Air Pump Hazards to Remember.

Many of you with fish tanks have at least one air pump and bubble stone. Often they are on the floor because of noisy vibrations or other area a little away from the tank. I just wanted to throw a quick post reminding people who have tanks and alerting those about to start the hobby an easy way of killing your fish due to forgetting about the nature of many of your pumps.

DIY Aquarium Glass Scraper-Use Those Annoying Plastic Cards!

Do you keep getting those plastic, mock credit cards in the mail? Or how about those free membership cards for use at places such as Best Buy or PetSmart? The kind that you have to save and use at checkout to earn points, but just keep piling up as you save one for each store. If you have a fish tank, you can make a glass scraper out of them. Revenge!

Have a crustacean (crayfish) molt? You can set it and keep it!

Last update: April 26, new molt pictures at end.

My crayfish recently molted successfully. If your crayfish has been established and is healthy, it is OK to take out his molt sometimes. Usually it is best to leave it in for a day or so and let the crayfish eat it (if he bothers) to get the materials back in his system. If you remove this one, let him have the next one.

Here is something to do with that molt should you like this sort of thing–set the molt!

If the molt has not been sitting around getting gross or nibbled on, remove it gently from the water using your hand or a small net. They are fragile so do not squeeze or swish it around too much.

Do this when you have time. Once it starts to dry, you cannot move the parts around. Also, lets hope your crayfish does not decide to molt when you have had too much coffee on an empty stomach. This is not the best set I have ever done. I was jittery and impatient. But I had to finish it before it dried.

The picture above shows a molt in the foreground and the crayfish recovering in the background.

Knitting: Blue Crayfish

I adapted a (free!) pattern for a knit lobster by Molly Lincoln at        http://dirigo.wordpress.com/2007/12/17/free-pattern-toy-lobster/ to look   a little more like my blue crayfish.

This is one of the best lobster patterns I have come across and have had it in  my queue of projects for awhile. When I recently acquired a (real) blue crayfish, I just had to knit this immediately. I decided to modify it a little bit to make it more like my crayfish, not because I thought the pattern needed any changing on its own.

Crayfish as Pets! My Electric Blue Boy

Last Update: March 26, He molted again!

If you are looking for the knitted crayfish please click here otherwise read on for live crayfish keeping.

For many reasons I have a love for crustaceans. I find their behavior fascinating. Unfortunately if you are not set up for salt-water, you are limited on what are available. (Hmm…that reminds me, I will have to add a blog on crabs later.)

Crayfish (crawfish, crawdads, mudbugs, freshwater lobsters, blue lobsters….) are usually thought of something you would eat (at least around here) but they are actually quite fun to watch. They have attitude.