Critters
Powder orange / powder blue isopod
Porcellionides pruinosus
Fine in a closed jarGrazes plants
A quick, busy isopod that breeds fast on the surface.
What the simulation uses
- Eats litter
- 1.5 mg/day each
- Dead leaves one animal shreds a day, turning them back into soil.
- Eats mould
- 0.2 mg/day each
- Mould one animal grazes a day, keeping fuzz and grey mould down.
- Colony at most
- 400 per m²
- How many the floor can feed when food is plentiful; less food, fewer.
- Starving loses
- 2 % a day
- How fast a colony thins when the jar cannot feed it.
- Eats
- decaying plant, leaf litter, rotting wood, frass, fungi, animal waste, fish food protein
- Foods it lives on; the jar feeds it from whichever of these it has.
- Humidity
- 60 to 90 % RH
- Air moisture it needs.
- Temperature
- 18 to 30 °C
- Comfortable range; beyond it the colony suffers.
- Doubles in
- 45 days
- Time for the colony to double with plenty of food.
- Lives
- 712.5 days
- How long one animal lives.
Care
- Size
- 8 to 12 mm
- Moisture
- Moist
What kills it
- total substrate drying without a moist refuge
- flooding
- sustained temps above ~32 C
- low protein/calcium (cannibalism, bad molts)
Description
It lives about a year in the wild and two to three years in captivity. Because it tolerates drier spots than dwarf whites, it suits open or mixed-moisture setups. Always leave a moist refuge, and offer protein and calcium for healthy molts.
Also called powder blue, powder orange, plum woodlouse.
Estimated, where sources were thin: size_mm; clutch_or_offspring; maturity_days; generation_days; population_doubling_days; temp_c; humidity_rh_pct.