Crawdads. Crayfish. Crawfish. Mud bugs. Yabbies. All of these names refer to a 10-legged “mini lobster” that inhabits many of the fresh water ecosystems on our planet outside of India and Antarctica.
What are Crawdads?
Crawdads come in a wide variety of sizes and colors. Of the nearly 600 known species of Decapods, 30% are listed as endangered, and very little is actually known about another 20%. The fish tank trade ships them all over the world with different marketing names like “blue lobsters.” They are an important part of the natural food chain in their NATIVE environments, providing food for raccoons, birds, predatory fish, snakes, and last year people consumed an estimated 75,000 tons of them! To each their own.
Here in Arizona, they are NOT native, but rather were originally imported by early settlers and currently listed by our Arizona Game and Fish Department as “highly invasive.” They are omnivorous and voracious competitors to most of our native freshwater species here. They have decimated the aquatic plant life in many of our mountain streams and they do serious damage to stream banks, causing some major erosion issues.
CAN I PUT CRAWDADS in my PHOENIX Pond?
We do NOT recommend keeping them in your Sonoran Desert backyard pond for a several reasons:
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