no thats just a reg blue crayfish its the aussie blues that get to be huge your guy will probally never get more than 6"
My Blue "Lobster" Crayfish
- Thread starter LondonDragon
- Start date
rottbo said:
Thanks for that, guess it won't grow much now then! Its a good thing since I don't want to get a larger tank for it!
Those are some beautiful pictures of a beautiful cray.
Crayfish are scavengers, so they'll really eat just about anything. It's important to give them some high-calcium foods, but you're already doing that with the shrimp and crab pellets. I think you've got a good diet for him. Has he molted yet? That will be the real test of good cray care, but he looks healthy and active, so clearly you're doing something right with him!
Crayfish are scavengers, so they'll really eat just about anything. It's important to give them some high-calcium foods, but you're already doing that with the shrimp and crab pellets. I think you've got a good diet for him. Has he molted yet? That will be the real test of good cray care, but he looks healthy and active, so clearly you're doing something right with him!
illustrae said:
Not familiar with the terms, I take it molted is changing its shell, if so yes 4 times since I got it 6 months ago. Last one was about 1 and a half months ago so should be one any time soon I take it.
First time that happened i thought it had died since I only saw the shell and the cray was hiding in the boghood. Was so pissed off that I took it out of the tank and threw it in the bin, when I came back to feed the guppies I thought I was seeing a ghost LOL
F
FishHeadSoup
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Here's a picture of the molted exosceleton of my Blue Crayfish.
It's very important that you leave the molted skin inside the tank. He will eat it to get all the calcium to help his new exosceleton harden.
And BOY do they eat it.
Here is what it looked like after he ate it.
It's very important that you leave the molted skin inside the tank. He will eat it to get all the calcium to help his new exosceleton harden.
And BOY do they eat it.
Here is what it looked like after he ate it.
Die Fledermaus said:
Thanks for the info, much appreciated, I wasn't aware of that, although one day as I was leaving for work it had molted, and when I got home from work, the old skin was nowhere to be seen, no one little bit, now I know why (althought it could have only been eaten)
LondonDragon said:
The most reliable way to sex any cray is to examine their swimmerettes (the small legs under their abdomen). The males' first swimmerette will be club-shaped (whereas the females' will look like the rest of her swimmerettes). The difference is quite pronounced, and an extremely reliable way to differentiate the sexes!
Beautiful pics!! What type of camera did you use??? Any tips/tricks for a beautiful shot like that?
CoverMe said:
Think its a female as all the swimmerettes look the same to me! Are these cray easy to breed if I get a male???
The camera is just a cheap digital, Fuji Finepix S5500, cost me around £300 (450 US$ if I am not mistaken), just use a manual mode with que weakest flash I can set on the camera, an ISO of 200 or 400, use the macro option and shoot away, to get a decent shot like the ones above usually have to take 40-50 photos!
LondonDragon said:Think its a female as all the swimmerettes look the same to me! Are these cray easy to breed if I get a male???
The camera is just a cheap digital, Fuji Finepix S5500, cost me around £300 (450 US$ if I am not mistaken), just use a manual mode with que weakest flash I can set on the camera, an ISO of 200 or 400, use the macro option and shoot away, to get a decent shot like the ones above usually have to take 40-50 photos!
Well, your persistence paid off, those are nice pix!
The problem with breeding, is that you have to have two in the same tank w/o them killing e/o. in order to do THAT, you need a fairly large tank, with plenty of cover/places to hide.
However, having accomplished that, I find crays very easy to breed. At the lab, once the female is in berry (has a bunch of eggs underneath her abdomen... aka "the tail part") we separate her and put her in a large plastic bin with about 4" of water and holes punched in the lid. Once the babies hatch and detach from mom, you can put her back into her original tank... there to start the process over again.
If you just want more crays, I say go to your local stream and catch more, because it's probably a lot less time consuming!!
catching crays is as easy as finding a shady bank, a slow moving stream, and either... a) a willingness to get pinched or b) a bucket and some chicken liver. (place chicken liver in bucket, place/sink bucket right side up in stream... crays crawl in to get liver, you pick up the whole bucket). Traps are even easier, but buckets are cheaper!