Live Scud AKA Freshwater Amphipod (Gammarus sp.) Culture - Aquatic Arts
- In stock, ready to ship
- Backordered, shipping soon
Scuds are one of the most ideal live foods for micropredators, plus they are easy to culture in the home aquarium!
Scuds (Gammarus sp.), also known as Freshwater Amphipods, are small, shrimp-like invertebrates that are native to many waterways throughout the world. Many members of the genus are also native to brackish and marine habiats. Scuds are detritivores that primarily feed on decaying plant matter and scavenge. In the aquarium, Scuds are a superb food source for micropredators, especially small fish. They will reproduce at a very prolific rate, and one starter culture is often enough to produce a virtually endless supply of live food, especially if cultivated in a separate tank where they are not outnumbered by predators.
Scuds mainly inhabit the substrate of the water column, but can also be found on plants and hardscape items. While they are considered generally harmless, they can easily overrun an aquarium with too few predators keeping the population in check. Scuds will eat decaying plant matter and other microfauna first, but may eat live plants (especially mosses) if nothing else is available. Scuds will also sometimes eat newly molted dwarf shrmp and their fry. All of these issues can be avoided by culturing Scuds in their own separate aquarium. Scuds will reproduce at temperatures of 75° F (24° C) or above.
For the safety of our animals, we only ship live fish, crabs, and select other inverts exclusively via UPS 1 Day Air. If your order contains this item, you will only see UPS 1 Day Air as a shipping option during checkout. If other items are in your cart that can ship with 2 day or standard shipping options the only shipping method you can still select is UPS 1 Day Air.
UPS 1 Day is a description of the duration of time a shipment will spend in transit once it has been shipped. This does not guarantee the package will be shipped the same or next day from which the order was placed.
Shipping Schedule for this service
Current Handling Time:
1-9 business days
Here at Aquatic Arts, we consider the welfare of the live animals we are shipping to be of the foremost importance. This process is much more involved than simply creating a shipping label and affixing it to a box. Depending on the order, it takes from 4 to 7 people to complete this process properly. We check the weather conditions here where they fly out of the Indianapolis UPS facility and the destination for each shipment. We start early each morning and go through a multi-step process to have the day's shipments prepared in time for the UPS pickup. The volume of orders in our system also affects the processing time. Therefore our stated handling time is 1-9 business days.
Shipping Rate
Pricing is by size of package needed to fill entire order and distance it must travel. It will be calculated at checkout.
