MY SECRET TO BREEDING HUNDREDS OF DWARF CRAYFISH

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:09]This little guy is a dwarf Mexican crayfish, more commonly known as a CPO.

[00:00:14]They're super colorful, mean as hell, and reasonably easy to breed. And once they settle in, this is pretty much all they ever do.

[00:00:27]So, in this video, I'm just going to share a little bit about my experience keeping them and breeding them. To start, here's a quick look at the ideal parameters to keep them in. Though, I find they are pretty tough, having kept them in a filterless, heaterless tank down to about 17° during winter on hard tap water. When I first picked these up, I got a pair, one male and one female.

[00:00:47]They were the last two in the shop, as I'd normally want to get an extra female just to make the ratio a bit better.

[00:00:52]Once I got them home, I added them to one of my heavily planted tanks. It's a 42 L 11gal 60x 35x 20 cm tank. And for the first month, they got along really well. Then one day, I found the female with one claw missing and nearly all of her legs ripped off. This was a bit of a shock, but thankfully I have plenty of spare tanks, so I scooped her out and dropped her into my hillstream aquacape.

[00:01:15]And although I didn't build this tank specifically for crayfish, it turned out to be the absolute perfect design for raising baby CPOS's. Because this tank has nearly endless gaps, hollows, and caves between all of the rocks and crevices, there's plenty of places for them to hide. After a couple of days, the female molted and regrrew pretty much all of her limbs, and she was also carrying eggs, which was pretty exciting. For the next month or so after, I didn't see her all that much as she moved into one of the gaps in the rocks and almost never came out. For a little while there, I thought she might have died, but I just left the tank alone and waited to see what would happen. After quite a long time, she emerged. And then about 2 weeks later, I spotted this little guy roaming around the sand, followed by about another 20 others. This is under a two times macro lens, and they're about 5 mm long. As soon as I spotted the babies, I scooped the female out again and dropped her into a different tank, then moved across the original male that roughed her up the first time around.

[00:02:10]Heat. Heat.

[00:03:01]and And just as expected, the same process happened again. So I scooped out the male, dropped him back in his original tank, and waited for the cycle to begin all over again. This time around though, there wasn't as many babies, and that's because this tank has a different species of fish and one of the most prolific micro predators that I've seen, emerald rasporas. These little things are ruthless, and not many fish hunt and snipe prey like these guys. So if you are planning on raising any shrimp or crayfish, definitely avoid these. Honestly, that's pretty much all there is to breeding these things. Just make sure nothing will eat the babies and separate the males and females if you see that the females are getting a bit beat up. The rest of the process basically happens on its own. There's nothing to it.

[00:03:54]Heat. Hey, Heat.