Keeping crayfish as pets can be a very fun hobby. Especially if you have one of the pretty electric blue crayfish. Well those are my favorites anyway. However, when getting started with crayfish, you need to make sure you have a good understanding of freshwater crayfish care.
The habitat of the crayfish
Crayfish are very low maintenance. They don’t need much and are easy to care for… And this is probably the main reason why I like them so much. Plus mine is blue.
However, there are a few things you need to provide your little critter for proper freshwater crab care. And that is a habitat.
The crayfish’s habitat is quite simple actually. First I suggest buying a small fish tank. A ten gallon tank is a perfect size. Then you will want to place some type of hiding place in the tank. Like a piece of PVC or a hide from any pet store.
A crayfish likes to burrow and needs a place to hide when molting so that it is not susceptible to attacks by fish and other crayfish.
Next, you’ll want to condition the water you add to the tank and cycle the tank before adding fish or crawfish to the tank. You can learn how to set up a crawfish tank on many sites on the web.
Food for crayfish
Finding the right crayfish food is a fairly easy task and a very important part of crayfish care. Crayfish are omnivorous and eat almost anything. They will eat plants and as a note they love fish and will eat any fish they can get their claws on. That’s just a little warning.
It is very likely that one day you will come home from work and find one of your fish is missing. However, there are fish that have a higher success rate with crayfish than others. I’ll talk about that in a minute.
So back to the food. You can feed your crayfish fish from the store, or you can just feed them sinking wafers. I personally suggest feeding them a wafer sinking every day. Crayfish create a lot of waste and if you have other fish this can affect the chemistry of the tanks. If your crayfish is lucky and catches a fish one day, I would let it go a day without eating. It will be perfectly fine.
Crayfish Tank Mates
You probably want your crayfish to have tank mates. Heck, it’s great to have some fish in the tank and watch them swim around and interact with each other. But you have to know what types of fish will work well with a crawfish.
As I said before, crayfish love to eat fish. Because of this, you will want to get fish that are swimming fast and/or near the top of the tank. I currently have a redtail shark, tiger barbs, and a danio in my tank. These work very well with crayfish.