Originally Posted By: snrub
We had an exceptionally dry spring. Ended up growing exceptional crops, but because of "just in time" rain with very little runoff.

As a result, the normal flow of small seasonal streams where these crayfish would normally be found was nonexistent. This springs lack of water along with a pretty bad drought last year simply was not good for crayfish reproduction, at least in the areas I checked and would normally expect to see them. They likely were in the larger creeks but did not go there.

Another issue is that I got some PK shrimp and put in my forage pond. After introducing these shrimp, I kind of lost the desire to stock crayfish. At least for a while till I see how the PK shrimp reproduce.

I've had crayfish in aquariums before. Mean little critters. In one case my wife was wondering why her beautiful fluffy tail goldfish had ragged tails and were loosing length. I had put a few very small (1.5" crayfish in the aquarium. We figured it out one day when we seen a crayfish hitching a ride behind a frantic goldfish, the crayfish hanging onto the fish tail with the bigger pincer, and picking off bits and eating with one of the small pincers. I thought it hilarious. Wife did not. Crayfish were removed from aquarium. In another later incident, we had some very small GSF and assorted minnows in an aquarium for our then small kids to observe. They had also caught some small mussels and a few very small crayfish. Like 1" long. I would have just dumped them in the aquarium, but wife went to a lot of trouble making a really nice environment. Got some pond grass/weed of some sort out of the creek, planted it in dirt in containers in the bottom of aquarium, went all out. Really looked nice. The 3 or 4 crayfish proceeded to un-plant all the plants and generally dig all the dirt out of her very carefully planted containers and generally make a mess of things. They arranged things to suit themselves and not my wife.

Crayfish are industrious, mean little critters. I was afraid if I put a bunch of them in with my newly acquired PK shrimp, the crayfish might make a snack of them. So I temporarily gave up on the crayfish idea in favor of the PK shrimp.

Will wait and see how the PK shrimp goes, then may reconsider the crayfish.


LOL! I had one in an aquarium when I was in college a million years ago. Took on the color of the red brick chips in the bottom of the tank. Seemed like it molted all the time and just kept getting bigger. My red tail sharks kept disappearing. One night I saw the crayfish perched in the top of one of the fake plants and it jumped out of the plant as a fish swam by and tried to loop its claws around it trying to catch it. Mean critters is right!

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