Pond Boss Forums MANAGING AN EXISTING POND Evaluating and adjusting fish populations Crawfish questions

Hey y'all,
New kid on the block here. I just recently stocked my pond. Bass, cats, bluegill, etc. I had some crawfish questions. If I stocked my pond with crawfish would it: affect my cattle by pinching, affect me when I swim in it, affect my dog when swimming? Could I order unpurged crawfish from a crawfish farm and stock them in my pond? TIA kevin

Doubt your cattle could feel a crawfish pinch if they ever actually pinched one.

Crawfish can make good food for your fish in the pond.

You might pay some attention to what kind of crawfish you introduce as some are known to borrow small holes around the pond..

Im sure some of the experts here can help out with more information on what type to consider stocking and what might needed to get them established.

Welcome to the forum!

Just like a city boy in the country, or a country boy in the big city, critters do better in an environment that most closely mimics where they grew up.

A crayfish from So. Lousiana where it rarely freezes might not do well in an Oklahoma pond that gets ice covered.

Since crayfish are prey species, they typically scoot away from things that are large enough to eat them. I wouldn't worry about anybody getting pinched unless they try to pick one up. Even then, if you grab them behind the pinchers, you're 99.9% safe.

There's many different types of crayfish. Some do better in streams and creeks, some do better in swamps. Some burrow into the bank and make chimneys, others don't. There's lots on here about crayfish, but you'd have to do some searching.

Hey,
I agree that there's nothing to worry about. Sure, nobody can guarantee that such thing will NEVER happen but the possibility is low, really low. I've been swimming a lot in a lake full of crayfish and nothing bad happened.
Probably it's the same as question - WILL THE PIKE BITE ME IF I SWIM THERE? Probably not but I've heard about 1 (only one!!!) case when starving pike attacked a swimmer though

Don't worry and go on! I'd worry more about survival of your crayfish because you got predators there.

Unless some species of crawfish act different, I doubt you will ever get pinched. Several of us boys used to swim in a pond that had no fish but thousands of crawfish. Many on them were huge, some dark red variety. We would sometimes go there to fish for them for something to do. You could pull one out as soon as your hook hit the bottom but we never got pinched while swimming.

I want to say one with "rusticus" in it's name is one to avoid.

Lots of info on here about crayfish. One thing for sure, bass and catfish love them. There are so many different species of crayfish. Some are considered invasive and different states have different laws about moving them. It is known that the invasive species can wipe out native crayfish.

The burrower kind can possibly cause pond damage. Many crayfish can come right out of your pond during wet weather and move across land to other bodies of water.

Papershells are very commonly stocked for bass ponds.

I would look into the possibility of trapping wild native crayfish from your area.

Wondering if anyone have built cover for crawfish? Or is there such a thing?

Crays like rock and broken concrete.

We put 4" medium crushed concrete around out pond. Pefect for the PH and lots of places for the crayfish to hind. Never have we had a problem swimming with them. We have local soft shell crayfish. Interesting how they clear up the water too. Hope to have millions this year. Put in around 500+

Cheers Don.

Don,

I thought soft crayfish were a molting phase of all crayfish and not an actual type of crayfish?

Yes you are correct. These guys are common Ontario Crayfish and will be soft when molting. I guess they shed a few times a year. We found many molts around the pond last fall. I thought these would be a great addition to our pond for the perch. We could get 50 a day from the local creek when the water level is low in the summer.

Cheers Don.

Yes, I have.



These are regular old 3 holer bricks, Each one is two mortared together. They are 4.5 inches tall and the holes are 1.5 inch diameter holes. Should be perfect for crayfish.

The 40 of these makes 120 crayfish holes.

What kind of crawfish are you stocking? Just wild ones you catch?

I took 2" dia PVC pipe, drilled holes thru each end and strung them on 2 lines, like rungs on a ladder without the spaces between them. Laid them out on the bottom of the pond. Seems to work. Easily removed to seine out crayfish. Don't use foam core - it floats.......

Wouldn't riprap shorelines would be perfect for crayfish?

I want crayfish in my pond also and am getting ready to go to a local river this morning and see if I can catch some. I took my galvanized minnow trap and bent the entrance hole to about 1 1/2" to 2". I have a small net bag to be put into the trap with some canned cat food and also drop in some dry cat food in the main cage. Ready to go and see if this works.

This is a picture of Salt Creek. In my 80 years I have had a history with this creek, from catching loads of bluegill in the 1940's to seeing muscles in the water and many years of catching crawfish in the rock strewed bottom. No more. I placed my trap to catch crawifsh for two days that was baited with four kinds of food and got one tiny bluegill.

Then I put my trap in White River that I also have a history with. In the late 1930's and early 1940's during and coming out of the depression people would go to White River and fish in the evening filling their washtubs with fish for supper. I had my trap in White River in three places over three days and caught one two inch minnow.

