Calling the Crayfish specialists.

jamzwayne

jamzwayne

I love Pl3co's
Jul 28, 2004
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Athens, TX
www.thegodshatetexas.com
I am still cycling my tank....BUT, I am excited none the less.

At this point, I am just brwsing around and gathering info and ideas to what or how I want to stock my 55 GAL tank.

I was thinking shrimp, but they are too small. Then I saw someone had a crayfish.

WOW. What a great idea.

I am going for a natural "Texas Pond" look for my tank. Trying to keep from the "tropical" look. Live plants are started, drift wood in place, rocks and caves all setup.

~ANYWAY~

I was thinking of adding a crayfish. I live in Texas where it fairly simple to just go catch one in the wild.

Good or bad idea? I have heard wild animals (fish) are more aggressive. Is this true? If so, a crayfish from the wild may not be a good idea, huh?
 
I was under the assumption that all of them were pretty aggressive, wild or not....... and that they will normally catch and eat slower moving fish.... a thing to look out for...
 
When I was a kid I had a friend who's parents had a crayfish in their tank.

It might be cruel but they simply yanked his claws off so he couldn't hurt anything in the tank. When they grew back...yank.

They had him for a long time so it apparently didn't hurt his longevity. Though, I will confess, I don't know how long crayfish normally live.
 
Many years ago, when I was a teenager living in the country, my boyfriend and I caught a small smallmouth bass, a large rock bass, and a pile of crayfish. We decorated a 35g tank with river rocks, made some caves for the bass and the crayfish, and thought it was wonderful to have a little bit of the surrounding waterways right there in my home. (I shudder now when I realize just how many things I did wrong back then, but I was just a kid.)
Well, our rock bass took to one of the caves and stayed under a rock most of the time (I assumed this was normal, this is what all the rock bass I caught in the wild did too). The crayfish crawled under the rocks and disappeared. I thought everything was fine. Some of the smaller crayfish that came out to explore were eaten by the bass, but we expected that. What we didn't expect was for a 5" crayfish to crawl into the rock bass' cave, raise his claws, reach up and sever one of the poor, dozing fish's pectoral fins! I was mortified! The fish was about 7" long, but this didn't stop that crayfish from thinking he was gonna get him some lunch.
I don't know about tearing their claws off, that seems a lot like declawing a cat, which seems like horrible torture to me, but I can tell you that crayfish are amazing to watch (we got to watch a mother with tiny, transparant babies under her abdomen protecting her brood, it was fascinating) but they might make a meal out of any plants and fish they can get within reach.
 
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