Marmorkrebs · Procambarus

Foods & Feeding

Marbled crayfish love a variety of natural foods. One favorite is live snails — if you have a snail problem in any aquarium, just net the snails off the glass where they live and breed, and empty the net into the cray tank. It's genuinely healthy feeding for them, since their diet is otherwise mostly vegetarian.

Plant-based foods

Marbled crayfish enjoy live plants and plant-based sinking wafer food. From the pet store, Anacharis and Cabomba are favorites, and algae tabs are a good staple too. Sliced cucumbers are a big hit as well — sink them with the lead weights that come with aquarium plants, though they do tend to dirty the tank faster than other foods.

Feeding for color

Diet can actually shift a cray's color — feeding certain foods can turn a whole animal green, red, or other shades. "Color flake" foods work by containing ingredients like spirulina and astaxanthin.

A note on cannibalism

Marbled crayfish aren't cannibals, and unlike other crayfish species, they generally don't attack each other while alive. They'll eat their own molted shell, and occasionally a dead specimen, and territory disputes sometimes end with a claw pulled off — but otherwise they're vegetarian enough to leave each other alone when properly fed. If your crays are actively attacking and killing each other, that's usually a sign either that they're not true Marmorkrebs, or that they're being underfed.

Everything on this page reflects personal, hands-on experience — not the results of formal academic research.