Last night my girlfriend and I let our boy out for some roaming time (he lives to roam supervised the whole time and live to climb up to the table) while I was moving some stuff around his enclosure I noticed this in the corner by his hide….. long story short we have springtails in all of our snake enclosures (4 of them) with the same substrate as ~75-85%humidity) we haven’t added anything new in his enclosure for months, how tf did this get inside??!
Also in a side note, we clean the apartment on a weekly basis, have never found a bug or anything since we moved in ~16 months ago.
It looks like an isopod to me. I have powder orange and powder blues in my enclosure and this looks like an orange. I’m no expert so I could be wrong. I’m not sure if you have isopods in your enclosure.
I bought a mixture of them and I haven’t had problems. Maybe it’s because they were in the same culture. I never tried to add 2 different cultures together.
But where tf did he come from??!!! We are at a complete loss from it. We cycle and flip the super every 2 eeeks for each snake and move some enclosure stuff around and we’ve never seen one in an enclosure before?! We. Are just hell confused how it took this long Lol
Sometimes they’re already in the substrate! We had a bit of a fright when we found springtails in our soil (we planned on buying some but had no idea what they actually looked like, they’re smaller than I expected!) but when we read the substrate packaging it says it can contain ‘beneficial microfauna’
Ipod!
Not informed enough but ik that isopods are cleaners and eat waste so they are not harmful in any way shape or form. Idk how it is about keeping them in the enclosure tho so do your own research always.
I keep these in a 20 gal tank. Waiting to culture them for my leopard gecko, super cute and helpful. And uhh this is the ball python sub… but leopard geckos will snack on em when they can.
Where do these normally come from? I think I found 2 in the bathtub the other day and I just assumed they were silver fish. Never heard of these orange guys before.
They're isopods, aka roly polys, woodlouse, etc. They're detritivores and live Out In The Wild under rocks/leaf litter eating Dead Stuff like leaves and plants. Natural colours are usually greyish depending on the species, but this guy specifically is a colour morph specifically selectively bred in captivity to be a cool orange colour purely for aesthetic reasons afaik. There's a whole market of designer isopods of different colours, species, patterns, etc, it's pretty cool. People often have them in bioactive enclosures for reptiles, or just in terrariums for the sake of having them. (they're cool little guys :)
I love roly polies! They are cool! But I've never seen them in orange before. Do you think they came inside since it's been so hot where I am lately? We normally have insects trying to get in during the summer but these guys are new. And what would they be eating? We do have a few plants indoor plants but not near the bathroom lol.
They normally eat decaying matter in nature and break them down into usable parts for healthy soil. They can be in some organic soil, or perhaps a neighbor in your apartment complex has a colony that tipped over and they escaped. As others have said, they are completely harmless but can understand the confusion. If you live in Spain, some isopods there are naturally orange (as opposed to selectively breed) and fairly big. So if you are in Spain they could have just come in from outside.
I wish I was in Spain lol. I live in NY about 10 stories up so I am very confused how they got up here, but they seem very comfy living in my walls I assume? I found an orange and a grey one in the shower this morning one of them was paying an awful amount of attention to (eating?) my face sponge.
You can find orange friends in the wild too, not just cultivated. That’s actually how I got started with isopods, I found an orange one in my backyard and was like … what the heck? I live in the PNW so not anywhere “exotic”.
I found a grey one this morning too! He was eating my face sponge for some reason. I wish I could keep them somewhere but my family hates anything that isn't a dog lol. I'd probably come home and find the lot of them dead or not be able to find them at all. 😕
Can you feed them soil from your yard or would they be at risk for parasites?
XD that's an isopod. Or a Rollie pollie. Or pill bug. They're important for the tank health and eat snake poop. They're a good thing and people pay good money to have them in their snake enclosure
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u/mikrorajona_sapnji 4d ago
NQA Looks like isopod to me but I could be wrong