My first (crayfish) molt!

Penelope, my little blue orconectes immunis, molted yesterday. I came downstairs in the morning to find this:


An exo!

Penelope was hiding, but she came out and ate her exo during the day while I was at work, and when I got home she was already feeling chipper enought to charge out and wave her claws at me:



Here's another picture of her post-molt:


Just for comparision, a crayfish molt (if it goes well) only takes about five minutes or so. And the exo is usually eaten pretty fast -- by the time I went to bed, only the thumbs were left. A bit easier on the nerves than your average hermit crab molt, though when it goes wrong it can be just as sad.

 

WOW!! CONGRATS!!!!!
I wish a hermie would be that fast!! HUGE differance!!!!!

 

OOOOooooo she is simply beautiful! Congrats on the molt!

 

Wow!! She is beautiful!
Great pics!
Congrats on the molt!

 

wow crayfish can die molting to? i hope i take as good care of my crabs as i did my crayfish, he was big enough to clog my toilet lol, had him for few years, he mustve had a disease, had huge black spots on his claw and back , he mustve died from old age or those spots

 

Yep, though generally they don't seem to have as tough a time of it as crabs do. But they can get stuck in their exo and not be able to complete the molt.

It sounds like maybe your cray had some shell rot. It's not uncommon for crays to get this if they scrape their exos on something in the tank. It's often treatable with a fish medicine called Melafix, which doesn't make the rot go away, but keeps it from getting worse until the crayfish can molt away the damaged exoskeleton.

But crayfish don't live very long lives -- three to five years at the most, so yours probably was pretty old, and the shell rot didn't necessarily kill him. Do you know what kind of crayfish you had?

 

no idea petco just said its a cray, he was brown with blue claws, and it was just getting bigger when he been molting, i had some stuff to heal scrapes and bacteria but he died when i started to use it, i kept trying to get more crayfish near his size but he kept eating them

 

Yeah, pet stores generally don't know anything about crayfish. I was at my lfs today and they had two blue crayfish that were totally different species. To me they look very different, but the guys at the lfs thought they were the same. But I guess I can remember when I couldn't tell hermit crab species apart, so I guess it all comes with looking at them.

I have heard it say that a crayfish's favorite food is other crayfish. Some crays are more agressive than others, and for males it can depend on what form they are in. (Form 1: "I want to mate!" Form 2: "That female looks delicious!") Generally, it's not a good idea to keep more than one per tank unless you really know what you are doing.

If you ever decide to get another crayfish, check out http://www.bluecrayfish.com. There's a forum there as well, which is where I get my crayfish questions answered. They helped me identify my first crayfish: it was most definitely not what they told me it was at Petco!