[PlantNewbster]

I recently found Scuds in my 2.5 gallon. I try to pick them out when I take a hand full of floaters out. I always seem one latched onto another one and the one on the bottom always seems dead, Now is this mating or are they killing each other or are they killing my baby shrimp?

 

[ChadO]

I wonder this too. The joined up scuds are not killing your shrimp directly, but they will compete on food source. I find a turkey baster works well to suck them out of the tank. If you have a lot of them, though, it'll be tough to get the numbers in check.

 

[PlantNewbster]

I remember hearing somewhere that scuds were devastating someones CRS Population.

 

[aquariumluvr]

I had scuds in my shrimp tanks a few years back. If the population is not well fed they will start eating the moss. They slowly stripped all the leaves off my flame moss and I felt like it made the survival rate of baby shrimp decline. The joined scuds are mating and don't really hurt the shrimp.

The only way I got rid of them was to sell all of the shrimp and take down the tanks completely. Ugh! Never again!!

 

[ChadO]

I've never had them actually eat a shrimp, but rather beat up the moss so bad that it was losing its value as a food source. I suppose they could outright attack shrimp, but I've never seen that, just them beating up my moss meant for the shrimps.

 

[Raymond S.]

Depends on which speceis of them. Some get larger than others. I bought a culture of the smaller ones and have them in my shrimp tank. No noticable harm to anything(yet) so. Do a great clean up job. Can see an issue if I didn't feed those shrimp every day.
But have skipped a day now and then without seeing any difference.

 

[garfieldnfish]

I have had a ton of scuds in my 30 gal breeder tank with plecos and tangerine tiger shrimp. Scuds are eggs eaters so they have got to go as I blame them for the destruction of 4 batches of plecos eggs. Anyway I decided to remove all the tangerine tiger shrimp and have been at it for about 3 weeks now. I thought the scuds were interfering with the shrimp breeding but that was obviously not the case as I have found way more tiger shrimp than I ever thought would be in this tank and I am still finding more of them day after day. Once the tigers are all out I plan on adding fish to eliminated the scuds so I can add the tigers back some time in the future. I have manually removed over 500 scuds during this time as well. If the fish do not take out the remaining scuds I plan on adding a copper based medicine. I hope that will do the trick. I keep hearing to break down the tank but I really want to avoid this. Has anyone tried copper based meds to kill them off? And if so how long before it would be shrimp safe again?

 

[dhavoc]

you can try copper but it may not do much unless you use a high dosage but once you do this the tank will be off limits to inverts from then on. manual removal is impossible, they live in the substrate and fry are almost too small to be seen unless they are moving in open water. fish will only reduce the dumb ones and they will be out and about at night. if you want to breed and are sure they eat your pleco eggs, nuke the tank and start over.

to the OP, you ESPECIALLY want to target the ones stuck together as they are breeding.

 

[SSSPeeWee]

Gas the tank with co2 and kill everything you don't want

 

[xmas_one]

Scuds = shrimp tank HIV

Start over.

 

[PlantNewbster]

Well its just got ghost shrimp, now I now the scudds came with the ghost shrimp, (I thought they were baby shrimp when I first saw them) so for now I will just let them go since everything is starting to fill in real nice. How should I go about cleaning the plants for scudds if I want to move plants.

 

[dougolasjr]

I would think a bleach dip might work.

 

[PlantNewbster]

Reviving this thread, would a high dose of Metracide kill them, even the ones in the soil?

 

[biotex3]

Scuds are very competitive with food. The shrimp population decline in the presence of scuds is usually because the scuds are out competing the baby shrimp for food. Scuds attacking baby shrimp is improbable but not impossible. Also many scud species are known hosts of parasites (especially if introduced from the wild obviously). Scuds are very hardy so I don't think metracide, peroxide, or gassing will work (unless you dose enough to kill everything else as well). Manually remove them and decrease feeding substantially. I would personally move my shrimp out of the tank and starve the tank/ add some hungry fish until the scuds are gone.

 

[PlantNewbster]

The shrimp are out. I was going to remove most of the plants and just bomb it with metracide. I just want to avoid having to dry out all of the sand and dirt.

 

[Plakatz]

Could you mi crowave the dirt and sand in plastic bags?

 

[PlantNewbster]

I'd have to remove it then....

Bump: So i might as well just dry it out....