Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations Thoughts on Crawdad removal

Kenny your suspicions regarding crays causing turbidity are well founded, I've fought that situation multiple times in my mini ponds where cray populations exploded due to lack of enough predation. They denuded all macrophytes, even all the filamentous algae. For a while I was excited at their ability to keep the FA at bay, but it was short lived as turbidity became an issue. I trapped crays in two ponds for months, removed thousands, but turbidity didn't improve. I eventually drained, seined, and nuked one pond. Refilled a couple weeks later and restocked my male Lepomis and the crays returned and turbidity persisted. When I drained the pond enough of them burrowed into the banks and made a return...that should have occurred to me, but didn't. So I drained and seined again and wintered fish in multiple cages and let the pond sit dry and frozen for several months. Refilled this Spring and not a sign of the crays in 5 months. This mini pond is only .25 AC but still the drain seine process was a major pain, I don't necessarily recommend it, just sharing my experience with an extreme management issue. In the other pond with cray issues I also drained and seined to install a clay and polymer liner to address major leaking so that process took care of them.

In your situation I would continue trapping - every night. Per Cody - experiment with baits. Pellet baited traps worked sometimes, some loved fresh BG per other posts, some I left empty and allowed tadpoles to enter, die, and those unbaited traps worked sometimes too but required me to leave them for several days. I bought different "professional" cray traps online - they can get pricey for the larger ones, but the standard hardware cloth minnow traps are too small to collect the BIG crays, so I went with the pro cray traps designed to get the lobsters.

I stocked 4 SMB from the main pond into the Lepomis pond and thought they might handle the crays. They didn't make a discernible impact on the population, and when I drained and seined I was shocked to find those fish only around 95-100 WR. I thought they'd be bursting at the seams with crays around 125+. What did I learn? SMB are not automatic cray management tools - but you already know that per your situation. I think turbidity might have impacted SMB ability to locate - but Northerns also grow so large I suspect many were simply invulnerable to predation due to their size. You already know that, though.

SO - following that diatribe, my advice is to deploy multiple traps every night and experiment with baits and keep on going...you may turn the corner and get on top of them, otherwise we need to start getting creative with temporary/supplemental stocking of some verified sex LMB and/or CC and catch and remove them when you see turbidity improving. I think CC and LMB possess traits enabling them to be more successful than SMB alone.