Went sheepshead fishing for the first time yesterday - and I caught one! I still have about half a pint of fiddler crabs left over… watching football today so won’t make it back to the water until tomorrow… how do I keep them alive? Right now they are in a bucket on my porch with a salt water soaked towel covering them…
dont quote me, but im pretty sure thats the best way. just dont let them get dried out
Sharing the stoke
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You don’t need to completley cover them. They can live a long time breathing air, but need access to salt water. They can live for days that way. We used to have a few as pets that we captured from my back yard.
See this site:
http://exoticpets.about.com/cs/rarespecies/a/fiddlercrabs.htm
Bring them inside tonight. It will be cold and you could have a bunch of dead crabs tomorrow if you do not. If I were not going offshore tomorrow I’d offer to help you drown them. The sheep bite is pretty good right now, or at least it was last weekend. Happy sheepin!
yea, I’m going tomorrow and would love to take them off your hands!
And the sea shall grant each man new hope as sleep brings dreams of home ~ Don Cristobol
The Morris Island Lighthouse web page
www.savethelight.org
Ditto here
Russ B.
God is great, Beer is good, People are crazy
Went sheepin’ today for an hour or so - lost a lot of rigs & caught nothing… so still have about half a pint of fiddlers (not the kind I see in the mud around here… gray / white backs… maybe they are just clean?). A guy I went fishing with on Friday used some fiddlers that had been frozen… if not going fishing again until this upcoming weekend- should I just stick the crabs in a freezer bag & freeze them? With water?.. or try to keep them alive somehow… for a week? I don’t have salt water nearby but can get some tomorrow if need be to put in a bucket with a rock or something so they can get out of the water…
Perhaps I am overthinking this… they are crabs…
I just stick them into a bucket and put some wet pluff mud and grass in there. Make sure you keep the mud wet because that keeps em going. They eat the detritus so make sure you get a good bit of old marsh grass in there as well.
Every piece of tail you turn down is a piece of tail you didn’t get.
xHCFKx
I keep a rubbermaid container about 2.5’x1.5’x1’. est. 2-3" of sand in the botttom (from the river) bowl of water in the bottom with the sand pushed up to the lip of the bowl so they can get in then a stick in the bowl of water so they can get back out. had a few make it 2 months
edited to say: saltwater in bowl from river
Friend of ours kept a big bathtub buried in his back yard as a Fiddler Motel for years… He didn’t have pets. He’d put them in there with saltwater, pluff mud and marsh grass and would feed them a sprinkle of oatmeal every day or so. Did it for years! Would catch them, use them, return the unused live ones and repeat.
If we keep 'em even over night, we have to cover them with a heavy screen to keep my Flossie kitty out of them. Not a pretty site when we didn’t!
a 48 quart cooler with a board or brick under 1 end, and a quart of water in the bottom, to make a pool, and if you change the water dail, you can keep them for weeks
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