Bill Cody, I watched the crawfish denude any or all of the vegetation along one bank of the pond. Clean as can be. And as far a water clarity, I see no evidence of turbid water caused by the crawdads. I don't believe I have enough crawfish in the pond to cloudy the water. After adding all 1200+ of those little 1/4 " baby craws, I see just a few big ones around the pond. I do see skeletal remains of some along the shore. Eaten and enjoyed by others around the pond. Anthropic, when trying to identify these crawfish as native, I had to wait for them to grow to adult size and while doing so, I was reading all I could find on the crawdads in our area of E. Texas. I found out the Red Swamps have taken over this area of Texas and I am thinking if you add the paper shells, they will be killed or moved out by our native RSC. So I might be a waste of time and money stocking the PSC. But I am no expert like Bill Cody or Ewest. And to FortheFamily, everything I have read says the lmb will remove 98% of the craws in a pond. Here in Louisiana, they trap the craws for the food table so you might give that a try but again the stocking of lmb works best, this is based on all I have read and my experience is the 1200+ I added is down to maybe 50 or so holes around a 3.5 acre pond with only a few larger ones seen in or around the pond bottom.
PS, I started this thread so others might learn from what I am seeing.
Tracy
Tracy, or anybody else with crawfish,
One of my concerns in stocking crawfish is it might upset the pond balance. Specifically, in my situation, it will distract the predators from my SF forage and create potential over population issues there. Have you noticed that your predators are moving away from fish for dinner in favor of "lobster?" Just wondering whether we need to spend a little more time thinking about the impact on the pond balance before we stock additional forage for our predators. I am not a pro but it seems every change made to the pond community has impact, sometimes, despite our best intentions, with a downside.
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