Has anyone tried and had success at maintaining a scud population in a display tank featuring:
Plenty of small hiding spaces
Several live plants including floating
Driftwood, rocks, botanicals
Mild flow from small HOB or sponge filter
Small number of small fish and yes I know most any fish will eat anything they can fit in their mouth.
Trying to get them to spawn now that they are settled in. Suggestions would be helpful.
I have not bred these, but if I were to do so I would set us a breeding tank with a grid on the bottom of a 2.5 or 5 gallon tank to protect any eggs since they are egg scatterers. I would use RO water, a small sponge filter, and put in some java moss on top of the grid. I would feed the parents live food---probably fresh baby brine shrimp every other day for a couple days. Then I would put the parents in the tank for a week, keep feeding them brine shrimp, remove them, and look for fry a couple weeks later. I expect the fry will be quite small and the really trick may be feeding the fry. Green water or parmecium might be the way to go.
I made an change to this egg collector since it was so tall. I switched it to a 8oz deli container and have been collecting CPD eggs.
Not sure how long my 20 gallon tanks heater failed. Found out when I went to feed the fish, opened the lid and got hit with a bunch of humidity. I tested the temp at 92 degree f, 17 degrees above set levels. This brings me to a great discussion of what heater people use and steps people use to prevent this type of problems. This heater was a cheaper aquaneat 100w that was only about 4 months old.
The hard part is running so many heaters on 1 power strip can start to tax the circuit and when you run multiple tanks it can add up pretty quick. There are a lot of great ideas when it comes to keeping an eye on heaters, running 2 undersized as well as having a one that monitors temperature. For some of the heater that I needed to replace I tried to look for titanium heaters that is for the tank size right now. But I did add a procedure to my daily tank maintenance which is write with erasable chalk marker the temp and use a temp probe to check the tanks daily to see if there are any changes to these temps.
Guess it depends on what you mean by "maintaining". I've had scuds survive in tanks with active predatory fish, such as blackbanded sunfish, but only where the tank had a lot of moss and/or susswassertang. I thought the scuds were all eaten, but when I pulled some subwassertang out I found there were scuds in it.