Part of our daily work is dedicated to our isopod color morphs. We distinguish between the naturally occurring mutations and the so-called designer morphs.

While e.g. albinos, orange, caramel, Dalmatian or High Yellow have been discovered sometime in the wild or in local breeding and are “pure-bred” at same time, designer morphs are combinations of two or more natural mutations.

If one takes as an example two pure parents, a Porcellio laevis (dominant, green) and paired these with a Porcellio laevis “Dalmation” (recessive, white), the offspring are heterozygous. The offspring carry the panda gene and the wild colour gene. In this constellation the offspring look wild, but are heterozygous for panda.

Heterozygous is the situation when a “mutated” gene on one chromosome is accompanied by a healthy gene on the other chromosome. Often the expression of the mutation is suppressed and completely compensated by the “healthy” gene (=recessive inheritance).

The second example shows the mating of this so-called F1 generation. So the offspring from our first example. It is normal to mate the siblings to each other in order to perform a color selection.

Conspicuous features such as malformations or small growth should be removed from the breeding line. In our example we mate 2 Porcellio laevis “het.(heterozygous) Dalmation”.

The young animals would then be as follows:
1 x Porcellio laevis,
2 x Porcellio laevis “het. Dalmation”
1 x Porcellio laevis “Dalmation”

Of course, we will produce more young isopods with a mating. This number has to be put into proportion: 25% Porcellio laevis ; 50% Porcellio laevis “het. Dalmation” ; 25% Porcellio laevis “Dalmation”