Today I found a really pale one! My strategy of saving unusual looking pillbugs from being eaten by the box turtle when I take him outside to eat is finally yielding results.
Yeah! While freshly-moulted roaches and beetles are often a reddish color before darkening back to black, isopods tend to be pale. They’re crustaceans, and I think their exoskeleton is perhaps Built Different in some ways because of it.
One of the most obvious tells that an isopod has moulted recently is that it’s got a two-tone appearance. This is because they shed their old exoskeleton in halves, otherwise known as biphasic moulting. Here’s one from “my” colony that recently shed their front half and now it looks like they’re wearing pants.
