Cloning crays

[agentamalia]

I won a few cloning crayfish in a contest. I was curious if anyone knows how I go about getting the blue variation. They are brown right now. Is it diet? Environment? How do I get them to have blues? Tia!


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[ImACoolguy]

I had actually never heard of these before but I dug this up:

"These self cloning crayfish must be handled with extreme caution. A single crayfish can cause an infestation and interrupt native species if released in the wild. These crayfish produce asexually and over the course of their life they are capable of having hundreds of babies. If you not longer want the crayfish, do not release them in the wild, make sure that they are dead and dispose of them in a way that they cannot reach any water supplies in the case that they might have a single egg on them........."

5 mins on Google took me all over the color wheel with these


Caleb

[Nils]

You mean Marbled Crays right? Self cloning, easy to keep, brown. If you feed a more plant based diet, like mostly zucchini and lettuce, then the parents and babies will be blue. A meaty diet will result in brown crays. Easy and hardy inverts, shouldn't be a problem to "breed" (if you can call it that )

[agentamalia]

Originally Posted by Nils

You mean Marbled Crays right? Self cloning, easy to keep, brown. If you feed a more plant based diet, like mostly zucchini and lettuce, then the parents and babies will be blue. A meaty diet will result in brown crays. Easy and hardy inverts, shouldn't be a problem to "breed" (if you can call it that )

Yea self cloning crays. They guy I got them from said he's never had luck getting blues and I am interested in trying to get some but have no idea where to start lol


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[Nils]

If you want to get real pure blues and keep them blue it will require very specific breeding and culling. I'm not a breeder so I don't what other stuff you have to do lol

[agentamalia]

That's what I'm wanting to do but I have no idea where to start lol. I mean I don't mind them being brown they are still cool but having a blue would be awesome


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[GreenGo]

However, according to this resource (don't know how accurate it is, but it doesn't ring any alarm bells) [http://www.marbledcrayfish.com/experiments, the blue color is only temporary while you're feeding color enhancing foods. So, while you may get a blue marbled cray, if you stop feeding it those foods, it MAY revert back to its original brown coloration.

PS, in no way do I condone releasing these into the wild, even though the resource's author mentions he doesn't think it'd be a bad thing. However, for an aquaponics system, well, I'll have to think about that one lol

[livefishguy124]

ok trust me look at my pick and how many posts i have put out, i have kept and breed them, culling is a stupid idea with these animals, they all have the same genetic DNA, so the only reason they are different is by environment and diet i don't know how to get them blue, because i haven't tried the ones i feed flakes are brown the ones that only ate plants were a greenish color so color depends on diet. they will change the most after a molt, they may go from blue to red in a molt or green to brown, look on google it will probably tell you all you need to know