Munchy crunchy scuds . . .?

I love their catagory suggestions. Food & Drink > Cooking & Recipes. Not quite. XD

The basics: 10 gallon fresh water tank.
Stock: breeding trio of guppies, a few guppy fry (5-6 less than a week old), young platies (6, half grown), algae eating shrimp (1.5 inch long), pair of kuhli loaches, otocinclus, assorted live plants

and if you don’t know what they look like, here is a pair of breeding scuds: http://www.flyfishersrepublic.com/entomology/crustaceans/freshwater-shrimp/freshwater-shrimp.jpg they’re 1/4-1/2 inch long when fully grown, semi-transparent, have hard shells. Very crunchy if you squish them.

So a few months back I was dealing with freshwater scuds in my fish tank and thought I had them gone. I removed all the gravel from my tank to eliminate their primary hiding place, cleaned my filter, and didn’t see a single one for 2 weeks. So I put my gravel back. Boiled the gravel for a good long time to cook any possible eggs or adults that might have still been alive, then restored it to the tank. Good to go!

I don’t know where they hid for 2 weeks, but I’m infested with scuds again. I want these guys gone, but since I’ve got a shrimp, I’d like to try and get rid of them as naturally as possible. I can move my shrimp to a quarentine tank if I must. The betta will just have a roommate for a while whether she likes it or not.

And I would rather not hear “they’re harmless, they won’t hurt your fish, just leave them.” because I’ve head that. Yes, I know they’re harmless, but as I commonly take my guppy fry to the pet store, I’d rather not have my tank be the source of an infection that spreads across all the pet stores and home tanks in my area. Once these things get in, they don’t like to leave. Uninvited house guests are frowned upon. I would prefer not to have them. I did not welcome them to my tank with open arms.

I was entertaining the notion of getting a clown loach and have it root the scuds out of my gravel. The kuhli loaches do not seem to be eating the scuds (come to find out its the fish bodies loaches that munch on snails, not the eel ones). I know the clowns get big and a 10 gallon is not ideal for any long span of time, but how long would it tank a single clown to eat them all? Would one clown be happy long enough to do the job and then I can take it back to the store (they’re pretty cool with that in this area. I’ve seen them take in all sorts of oddball fish)? I can’t really do 2 clowns unless I bump up water changes, as my tank is already well stocked, and with breeding guppies it can only get more stocked. Would clowns hurt any of my existing fish/shrimp?

Alternatively, would any (preferably small) species of cory cat eat the scuds? It seems they are also bottom feeders, but I do not know of they have the same snail eating reputation that loaches do.

My only other choice if neither of these work would be to either 1) dose the tank with something like had-a-snail and hope the scuds have no immunity to it and wait a few weeks for any eggs to hatch and dose the water again. 2) completely 100% tank down the tank, scrub everything, boil everything, throw out my live plants/dip the plants in something and quarentine them to make sure the dip worked, then rebuild from square 1.

halp mi . . . x___X

questions, comments, flames.
Thanks in advance.
Gary C: excellent they maybe, but the fish can’t find them because they’re hidden in the gravel. Otherwise I think my hollow-bellied platies would have munched them all down by now (seriously, those platies think they’re hungry all the time, even if they’re eaten so much they’ve got pot bellies XD).

But as stated, I give my fish to pet stores and would hate for scuds to be unintentionally spread to an unsuspecting tank. Once in, they’re hard to get rid of. I’ve been fighting these for 6 months unsuccessfully, and spent the first 3 months just trying to ID them. I got them probably on my live plants and wish they had not come to my tank at all.
I. Don’t. Want. Them.

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