How do isopods reproduce

Our goal is to offer only what the Isopods will devour within hours at each feeding, and only offer more food once the original amount has been gone for days. If an abundance of nutrient-rich food is left out for too long, it may attract unwanted guests like Fungus Gnats. Harmless but annoying, more info in VC For this reason, it is absolutely critical not to offer too much food at one time. To start, we recommend adding a pencil eraser sized portion of either Repashy Product and checking to see how quickly it's devoured.

From there, it should be easier to get an idea of exactly how much a specific culture will devour within a given time. It's better to feed a little less than to feed a little too much. We recommend against feeding Isopods fish flakes, rice, cereal, and dog food. After experimenting with all three in the past, we found mostly negative results in comparison to our usual method described above.

We've seen some commercial products being marketed towards a "once and done" solution towards feeding Isopods within a vivarium.

We wouldn't recommend a practice like this, since long-term abundances in nutrient rich substances can result in various opportunistic pests proliferating within the live environment. Virgin cardboard has been used as a source of cellulose within the hobby for years.

If you have more info on the topic of adding calcium directly to a substrate, please email us at support neherpetoculture. We aim to offer the most complete advice we can, and would love to hear from you! Most basic style enclosures are built by Isopod enthusiasts, breeders, or by those in an educational setting.

We recommend providing an enclosure with at least 6 quarts in overall volume about 1. As the population grows, the size of the container can be increased considerably. The Isopods we work with won't readily climb clean glass or plastic containers with vertical sides.

A Sterilite container, small aquarium, or tiny glass terrarium would work great for this purpose depending on your aesthetic goals. Providing a small vented area on the top of the enclosure is especially important, considering adequate airflow has proven to be highly beneficial to Isopods in captivity. The ideal size of a vent depends on your ambient conditions, but we personally add a 2in vent on 6 quart 1.

All vented areas should be covered by fine screen mesh to prevent unwanted guests from joining your Isopod colony. Other options include more expensive 2-micron filters, and less expensive coffee filters. We use our non-toxic black silicone as adhesive for adding screen.

The substrate is admittedly a little "over-engineered" for a simple enclosure like this, but it's the basis of all of our breeder cultures here at NEHERP, and we've had great luck with it over the past few years. Substrate should be at least a couple inches deep, and a few inches away from the top of the enclosure. A thin layer of Leaf Litter is then applied on top of the substrate, with care taken to ensure it doesn't reach too far up the sides to allow for Isopods to escape.

We recommend moistening the whole enclosure evenly at first as an easy baseline. Afterward, one end of every enclosure is kept slightly more dry than the other to allow the Isopods to naturally hydroregulate. We try to keep all of our Isopods between 73FF year-round. If your room temperature is significantly cooler, it may be worth purchasing an Under Tank Heater, and placing it on one side of the enclosure to allow the Isopods to thermoregulate.

Isopods kept in a basic enclosure won't benefit from the food described in the above "Natural Live Vivarium Detritus" paragraph, so it's critical to provide food from both the "Leaf Litter" and "Nutrient Rich Food" categories instead. This section will illustrate in detail how to care for Isopods within a live vivarium environment, and what one can expect in terms of long term maintenance. The following advice applies to vivariums built to the specs described in Vivarium Construction , and may not apply to enclosures built using methods we wouldn't recommend.

If you'd like to learn how to build a live vivarium yourself, we encourage you to check out VC Isopods can play a critical role as detritivores within a live vivarium environment.

They do a great job of helping to process fallen leaves and other detritus produced by co-habitants. The widely held belief that Isopods directly decompose waste within a live vivarium is actually a misconception.

Isopods aren't responsible for decomposing these materials directly, but they do greatly contribute to the fragmentation of organic matter. In our experience, Isopods are more effective at quickly breaking-down larger bits of detritus than Springtails, which helps ensure waste is processed a little quicker than it would otherwise.

Compared to Springtails, Isopods are also less prone to dessication drying out in an enclosure, which allows them to be a little more bold by climbing higher surfaces to reach things which might otherwise be missed. In our experience, Isopods also help to prevent substrate from compacting over time. It's important to add microfauna to a live vivarium as soon as it's planted, to ensure no opportunistic detritivores have a chance to establish themselves first.

We don't recommend manual agitation stirring it up after it's been poured, since doing so may injure the fragile Isopods. After the Isopods have a moment to work themselves down into the substrate they usually will pretty quickly , Leaf Litter can be added to the vivarium as the final touch. The same procedure applies to Springtails. We recommend waiting as long as possible, to ensure the Microfauna have plenty of time to establish healthy populations. We'd expect to find signs of Isopod activity throughout the leaf litter layers after about weeks, where they'll be found feeding on the decaying leaves.

Even if your inhabitant species won't need it that humid in the long run, keeping it that way in the short term will help the Isopods get a head start before the primary inhabitant is introduced. This practice helps the plants, Springtails, and mycorrhizal fungi too! All vivariums require replenishment of Leaf Litter over time, but it's extra important to remain diligent if Isopods are introduced. If Isopods are a secondary inhabitant species, additional food sources are not usually required considering the abundance of leaf litter, naturally shed plant leaves, and inhabitant waste which will be present.

In some rare cases where there isn't enough available nutrients, adding very small amounts of nutritional food may be beneficial to an Isopod population within a vivarium. Very humid enclosures can be misted a little less often, with the primary goal being to ensure the substrate never dries out. Live vivarium substrate will sustain plant life, mycorrhizal fungi, beneficial microbes, and resist breaking down long-term. It should also remain airy enough to allow microfauna to travel freely from top-to-bottom within the substrate layer.

