Having pet crayfish can be a pretty fun hobby. Especially if you have one of the pretty electric blue crayfish. Well those are my favorite anyway. When getting started with crayfish however, you want to make sure you have a good understanding of freshwater crayfish care.

The Crayfish Habitat

Crayfish are pretty low maintenance. They don’t need much and are easy to take care of… 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 with for proper freshwater crayfish care. And that is a habitat.

The crayfish 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 a hideout of some sort in the tank. Like a piece of PVC or a hideout from any pet store.

A crayfish likes to burrow and needs a place to hide out when he moults so he is not susceptible to attacks from fish and other crayfish.

Next you will want to condition the water you add to the tank and cycle the tank before you add any fish or crayfish to the tank. You can learn how to set up a crayfish tank on plenty of sites on the web.

Crayfish Food

Finding the right crayfish food is a pretty easy task and a very important part of freshwater crayfish care. Crayfish are omnivores and eat pretty much everything. They will eat plants and just as a note, the love fish and will eat any fish they can get their claws on. That’s just a little warning.

It’s very likely that one day you may come home from work and find one of your fish just missing. However, there are fish that have a higher success rate with crayfish than others. I’ll talk about those in a minute.

So back to food. You can feed your crayfish feeder fish from the store, or you can just feed them sinking wafers. Personally I suggest feeding them one sinking wafer every day. Crayfish put out a lot of waste and if you have other fish, this can affect the tanks chemistry. If your crayfish does get lucky and catch himself a fish one day, I would let him go a day without food. He’ll be perfectly fine.

Crayfish Tank Mates

You probably want your crayfish to have tank mates. Heck, it’s pretty cool 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 crayfish.

As I said earlier, crayfish love to eat fish. Because of this, you will want to get fish that swim fast and/or near the top of the tank. Currently I have a red tail shark, tiger barbs and a danio in my tank. These work great with the crayfish.