Serrated Marine Isopod

• When threatened it rolls into a perfect ball, like a woodlouse, leaving only its armour exposed.
• Its tolerance of salinity lets it live in seawater as readily as in brackish lagoons and salt pans.
• Like the woodlouse on land, it rolls into a ball when disturbed, a trait that gives its family, the sphaeromatids, its name.
• Its distribution in coastal lagoons depends on temperature, depth and the plant biomass available.
• It is a common marine isopod of the Mediterranean rocky intertidal, where it lives alongside several species of the genus Idotea.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - articulated calcareous exoskeleton (crustacean)

Habitat and environment

Under stones and in intertidal crevices of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic

Sources consulted: Fabricius (1787) · Charfi-Cheikhrouha et al., estudios de distribución en la laguna de Bizerta · ScienceDirect (Hughes 1989) · Science Advances, How colonial animals evolve · Wikipedia, Zooid