Where to buy / catch live foods

[chaples55]

Would like to start a thread documenting any kind of live foods available for purchase locally. Could be at LFS or bait shop or international market or anywhere else you're aware of, please let us know! I'd be particularly interested in live saltwater shrimp or fiddler crabs to feed my zebra eel. I'm open to trapping/collecting critters too if anyone knows a good place to find crawfish for example. My old LFS in Gainesville, FL had fresh AND saltwater ghost shrimp 10 for $1.

I just got back from a trip to Tampa, FL. I collected critters at Fred Howard Park beach on the last day. Caught a few small aquatic crabs and a few mangrove crabs. My eel has gone absolutely NUTS for them. Never seen him eat with such enthusiasm before! Side note: I also collected clean up crew, around 70+ big Florida Ceriths, a dozen dwarf and white leg hermits, and around 20+ of these "mini turbo" snails.

 

[ecoreefguy]

For pods, I’ve used @MattR with great density.
For crawfish - any creek with dog food will get a dent haul
Ghost Shrimp I use petsmart. Kinda expensive now. Use to be a dime. It’s like 50 cent last time.

 

[shimshimshinil]

If you ever go to Jekyll Island you can catch your hearts fill of fiddler crabs on the shore in the summer and castnet a lot of aquarium feeder shrimp

 

[Hunna]

I also have started breeding copepods. I’ve just been lazy at collecting them lately. I started primarily with Reef Nutrition’s tiger pods and then added in a splash of Dinkin’s Aquatics snackle box mix after a few harvests.

 

[MattR]

I grow large quantities of copepods, brine shrimp and live mysis for the larvae of all the species of fish I breed to wean off of Parvo copepods and rotifers. For ghost shrimp I go to Optimum Aquarium as they are 25 cents each.

 

[chaples55]

Went to GW Supermarket today at the recommendation of an employee at Nemo's. They have a live seafood section with some items that may be of interest for us reefers. Particularly the "small" live shrimp for $16.99/lb should work as feeders. They also had frozen shrimp / krill in a bunch of different sizes including really small ones that you don't normally see. The snails and abalones made me wonder how they'd do in a reef tank, but everything here was kept in cold water so I'm not sure.

 

[chaples55]

I bought a few of the live shrimp. Here they are in a 5g bucket. The smaller ones should be great for my eel but the biggest one is probably too much...

The employee who caught them for me seemed to find my request for just a few shrimp a little odd but didn't give me a hard time or anything. I did have to ask that they put water in the bag. They were going to give them to me dry after weighing them lol

My eel can probably eat only one of these every 3 days until he gets bigger. The price came out to about 36 cents per shrimp. That would be less than $4 a month to feed my eel live food if he ends up liking these!

 

[ptreef]

I used to breed marbled crayfish for puffers, get one or two and soon you’ll have plenty. They breed very easily using parthenogenesis (cloning). Very very low maintenance. I kept them in a small tank or plastic storage bins with a bubbler