Scuds as food

I seem to have an infestation of scuds which have invaded my daphnia culture. How they got there is a complete mystery, as all the water comes from the salamander tanks, and the daphnia are in an isolated room in the house. But anyway, can I use them as food for advanced larvae? Obviously the hatchlings won't be big enough to eat them, but the larger larvae are (if they can catch them). Any thoughts?

Scuds for food

I feed my newts regularly with scuds. The adults love them.

As for the juveniles, T. granulosa will take them from tweeezers or off wet paper and my N. kaiseri will catch them in their water bowl (they're kept terrestrially). The juvenile alpine newts refuse to take them from a water bowl, or off wet paper.

My little group of C. orientalis had three red bellies and two pale yellow bellies. One of the yellow bellies now has a red belly, which I presume is down to their diet of mainly bloodworm and scuds. It's a mystery to me why one should remain pale coloured when the other changed.

Because of the winter weather I transferred a number of scuds to a small indoor tank with water weed and dead leaves, hoping they would breed. They didn't thrive. I source them from a half-barrel pond which is full of detritus and various pond plants. Numbers are fewer now, but up to January I could gather hundreds in minutes with a small aquarium net. I tend to use the smaller ones and leave the bigger ones to keep up the stock.

That's funny. Mine are going like gangbusters in a 10 gallon aquarium. I regularly top it off with waste water from the salamanders. They reproduce almost as fast as the daphnia. I also have copepods now.

Good to know. The little axolotls shall get more snacks then.

I wonder how well they would fare as detritivores in the adult tank... As in, I wonder if the adult axolotls would eat them.

Bah, I've tried culturing scuds - twice - and they never did well for me. You have quite the luck, Kaysie. Should be an ideal food for large larvae and also for adults.

I found rather dirty water works well. Adding some source of cellulose...say, paper bags or cardboard works well. Also add in veggies or plant clippings and some pellets. They reproduce pretty fast.


They are also very good hiders, so yes they would survive in the adult axolotl tank for quite a while.

The tank's full of all sorts of crud. I generally add waste water from my aquatic tanks, which invariably has java moss in it. There's a little bit of wolffia (or duckweed, but it doesn't reproduce very fast, so I dunno), a couple of blackworms, lots of growing-on-the-sides algae, general mulm. The other day I must have pulled 75 of 'em out n flushed 'em, as they were eating all the algae I was growing for my daphnia.

Maybe I'll throw some in the adult tank and see if they like brown algae.

I wonder if it is due to us and Jenn having different species.