CRAWDADS!!

[el pollo rey]

The minnow traps work well and other variety of home made hardware cloth traps work well and are cheap to make a chunk of fish will work as bait when I was young growing up on lake erie catching and selling them to bait shops was a kids summer industry ,,,,

 

[Ole and Lena]

Also, if your pond is deep and cold enough to support smallmouth bass they are voracious crayfish eaters. If it's on the warm side, largemouth will eat some but they prefer frogs, minnows and bugs. I'd still trap them. They are tasty. As far as mitigating damage to your spillway, you may have to draw the pond down, excavate, replace softer clay with hard packed class 5 mixed with trap rock. Not fun, but once the damage is done it will continue to seep. Also keep the muskrats trapped out. There bank runs do a lot of damage and make more habitat for crawdads.

 

[el pollo rey]

Small mouth luv um for sure that is what we sold them to bait shops for when I was young the small mouth fisherie in lake erie ,, huge smallies . Good luk

 

[Tame Emu Guy]

Bloonskiller, I’m just visiting from over at the Emu Section. I’m in Western Australia, and I have heard that some farmers use poison to deal with crawdads (‘yabbies’ here) that burrow.

It may be, if you are serious enough, that you can learn which species will ‘eat out’ which other species – not all species burrow. (One Australian species is called ‘destructor’ because it burrows.)

Personally, I’d be far far more inclined to learn how to breed them – at least the right species. Make a sauce with chilli, honey, coriander, and tamari. Lightly boil the crawdads, and extract the meat. Learn how to make a bed of cous cous (with lemon). Steam broccoli.

If you serve your guests spiced crawdad meat and steamed broccoli on a bed of cous cous, you’ll have them lined up.

Supreme Emu

 

[wyoDreamer]

Do you have a baffle on your pipe to prevent water from seeping along the pipe and washing the dam out?
Maybe a change in the type of outfall you have might help. There are minor adjustments you can do to have the water intake pipe below the water level that you want to maintain. Maybe if you did this, then they wouldn't be digging along the pipe and causing problems.

 

[chickengeorgeto]

I would think that more rocks not fewer rocks would work best at keeping chimney building crawdads from burrowing in your dam. Why not think about "paving" over the top of the dam with gravel? These are more than one type of crayfish and they all don't live under rocks.

 

[refamat]

along with the minnow trap, you can fish for them..fish hook baited with some meat, put it down the hole and they will clamp on , pull up, drop in bucket, prepare as described above

 

[allieszoo]

awwww... :{ i want a pet crawdad...

You can come to my backyard and take as many as you want. For free. I don't mind : )

We get them in our backyard. I had no idea they would burrow (or whatever it is they do) so far from water -- I had only ever seen them around ponds or streams. But I noticed a bunch of weird holes in the back part of the yard and asked my husband about them and I honestly thought he was kidding about the crawdads....until I found what looked like a medium sized lobster in the yard.

I was honestly hoping the chickens would eat them.

 

[StephieSky]

Late but maybe you still need a long term solution. Copper additives are lethal to invertabrates of all types while being safe for fish and other wildlife over the short term. Any pond store in your area should carry a "pond snail killer" with a copper base. It will also kill off the crayfish. There are safe doses for the water to still be fine for fish and mammals. Be sure to read the label and follow the directions. More is not better!

 

[suthrnmomto5]

Oh I'd eat them with my kids!!!