Culturing scuds is probably one of the easiest live fish foods to culture. Basically they will eat anything like peas, hornwort, aquarium plant clippings, regular dried or frozen fish food and algae wafers.
If you want to watch a very good video on scuds look at Bob Bock's video. Here is a link:
Only culturing vinegar eels is easier IMHO.
I have two 20 gallon scud cultures going. Both have thousands of scuds. I use hydrosponge filters designed for 50 gallon aquariums to filter the cultures. The scuds are fed any excess hornwort I have, any bad looking java moss, excess valisneria, plus on Sundays and Thursdays they are fed three algae wafers. They are also fed my regular dry fish food, about a teaspoonful, daily.
Scuds are found in the Potomac River in small numbers, so they can survive in relatively soft water. But they seem to do better in harder water. Adding a teaspoon of calcium chloride (bought as deicer at the local hardware store) and a teaspoon of Epson salt (from the grocery store) (magnesium sulfate) per twenty gallons changes my soft well water into water the scuds like.
To harvest the scuds to feed or sell, I siphon culture water through a brine shrimp net. The scuds collect in the net and are transferred to fish tanks to feed the fish, or I transfer over 100 scuds to about pint sized containers of water for sales.
The culture water gets a 50 to 70% water change about once a week. Again the water is filtered through a brine shrimp net to collect the scuds an return them to the culture.
Fish that are eating scuds are very interesting to observe. Scuds move so fast compared to other live foods like daphnia and brine shrimp, the fish must adopt a different strategy to catch them. Of course the fish learn very quickly how to catch the scuds but often miss a few in the beginning.
If you want to watch a very good video on scuds look at Bob Bock's video. Here is a link:
I have two 20 gallon scud cultures going. Both have thousands of scuds. I use hydrosponge filters designed for 50 gallon aquariums to filter the cultures. The scuds are fed any excess hornwort I have, any bad looking java moss, excess valisneria, plus on Sundays and Thursdays they are fed three algae wafers. They are also fed my regular dry fish food, about a teaspoonful, daily.
Scuds are found in the Potomac River in small numbers, so they can survive in relatively soft water. But they seem to do better in harder water. Adding a teaspoon of calcium chloride (bought as deicer at the local hardware store) and a teaspoon of Epson salt (from the grocery store) (magnesium sulfate) per twenty gallons changes my soft well water into water the scuds like.
To harvest the scuds to feed or sell, I siphon culture water through a brine shrimp net. The scuds collect in the net and are transferred to fish tanks to feed the fish, or I transfer over 100 scuds to about pint sized containers of water for sales.
The culture water gets a 50 to 70% water change about once a week. Again the water is filtered through a brine shrimp net to collect the scuds an return them to the culture.
Fish that are eating scuds are very interesting to observe. Scuds move so fast compared to other live foods like daphnia and brine shrimp, the fish must adopt a different strategy to catch them. Of course the fish learn very quickly how to catch the scuds but often miss a few in the beginning.