Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Raising Forage and Bait Self-Cloning Marbled Crayfish aka marmorkrebs?

Marbled crayfish are not native crayfish. Anywhere. They were discovered in the pet trade. They were not specifically bred for it; they were just found in tanks in Germany.

The closest relative to marbled crayfish are slough crayfish (Procambarus fallax), which live in Florida and the very southern part of Georgia. A paper published last year paper published last year, though, showed that marbled crayfish are quite distinct from slough crayfish in several ways besides their mode of reproduction.

Calling something a "native crayfish" is not very informative without saying "Native to where?" Many crayfish species have very small distributions. Some entire species are confined to an American county or two. Moving crayfish from one watershed or river or lake to another - even very close, within a short car drive - can be bring an entirely new species into a new habitat, where it can cause problems. This has happened a lot when people have used crayfish for bait.

Zen Faulkes
Department of Biology, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley