Anyone Ever Seen a BLACK Crawdad? - Homesteading Today
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  #1  
Old 05/17/08, 08:48 AM
 
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Anyone Ever Seen a BLACK Crawdad?

We were out yesterday, watching th county do some road work by our place. They turned up some HUGE crawdads (bigger then my hand and about 2" wide at the abdomen.....). None of us there had seen any that big nor had we seen any BLACK ones. This is in SE Nebraska.
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  #2  
Old 05/17/08, 08:51 AM
 
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Wow - I've never seen one around here...also SE Nebraska - but I haven't looked for them this year. ... usually reddish/brown. Not black - maybe with the "colder" spring they are darker??? OK, and never have I seen any that big...usually much smaller.

You may want to check with Nebraska Game & Parks - maybe something new/introduced???

Hard to tell with all the game fish bait sold - not all of it native.
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  #3  
Old 05/17/08, 12:47 PM
 
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We have black ones here. They don't live in creeks like I am used to. They live in the moist banks of drainage ditches, etc. They are called 'mud bugs' here. They dig out burrows and pile up the wildest looking structures from the mud. The drought virtually wiped out the populations here along with leeches and decimated the mosquito population (I'm not crying over the last two). The 'mud bugs' freak my dog out.
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Old 05/17/08, 01:40 PM
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I've never seen a black one but have seen one neon blue one. It lived in the small spring, covered with a grape arbor, in my Grandmothers back yard. All the grandchildren pestered it so much it was tame.

The crawdads in the creek were brown. I never understood why that was the only crawdad in that small two foot wide spring.

I'd really enjoy seeing a black crawdad up close and personal.
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  #5  
Old 05/17/08, 02:00 PM
 
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I've seen black ones in N. AZ.

Tasty critters.
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  #6  
Old 05/17/08, 02:47 PM
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I saw an article in a magazine a few years ago with pictures of all the colors that breeders have developed in crayfish. Some are raised on fish food farms, and some are raised for the pet trade.

It was cool. They even have snow white ones.
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  #7  
Old 05/17/08, 05:16 PM
 
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We have what look black, but they are really a deep brown.

Usually they get darker the later you get into the season. Also get much harder shells.

Reaux
BTW, it's crawfish....
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Old 05/17/08, 06:20 PM
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Here's an interesting webpage about crayfish:

http://www.seagrant.umn.edu/aqua/northern.html

From the above:

Between 2,000 and 3,000 metric tons of crayfish are consumed annually at a festival in Sweden.
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  #9  
Old 05/17/08, 07:32 PM
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I grew up in SE Texas and we had both black and red crawfish. The black ones were usually larger and more aggressive than the red ones.
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  #10  
Old 05/17/08, 10:05 PM
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bjba View Post
I grew up in SE Texas and we had both black and red crawfish. The black ones were usually larger and more aggressive than the red ones.
Yeah, these guys seemed a tad more "out to get me" then normal ones. According to the State of Nebraska G&P, they are not "offically" listed as a species for this area.
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  #11  
Old 05/18/08, 01:58 AM
 
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Used to hunt crawdads in Waco, TX. Lots of albino ones hidden under rocks....
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  #12  
Old 05/18/08, 07:24 AM
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yes, I've seen them...perhaps not as large as you describe, but definately black...
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  #13  
Old 05/18/08, 09:03 AM
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Hey.

I've caught red,light blue, and black mudbugs. However, I never saw one as big as you describe.

RF
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  #14  
Old 05/18/08, 09:57 AM
 
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I guess about 30 years ago I lived in a trailer park and there was maybe a 4-500 hundred acres of woods I would squirrel hunt. I came about a cabin that had colasped way back in the middle of nowhere. No drive to get to it or path I could find but there it was.
It had a spring that had a concrete drain pipe about 4 feet wide setting over the spring and a hole the excess water drained from. We moved the lid just to look in and there were a bunch of crawdads in there. I noticed the bigger they were the darker they were. Maybe 10 or ??? years later I carried a guy from work home and he lived in the same trailer I had lived in before. I got to telling him about the spring and all so one satuday we went hunting and looking for the spring too.
When we found it there were crawdads all in that spring creek and when we moved the lid again, there were about a half dozen that looked like small lobsters but they were from light brown to black.
I don't know what they ate because they were too large to get out of the hole in the pipe but they were huge to be a grawdad......
And I am here to tell you, there pinchers pinch. We chased them arounf for probably 10 minutes before I caught one. Let me refrase that. Before one caught me, LOL.
We went back and made a cage we run them all into and carried them home and cooked them and they were great. Well some of them were. Some didn't taste worth a dime.
It was either the lighter colored ones or the darker ones that were good but I forget which now. But they were from a sand color to just short of being black they were so dark.
Plus the biggest ones were all different colors also.
I think the next time I am over that way I will go back and look to see how they are all doing.
There were a bunch of them that were like 3" or 4" long. They were all in the little stream.

Last edited by crafty2002; 05/18/08 at 09:59 AM.
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  #15  
Old 05/18/08, 11:51 AM
 
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In SW Louisiana, it seems to be a faux pas bordering on bad manners to call crayfish, pronounced crawfish, crawdads. Are these the same critters? Where is crawdad the common or appropriate name? Thanks, Sue
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  #16  
Old 05/18/08, 01:39 PM
 
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The only places I have heard them called anything BUT Crawdads, is in the south (Crawfish), Eastern Seaboard (MudBugs) or some people in Oklahoma/Kansas (Mud Puppies). Everywhere else I've heard Crawdads.

It's like that river that flows through Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas......
To the rest of the world it's the "Arkan-SAW" River. To someone from Kansas, it's the "Ar-KANSAS" River......
Actually almost got into a fight in a restaraunt over it. Some clown wanted to kick my behind because I pronounced it "Arkan-SAW".
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  #17  
Old 05/18/08, 02:06 PM
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not lately, ours are a real dark brown, almost look black, but we can catch bass on a black plastic crayfish

Last edited by stranger; 05/18/08 at 02:09 PM.
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  #18  
Old 05/18/08, 02:21 PM
 
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I know Arkansas and Idaho call them crawdads. Here we have several kinds, a medium sized red one is the one I find most and a huge dark red one in one place that might be escapes from a fish farm. Mighty tasty.
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  #19  
Old 05/18/08, 03:15 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Use Less View Post
In SW Louisiana, it seems to be a faux pas bordering on bad manners to call crayfish, pronounced crawfish, crawdads. Are these the same critters? Where is crawdad the common or appropriate name? Thanks, Sue
I was born in West Virginia, lived there until I was six. My Dad relocated us to Florida. In both states everyone I knew called them crawdads.
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