Isopods

[porkchop48]

I swear if this is a comonly asked question you can just smack me and say do a search.
If i collected some from my garden how woould i go about culturing them. I live in WV if that help you know what kind they are, and all the ones I see are grey. Do i need to collect alot of them? Can they be raised in sterailte containers also?

[kyle1745]

If I am not mistaken the local ones are a big tough and large compared to the dwarf ones commonly used in the hobby.

[brettlt]

I like to put a few local ones in the tank, but I do not think the frogs will eat them. They just add to the activity level, and help eat decaying matter and such.

I also put in the tropical ones that the frogs can eat, though I do not know how often this happens, as they tend to stay underground.

[KeroKero]

A couple points to make... 1) not all isopods are created equal and 2) culture them outside the tank if you want to use them as feeders.

Native isopods (such as Porcellio scaber), while certainly cheaper, definately are not the better feeder. They make fine take custodians, but that is about it. For a slightly "prettier" (when you rarely see them in the tank) you can try the orange isopods, which are mearly an orange population of Porcellio scaber. These isos are rather large and hard shelled, and just don't make good feeders. The young are tiny and make good frog food, but are hard to seperate from mom, and aren't produced in significant numbers. Small tropical feeder isopods tend to have size and shell softness on their side (meaning you can feed out most life stages), with more frogs taking them as food. They can also be used as a cleaning crew, but they might get eaten more

If you want to use them as any significant source of food, culture them on their own outside the tank (and preferably save yourself some effort and use the smaller, softer species). They are slower to reproduce than some of the most popular feeders (then again, most critters are!) with 3+ month generation times. The ones in the tank will probably not produce as much, especially when the population stablizes, and will be hiding away from the frogs, so they will only be a once in a blue moon treat.