More specific advice will depend on the type of vivarium you'll be designing and the type of inhabitant if any you'll be caring for. Below we'll describe all of the common vivarium setups which have unique care advice for Isopods. Link , and are even a good fit for an office or dorm room.

If the keeping conditions are fine and you keep males and females in the same terrarium you will not be able to stop them from reproducing. But the uncontrollable mating could become a problem if the tank you keep them in, gets too full. So before starting to breed isopods make sure you have enough space to put them into.

Before you can start breeding your own isopods, you should make sure you have both genders in the tank. The clearest gender identification feature of all isopods can be found on the underside. To do this you carefully grab the isopod or put it into a transparent vessel and look at the end of the abdomen. I use reading glasses for this, of course you can also use a magnifying glass to see the differences better. From the shape of the segment plates you can see that the male isopods have a pointed arch and the females have a rectangular shape.

Some porcellio kinds have a phenotypic sex determination which means you can tell the difference by the outer appearance. Most of the time the uropods will tell which gender your isopod is. Males often have a longer last pair of legs. Porcellio silvestri females shine with a full and bright orange while the males are more plain in general. In the next part i will explain a little about sex determination of armadillidium-kinds pillbugs. As soon as female isopods are pubescent usually only takes a few months , the brood puch marsupium will begin to show up.

You will find it between he first and fifth pair of legs. Especially with pilbugs, the brood pouch is often the only difference between males and females. These types of tests require test organisms that reproduce rapidly and generate a sufficient offspring number. Furthermore, these organisms should be readily available in the field and well adapted to laboratory manipulation.

The present study aimed to assess a population of the pantropical terrestrial isopod Cubaris murina Brandt, , under laboratory conditions. Aspects related to C. Periodic spraying of distilled water maintained an adequate moisture level to avoid either desiccation or fungal growth, and moldy food items were immediately removed. Ovigerous females at different ages were collected from cultures and transferred individually or with a male to plastic boxes 6 x 6 cm, 5 cm height , containing 2 cm of soil, similar to the culture boxes.

For each female, the number and duration of ovigerous periods, the offspring number per brood, and the molt frequency were recorded. Neonates were removed from the box at the moment of counting. The ovigerous period was considered from the parturial molt, because the passage of the fertilized eggs to marsupium coincides with this molt Heeley, , until birth of the young. The successive broods were compared for the mean offspring number using Tukey-Kramer multiple comparison tests Zar, The C. Adult males can be identified externally by the modifications of the first 2 pairs of pleopods, which form the external genitalia used in sperm transfer Sutton, The number of females versus males was compared using a Student t -test Zar, Five different densities were established: 6, 12, 18, 24 and 30 animals per culture box cm 2 , employing the previous cultivation procedure.

For each treatment, 3 replicates were used with animal ages ranging from 5 to 8 days. Animals were not weighed at the beginning of the experiment to avoid additional stress, but were distributed at random to avoid bias. The weight of a separate randomly chosen sample of 75 young individuals, with age ranging from 5 to 8 days, was averaged as initial weight. Specimens were weighed at the 40 th , 77 th and th day of life and fed ad libitum.

Dead organisms were continuously removed and not replaced. In the event of significant differences, a Tukey-Kramer multiple comparison test was conducted. The offspring number from broods was recorded and analyzed, together with the time from 90 ovigerous periods. The results of 3 successive broods are shown in Table 1.

One mating was enough to obtain at least five broods. Although in group A mating could occur only before the experiment beginning, the females became just as frequently gravid as the females from group B, where mating could occur more frequently. Most specimens consumed their own exuviae, as observed by Nair in a population of Porcellio laevis Latreille, Moreover, three cases of cannibalism were observed, where the female ate the male during its molting.

Concurrently, some isopods had difficulties during molting and died, because they could not remove their own exuviae. A sex-ratio of However, at the end of the experiment th day , there was no significant difference in weight between the different densities. It is possible that the higher level of mortality occurring in the higher density groups led to this result, hence lower densities showed far more favorable conditions to survival Figure 2.

All offspring were counted at the th day. The females in the lowest densities generated more offspring, when compared to higher densities. However, the nonparametric Dunn's multiple comparison tests did not reveal any statistical difference among treatments. Females of C. Continuous reproduction under laboratory conditions for at least 4 broods was found by Vink and Kurniawati for Porcellionides pruinosus Brandt, , and for at least 6 broods by Mocquard et al.

Vink and Kurniawati found no reduction in the size of successive broods after one mating for a population of P. The results of the present study are in good agreement with these previous findings and confirm the ability of isopods to reproduce without continuous mating.

The absence of a statistical difference between the number of males and females born in the laboratory indicates a potential equal effort on male and female reproductive tactics.

A comparison between C. The density of individuals in the maintenance boxes plays an important role in the survival of the organisms, because the lowest densities 6 and 12 animals per box provided higher growth rate and reproductive output but not in a significant way.

These results are in good agreement with Caseiro et al. The decreased growth rate of individuals in high density boxes had a direct effect on reproduction, because there was a positive relationship between female size and fecundity Nair, ; Hassal and Dangerfield, Therefore, intraindividual competition at high densities affected the individual body size, which then influenced survival and reproduction success.

Considering that the isopods were fed ad libitum, the negative effects on survival, growth and reproduction were not related to lack of food.