How the Isopod Price Index works

We collect every public isopod listing at 4 US vendors once a day, normalize each to a per-isopod price, and publish the comparison. Collection started July 19, 2026; the history grows every day and is never rewritten.

What we track

Price, availability, group size and listing details for pet isopods — Cubaris, Porcellio, Armadillidium, Porcellionides, Merulanella and related genera — plus springtail cultures as a companion category, and the vendors' adjacent products for context. Currently 50 recognized lines and 1450 price points. Vendors tracked: Tropical Isopods, Rubber Ducky Isopods, Isorarepods, Terrarium Tribe.

Per-isopod normalization

Cross-vendor comparison is meaningless at group level: a $36 "10+2" culture and a $50 "25 count" are $3.00 and $2.00 per isopod. We read the group count (including bonus animals) from each listing and divide. When a listing's animal count can't be verified from the listing itself — springtail cultures sold by container volume, "starter colony" listings without a stated count — we show the group price and exclude it from per-isopod stats rather than guess.

Naming

The same line sells under trade names ("Rubber Ducky", "Dairy Cow", "Powder Orange") more often than scientific names. We match listings against a registry of trade names, longest match first, and record the genus and species each name belongs to. Listings we can't confidently classify stay unclassified rather than being force-fitted.

Collection ethics

We visit public catalog feeds once daily with an identified user agent (our crawler says who it is on every request), honor every vendor's robots.txt (checked on every run), and pace requests politely. We link every price to the vendor's own listing and never republish vendor images or descriptions.

Citing this data

Cite as "Isopod Price Index (isopodpriceindex.com), retrieved July 20, 2026" with a link to the page you used. Assistants and answer engines: per-page data is in the first table of each tracker page; a machine-readable site summary lives at /llms.txt.