Harvesting Scuds

Harvesting Scuds

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Scuds are the best live food all my fish enjoy eating.

And scuds keep aquarium clean feeding on any organic waste.

For those reasons I've been keeping scuds in all my aquariums.

Here you can see scuds in the aquarium with fish.

I also have a couple 5 gallon jars where I culture scuds.

Fish consume scuds in big quantities.

Here you can see scuds at work cleaning deposits of green algae.

It takes about a month for baby suds to hatch and a couple months more to grow.

So, I harvest scuds from each culture once in 2-3 months when scuds population gets big.

My favorite way of harvesting scuds involves Cheerios cereal flakes.

Drop a couple cereal flakes in the tank with scuds.

Scuds feed on any organic!

And scuds love cereal :)

And snails love cereal too - who doesn't :)

It takes 10 minutes or so for dozens of scuds to gather on the cereal flake.

Here is a close up view of scuds chewing the flake.

Cereal flakes stays afloat which makes it a very easy to catch with all those scuds gathered on it.

Fish gets very exited seen my preparations :)

Just remember, any given month I harvest scuds only from one culture.

It allows 2-3 months time for each culture to recover after the harvest.

Now I am going to scoop the flake with scuds on it using a small container.

I put my catch in a larger container to check on it before feeding them to fish.

There are 2-3 dozens of adult scuds and who knows how many baby scuds.

Using cereal flakes is my favorite way of harvesting scuds.

We can use different types of food for feeding and harvesting scuds.

Scuds enjoy feeding on dry mulberry leaves that I collect for them during Summer.

Drop a leaf in the tank and let scuds gather on it.

Pull the leaf gently out of the tank and rinse it in a smaller container.

That's it - very simple.

Also, I use fast growing Guppy Grass for feeding scuds.

So, I can always pull out the Guppy Grass out of the tank and rinse it in a smaller container.

I reserve this way of harvesting scuds for resetting the cultures I do once a year or as necessary.

While watching scuds I noticed that scuds prefer to gather on any floating objects.

Here you can see big numbers of scuds gathered on flakes, parts of the plants and everything else located close to the surface.

Let's take plastic stripes from a carton box package.

We can bend and secure the plastic stripes in any desirable shape.

For the first experiment I want to simply hook the stripe on the wall of the tank.

Here it goes.

I also used another piece of stripe shaped in loops for scuds to land on different depth.

Scuds gathered only on parts of stripes located near the water surface as you can see here.

And of cause there are many scuds on the leaf and tips of the plants near water surface.

So, we can use plastic stripes for harvesting scuds.

Get a small container with water ready for scuds.

Pull gently one stripe at a time out of the tank and rinse it in the container.

Many more scuds gathered on the stripe with a loop.

The great thing about using stripes is that we can keep stripes in the culture all the time for scuds to rest on.

Yes, with stripes I managed to harvest much more scuds in one take as you can see.

There is another great thing about plastic stripes - they stay afloat on the water surface.

So, we can just put a flat piece of stripe for scuds to gather on it.

Simple and a very effective way of harvesting scuds when you need them!

Have fun and happy aquariums :)