Wild crayfish help please

BeckyCats said:

That's good to know. I do have those but haven't tried them yet. Hopefully they'll be appetizing.



Do you think the crayfish will find the flakes? I'm concerned that flakes will get stuck in the plants and just rot away before the crayfish finds them.

If anyone is interested, I did call the wildlife and fishery folks here. I was told that there actually are a few native species but crayfish are "understudied" here so they can't be sure whether mine is a native or introduced species. They have not found crayfish to have a big impact on MA waterways at this time (at least not yet, he said), but obviously it is not great to have introduced or invasive species, especially in wetlands which are protected and vulnerable.

He said that there is nothing illegal about taking the crayfish home or keeping it. It is seen as no different than gathering one up to use as bait, as far as the impact on the environment. I asked if that sort of thing ever happens again, should I put the animal back in the water or remove it. He said it is fine to put it back.

Interestingly, he wants me to send pictures of it, top and bottom, send the size, where I found it, the date, etc. He's going to forward the info to the "crayfish guy" to keep as a datapoint.

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It's a scavenger. If there's food in the tank, it will find it.

BeckyCats said:

That's good to know. I do have those but haven't tried them yet. Hopefully they'll be appetizing.



Do you think the crayfish will find the flakes? I'm concerned that flakes will get stuck in the plants and just rot away before the crayfish finds them.

If anyone is interested, I did call the wildlife and fishery folks here. I was told that there actually are a few native species but crayfish are "understudied" here so they can't be sure whether mine is a native or introduced species. They have not found crayfish to have a big impact on MA waterways at this time (at least not yet, he said), but obviously it is not great to have introduced or invasive species, especially in wetlands which are protected and vulnerable.

He said that there is nothing illegal about taking the crayfish home or keeping it. It is seen as no different than gathering one up to use as bait, as far as the impact on the environment. I asked if that sort of thing ever happens again, should I put the animal back in the water or remove it. He said it is fine to put it back.

Interestingly, he wants me to send pictures of it, top and bottom, send the size, where I found it, the date, etc. He's going to forward the info to the "crayfish guy" to keep as a datapoint.

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Thank you for sharing the experience with your state wildlife agency..and very neat that they would like to see pics of it

I haven't read back over the thread, are there other inhabitants of the tank, or just this single crayfish?*

On second thought, forget flake food, a single sinking pellet is best...easy to monitor if the cray shows interest, and doesn't pollute the water too bad if it doesn't and you remove the pellet

If there are fish in this tank, regardless of what you feed the fish, the cray will not starve...they are scavengers, and will eat whatever they can find...including detritus in the tank

How is the cray acting? Hiding, or out-and-about?

*"Crawfish" it's pronounced, where I live ...a delicacy for many here, boiled, but not yours truly

That's cool about the fisheries person wanting to know more. I find that a lot of people like that are excited when they meet someone that's interested enough to call them.

Crayfish (pronounced "crawdad" around here) have an amazing sense of smell, so I wouldn't worry about it finding stuff in the tank. I agree that pellets are better than flakes, though, as they're slower to dissolve. When we go crawdad fishing at the local rocky pond, we usually chum the water with a few crumbs of beef jerky or turkey sausage*, and within a few minutes they're coming out of their holes all over the place.

*the best use for turkey sausage, in my opinion

Slaphppy7 said:

I would just hang on to the cray, and let it live out the rest of it's natural life in your tank

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or it could live out the rest of its life in a pot of hot water

BeckyCats said:

Exactly! That was my concern.


I tried but did not find what I was looking for.


That was my plan. I just hope it eats something. It is not eating the sinking pellets. I'll try the algae wafers next. I'll take a look in my lfs as well to see if they have anything that might be less vegetarian that sinks. I think most of my sinking foods are plant-based.

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freeze dried tubifex worms were very popular with mine. I fed twice a week, one block - with only one cray maybe half a block

Slaphppy7 said:

Thank you for sharing the experience with your state wildlife agency..and very neat that they would like to see pics of it

I haven't read back over the thread, are there other inhabitants of the tank, or just this single crayfish?*

On second thought, forget flake food, a single sinking pellet is best...easy to monitor if the cray shows interest, and doesn't pollute the water too bad if it doesn't and you remove the pellet

If there are fish in this tank, regardless of what you feed the fish, the cray will not starve...they are scavengers, and will eat whatever they can find...including detritus in the tank

How is the cray acting? Hiding, or out-and-about?

