Culturing Asellus indoors

Made an attempt at these little buggers, mainly as tank scavengers, a few months ago thanks to Mark

They made the transfer from outdoors to indoors well, also survived several changes of environment very well.

I started them in my version of el natural, soil base capped with sand, densely planted. Put them in, then I didnt see any for many weeks. Later when I moved and had to make a new setup, this time using mineralised soil capped with gravel also densely planted, I found a few Asellus living under a large root.

After a few months and a sparse carpet of Glossostigma they are everywhere and turn out to be ferious planteaters. They started making the Rotala rotundifolia their dinner then went on to consume the Glossostigma... It started out as small holes in healthy leaves then the leaf went yellow and subsequently further attacked. They started doing this when they ran out of dead plant matter etc to eat.

I have taken out the root 3 times and removed shocking amounts of Asellus to no avail, they hide very well and multiply very fast once they get going...

Now some H.orientalis are patrolling this setup, hopefully they can clear them out.. Should culture some for snacks really...fast breeders, hardy, very undemanding and cope well with high densities.

They get along well with shrimp too; one of the few animals that can safely be kept with shrimp.

Asellus aquaticus (waterlouse) - YouTube

shrimp feeding frenzy - YouTube

I found some asellus yesterday when I was walking the dog and stopped to turn over rocks in the river. There weren't a lot of asellus; just about 1 for every 5 rocks I turned over, so perhaps a river full of minnows isn't the ideal environment for them.