Scuds For Freshwater Fish Food?

[PartyHacks]

Scuds are amphipods. I ordered 50 of them from ebay and they come this friday.

My eels only eat shrimp such as ghost or neo shrimp.

Problem is, that can be expensive.

I figure these can't be too far off their palate.I have been reading about scuds and how incredibly easy they are to get to reproduce.

Plan was to get a big garbage can and leave it outside and let them reproduce. Apparently according to google:

"According to Morgan, a female that produces 22 eggs each 11 days potentially has 24,221 offspring in a year (but egg mortality is high)."

A couple questions..... Anybody heard of eels being interested in these? There is one post on here that mentions feeding these to eels. Anybody else have any experience with these?

 

[Bbuckley]

I'd also be interested in this information ?

 

[twentyleagues]

Depending on the size of the eel or rather its mouth. My ropefish hunted a thousand of these pretty much to extinction in my pond. The polys ignored them. I put the majority of the thousand I purchased in the pond figuring they would leave them alone as they are used to larger food items. I put some in my shellie tank and the fry grow out and in the tank of mixed small fish pretty much knowing those would be eaten and were. I didn't expect the ropefish to be so interested. If any have survived I haven't seen them.

 

[Tj203]

What about blackworms they are by far the easiest live food I have ever grown. All you need is a bucket, or something to store them in. No heater I used a 20 gallon tank with very corse gravel about 3/4 of an inch deep and they doubled there population every couple weeks. also when you throw them in they move so it will attack it.

I have tried the scud, guppies, and Platts all were more work then it was worth

 

[Fishman Dave]

If you have a filter box which the water passes through on a pond, check in there. That’s the place to find the scuds reproducing like wildfire.

 

[andyroo]

scuds take a while to build a population, but once they're there it's pretty manic - they coat every surface & will kill and/or consume pretty much anything that can't/won't get away from leaves & algae to sticks to MTS & mystery snails, so may be able to gut-load with carrot if looking to colour-up your fire-eel. Can scoop 15~25% of your population / week without impact, so long as food is offered & O2 are good & water doesn't sour. A bubble-stone's not a terrible idea, and swap out some water every week. Rather than a trash-drum, I'd suggest a cheap-O 12Gal so you can keep an eye on them, food, bubbles, structure, temperature, water colour/clarity etc. Doesn't take much space to carry a huge population, particularly if the water's erring to warm (but not hot)