*"Crawfish" it's pronounced, where I live ...a delicacy for many here, boiled, but not yours truly

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There are currently 4 very old tetras in there. Previously I accidentally mistyped 2 instead of 4. I was waiting for them to die off before adding anything new, but I didn't know what else to do in this case. In hindsight, I should probably have set up a quarantine tank for the cray, but at this point, what's done is done. In the moment, with a live animal's life and comfort at stake, I didn't think about much except getting it into water as soon as possible. I'm not too worried about the tetras because they stay near the top and middle of the tank always. Even at night. Plus they are fast. Although really, I can't believe they're still alive. It's been years and all their other tankmates have swum under the rainbow bridge long ago.

I think I will try some frozen foods. I think it did eat the Omega One veggie pellet I gave it yesterday. I'm not sure how much to feed it or how often.

I did get a look at the underside of it and it is female from what I can tell. I put a picture below. If anyone disagrees, let me know.

She is crawling around and likes to hide but also likes to sit on top of the driftwood. She has been digging a bit. I can see sand displaced. I plan to add some larger gravel type pieces in there for her to move around since I've read they like that. Right now, there are more plants and driftwood and a few medium stones. Also a large cave which she likes to sit on right under the HOB waterfall. This surprises me a bit because the water she left was a wetland. There's not exactly a whole lot of heavily oxygenated water there, so I would have thought she would prefer something similar to her original environment. I put a picture below. In case anyone wonders, I'm keeping the water level a little lower now on purpose so that it will be more difficult for her to escape. There is a large patch of java moss that she will gather around herself sometimes. I find that particularly cute.

She has a piece of one of her hind legs missing. I don't know if she lost it during her excursion hiking across the road? It was that way when I found her. I assume that if she molts, it might grow back although I haven't looked that up yet. I'm just guessing based on other how some other critters work.

So it looks like my question of what to do with the tank when the fish die, has been answered.

it's a girl, at least that's what I'm going with

Nice looking crawdad! Most species are nocturnal, so you might not see her eating, but she probably is. She'll grow those legs back, eventually, and it shouldn't slow her down much in the mean time. They have built-in spares.

WhistlingBadger said:

Nice looking crawdad! Most species are nocturnal, so you might not see her eating, but she probably is. She'll grow those legs back, eventually, and it shouldn't slow her down much in the mean time. They have built-in spares.

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I suspect that the reason they evolved to have so many legs is so that they could afford to lose some.

I like watching them walk and dig. With all those little legs, and all that armor, they look like little tanks.

WhistlingBadger said:

I like watching them walk and dig. With all those little legs, and all that armor, they look like little tanks.

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She's been digging in the sand and hiding under the driftwood. I see her less than I would like, but as long as she's contentedly doing her thing, I'm happy.

I found out why she was hiding. She must have had eggs, because a few days ago she came out into the open areas looking like this (her hind leg was broken when I found her btw):



The next day she had significantly fewer on her, so I checked the filter. I have a HOB filter and I've had fry get sucked up into the intake tube before and sure enough, there were at least half a dozen live crayfish babies and one dead one in there. I put them in the aquarium and as they are largely translucent, they promptly became invisible and disappeared. I put a sponge filter over the intake tube so no more critters will get in there. They were so tiny. I scooped up a couple in a half-teaspoon measurer and there was room to spare. I put it on a ruler that has 0.5mm marks and they were about 4 - 4.5mm.



The little ones are all off of their mother now. I have no idea how many survived or will continue to survive to adulthood. I'm waiting to hear back from the wildlife & fisheries dept to learn if I can give any survivors to a fish shop if there are too many for me to house. I have time to worry about that later.

Though larger than they were, they are still very small and don't have full color yet, so they are difficult to see, but are worth the search because they are very interesting and cute. Those are grains of sand, not gravel. That should help you visualize their size!



I put in an Emerald Entrée omnivore cube and it went over extremely well. Mom tore into it causing bits to fly about making a mess that the babies and the tetras eagerly cleaned up. In the pic below, I circled 2 of the babies. You can see the little legs of one of them. There were more of them nearby but they didn't show up in the camera. Camera-phones annoy me at times like this (my phone has an embarrassing number of bug and aquarium photos), but unless I want to buy a real camera and learn how to use it, I'll have to be content with this being as good as it gets.

The disgusting looking mess that Mom is standing over is the Emerald Entrée cube. Yum.

Cute photo of Mom with a leaf mustache:



If you don't think that's cute, I don't need to know you.

How cute. You are officially fully stocked.

So cute! @TheLavenderBadger , are you seeing this?