Do crappie eat freshwater shrimp and scuds?
Yes — they fill the rung between zooplankton and minnows. A crappie keeps eating small things for life, and in weedy water the small things include scuds picked off plant stems and, in the southern part of the range, grass shrimp, which live in the same vegetation and are a well-known crappie food there. They matter most for black crappie, the weed-lake species, and least for fish suspended over an open basin, where the choice is plankton or minnows. For anglers this is one more argument for the classic small jig: a 2.5–5 cm (1–2 in) plastic or a sparse hair jig in a translucent, natural colour hung beside a weed edge is a fair copy of a shrimp, not just of a minnow.
The full story
This answer is one piece of a longer lesson — setups, diagrams and the reasoning behind it.
More questions about Diet
Same topic, other species
- Do adult largemouth bother with leeches, worms, freshwater shrimp or fish eggs? — Largemouth Bass
- Do adult muskie ever eat small stuff — crayfish, gobies, insects, leeches? — Muskellunge (Muskie)
- What is simply too big for a perch — frogs, mice, suckers, ciscoes? — Yellow Perch
- Do pike eat shad and alewives? — Northern Pike
- Do smallmouth really eat leeches and hellgrammites? — Smallmouth Bass
- How does a trout's diet change as it grows? — Trout (Rainbow · Brook · Lake)
- Will walleye eat a dead minnow — and do they eat fish eggs or scuds? — Walleye