I think I know what has happened. Every farm field has been laced with the modern plastic drainage tubing so that virtually every gallon of water that falls on the fields in excess is flushed into the streams carrying herbicides and pesticides. So water plants and fish are almost non-existent. I will check out two more streams that used to be pretty clean and try a seine to get some crawfish. It's sad that it take a private pond to have what was used to be a natural environment around here.

How dose the cat food work? I always have used a chicken leg or thigh. Takes a week or so just leaving it in the creek.

Cheers Don.

Good link on crawfish ecology:

Crayfish Ecology

In short, crawfish are divided into three types based on burrowing tendencies.

Primary burrowers like the Red Swamp Cf live primarily in tunnels.

Secondary burrowers retreat to burrows during dry spells.

Tertiary burrowers are species where only females burrow and just to incubate the eggs.

mudbugs are good eating

John, I'm not catching any crawdads either, but I think it is for a different reason.

Either I'm too early yet, or the severe winter took them out. The small seasonal stream that winds between my two ponds has had lots of crawdads in the recent past, and I suspect they will be there again. Either this year or later after a flood replenishes seed stock. If the severe winter got them, it will take a flood where the seed stock will come from fish and critters swimming up the back waters from the main creek.

That is my theory at least. That the fish and critters come and go depending on the droughts and severe winters, then get restocked with the floods that we have not annually, but one at least every few years.

We had lots of crawdads in this stream as recent as just a few years ago (the last time I got some for grandkids to watch in aquarium). None so far this year, but with the long winter it may just be too early. None out in our road ditch this year either, where last year it was loaded with them. But it was a dry, cold, hard winter this last year and we had a wet spring the year before.

Things seem to come and go. My brother was worried about a lack of rabbits one year and lamented about the lack of habitat. It wasn't but a year or two we were nearly over run with rabbits and had a lack of coyotes. Stuff runs in cycles. For a while we rarely saw squirrels. Now we have a half dozen running across our yard every morning. The stuff comes and goes with the seasons and cycles.

Not saying there are not or can not be man made problems, but stuff also runs in natural cycles brought about naturally long before man made a difference.

Dono, I have used liver in the past to catch crayfish, (crawdads is what I always called them) and the next day I had crawdads and bluegills. This time I was using canned cat-food, dry cat-food, dry dog food and bacon.

Here is my thinking about the farm field runoff into the streams. I have a farm so I am trying to be honest in my thoughts. I have walked the White River starting with in a mile or two of the head waters where it starts. I find eel grasses and water vegetation for a ways down steam and then it just disappears. Now you would think that with the farm runoff of fertilizer that there would be lots of water plants because of the fertilizer but there isn't. So I believe the herbicide runoff kills the water plants overcoming the effects of the fertilizer in the streams to promote plants. I believe this isn't natural for plants not to be in streams. I kayaked one stream feeding a reservoir for drinking water to a nearby city and it was the most desolate water I have been on. It was so quiet, no birds, no minnows, nothing. On the other hand I have been on a stream in northern Indiana in an Amish community where I could not detect any pollution and the stream was filled with eel grass. I also found these pristine conditions in Canadian streams. So if I were to go out to the same place in White River where 73 years ago family's caught a washtub full of fish for supper I think you would get nothing. So I ask myself what has change so much, and it is farming and what we discharge into the water. But we have to have food for a growing population and there is a cost.

Snrub, your theory could be a good one for one year but not for 73 I think.

I do live in a farming community in Ontario Canada. It is very rare that any farmer uses pesticides. We do use herbicides to control weeds. Of them the only one that is a problem that is used is atrazine and it will travel with water.

I rarely see any ell grass or water cress. Lots of green and brown algae depending on how warm the water gets.

How long to you leave your trap in the water. The land is so well tiled that I have lose many minnow traps with an over night rain.

Cheers Don.

About 10 years ago I would leave my trap for a 24 hour period and would get crawfish and bluegill. The last 5 days I left the trap in for the same length of time and run the trap each day but only got one minnow and one bluegill. We are supposed to get rain for a few days but if the rivers aren't too high I will try to seine on two rivers that are more pristine and see if I do better.

A few years ago I kayaked a lake with no cottages on it and the map I had showed a narrow stream running for several miles with out any human build up close to it, because I think it was mostly marsh land. This narrow stream had vegetation as I picture a stream should look and I saw the first otters playing in it I had ever seen in Indiana. The stream was deep and narrow so that my kayak paddle almost touched both sides of the stream. Because it was hard for humans to get into it and with the area being protected for a long distance that the stream ran I feel this stream is what it must have been like all over Indiana a few hundred years ago.

The last two years pesticides have been sprayed in the area from an airplane for corn bore if I remember correctly.