Spirobolellus immigrans
Maui Skunk-Striped Millipede: Advanced Care Guide
Keeper Snapshot: A tiny tropical millipede best kept as a moist communal group.
Group: MillipedesDifficulty: Spice 1: Kid FriendlySetup: Small tropical communal millipedeHandling: Brief contact tolerated. Handling is optional and never required for good care, and a fall can injure the animal.
Use This Guide Safely
- Confirm the exact animal. Match this guide to the species, locality, size, and life stage on your label. If the ID is uncertain, use the more conservative part of the range and ask before changing the setup.
- Change one thing at a time. Treat temperature and humidity as target zones, then watch posture, burrowing, drinking, feeding, and molt behavior before making another adjustment.
- Respect the handling boundary. If the guide says no handling, fast, defensive, or medically significant, plan transfers with catch cups, locked lids, and no bare hands. For serious bites, stings, or symptoms, seek emergency medical care.
Quick Snapshot
| Temperature | 72-80°F |
|---|---|
| Humidity | High ambient (75-85%) with fine-mesh cross ventilation; damp lower layers, drier surface |
| Setup Type | Small tropical communal millipede |
| Substrate | Moist leaf/wood substrate with moss |
| Feeding | Leaf litter, veggies, calcium |
| Care Difficulty | Spice 1: Kid Friendly |
| Handling | Brief contact tolerated. Handling is optional and never required for good care, and a fall can injure the animal. |
Humidity zones: Very Low under 30% - Low 30-60% - Low-Moderate 40-70% - Moderate 60-80% - Moderate-High 70-85% - High 80%+ - Very High 90%+
Enclosure Format / Size Class
- terrestrial burrow setup for larger colonies
Warnings First
- Small escape risk
- Sensitive to drying
- Best viewed as a colony animal
- A compact humid bin has little air volume to buffer a damp substrate. Fine mesh low on two opposite walls matters more here than on a large enclosure.
Simple Care
- Keep moist and secure.
- Fine-mesh vents low on two opposite walls; small enough to hold them, plentiful enough to keep the bin aerobic.
- Use fine ventilation.
- Shallow water dish packed with pebbles so small animals cannot drown.
- Great small colony display species.
Advanced Keeper Notes
Enclosure & Microclimate
- Because these are small, stable moisture is more important than a large enclosure. A compact setup keeps them easy to find.
- Use deep edible substrate relative to body size, plus leaf litter and moss.
- Compact and moist is exactly the combination that goes anaerobic fastest, because there is so little air volume relative to the damp substrate. Put fine mesh low on two opposite walls so air crosses the substrate surface. A small humid bin vented only through the lid sours within weeks rather than months, and sour substrate is inedible to a detritivore.
- Hold the moisture in the substrate rather than the air and let the vents flow. Stable moisture and good airflow are not in conflict; the stability comes from the depth of damp substrate, not from trapping humid air.
- Judge by squeeze and smell rather than by a gauge that barely fits. Lower substrate clumps like a wrung-out sponge with no free water and smells like forest floor.
- Keep a shallow dish packed with pebbles or coarse grit so the waterline sits below the rim. At this body size the animals drown in very little water, and a colony loss goes unnoticed until numbers drop.
- Mist under the moss and leaf litter rather than across the surface. That keeps the grazing layer damp while the open surface keeps breathing.
Feeding, Growth & Maintenance
- Avoid overfeeding wet vegetables that mold. Small pieces are better.
- Molting: millipedes molt underground, sealing into a chamber and going still for days or weeks. Never dig up or disturb a buried animal, keep that part of the substrate from drying out, and keep cuttlebone available, since they eat the shed exoskeleton to reclaim calcium.
Possible Origin / Range
- Likely native range: Warm Pacific or Asian-associated introduced habitats; commonly encountered in Hawaii or Maui trade context.
- Habitat translation: Humid leaf-litter culture with steady warmth and rotting wood.
Advanced Keeper Details
- Keep colonies dense with surface leaves so young have cover and food.
- Avoid over-wet substrate; sour smell indicates anaerobic breakdown.
- Spelling note: the valid genus is Spirobolellus Chamberlin, 1920 (family Spirobolellidae). The variant 'Spirobollelus' circulates widely in the trade and was previously used here, but it is a transposition and not the accepted spelling. You will see the old spelling on older listings. Same animal.