Of course almost every new isopod is the "biggest" but this is the longest species according to species literature (documented at 3.2 cm body length). The male has long uropods and tends to be longer than the female.
Porcellio magnificus
- Thread starter Allpet Roaches
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mantisfan101
Third Instar
I personally prefer the larger porcellio compared to the newer cubaris sp...awesome picture!
I like the big Porcellio the most. Many of the Cubaris are nice/neat but I don't understand how little differences in color on relatively small pills that don't look horribly different from Armadillidium (which are bigger and come in brighter colors) are selling for $40-50 for one tiny specimen. Good thing about Cubaris is so far they seem to all be very easy so in a few years it's hard do believe they all won't be down to $10 a dozen.
I love these guys but I can't seem to keep them happy for some reason. They'd breed and grow, but I see high cannibalism rate and I occasionally find specimens that seem to have died from stress. I ended up selling away my entire colony because of this 
Was the colony male heavy, and were most of the deaths of sexually mature females? I've had lots of trouble with Spanish Porcellio males killing females, probably due to continuous mating attempts leading to stress... Removing the males or only having one male in at a time in my starter colonies usually fixed the issue.I love these guys but I can't seem to keep them happy for some reason. They'd breed and grow, but I see high cannibalism rate and I occasionally find specimens that seem to have died from stress. I ended up selling away my entire colony because of this
Mine had a good mix of male and female. Ones that died were mostly small and medium sized juveniles. I actually speculated that to be a problem and removed all the big males and left only one small male one time and that still didn't stop the deaths so I stopped removing males at that point.
Dang, sorry to hear that... At that point I usually attribute random deaths to lack of ventilation or humidity levels being too high, but if neither of those were the problem, I truly don't know what was...
I have not witnessed cannibalism of living specimens and I have had hundreds of mid-size to adult specimens in one tiny shoebox. It is a rather touchy species on the humidity and ventilation and it took me some years to get a hang of it. Both solid and screen lid attempts proved extremely harmful over a long period but seemed to work okay the first half a year. I think it is as much the cage design as the level of care and you have to water a small amount every day or two depending on how fast the substrate dries (during certain times of year the humidity can be high and watering is not needed for weeks).I love these guys but I can't seem to keep them happy for some reason. They'd breed and grow, but I see high cannibalism rate and I occasionally find specimens that seem to have died from stress. I ended up selling away my entire colony because of this
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Hmmm....sounds like they are a lot more pain in the butt to keep than I anticipated. Quite glad I got rid of them now cause I'm using that space for Porcellio expansus, which are doing much better.
The problem with Spanish Porcellio is that since lots of them are so picky about their humidity, how humid you keep them really depends on what your ambient humidity levels are... And those are different for everyone and change with the seasons.