreciation of the world that extends even deeper than just microfauna and the propensity to squint that much harder at some lil arthropods even just in your neighborhood. That'll be it for now and I'll meet you right where I always do - next post. 🙂