Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

The yabbies I ordered should come today. I'm a little nervous about getting them into the tank.
After a long trip, they will be starting to be a bit worse for wear and I expect that some will have died in transit.
Whats the best way to get them into the tank without shocking them too much?

there is a really good thread written by Janetpatelletier called "I Got A Bag of Fish, Now What " in fish problems. A really useful read. (i wont attempt to type the link cause i always stuff that up )

Found out on my holidays that marron ( I suspect yabbies are the same) need to release the air they are breathing as they go back into the water, if you have a way that the yabbies can walk into the tank slowly, the better they will acclimatise.

Maybe a ramp? So they can get in as quickly/slowly as they want to?

A ramp sounds like a good idea to me. Perhaps stack up a milkcrates or something so you can rig up a platform to put them on in the tank right near the water surface with a ramp or some netting going down. I've never handled such creatures but would love it if I could grow them here.

Best I found is to clamp a mesh bucket to your tank so about 3 inches of water covers bottom, put yabbies in and cover top, about an hour should do it then let them go, even use a yabbie net and suspend it some how or even hang a shelf inside tank and and put yabbies on that, when they are ready they will enter the tank properly themselves, don't be surprised if they take off right away, this is fine. Yabbies aren't as finicky as Marron but is still good to give them time to adapt to new conditions, Gnash it doesn't take long to get rid of air, it is more for getting use to new conditions

I ended up picking the four dead ones out (squished in transit by the cooling ice block, the chooks loved them)
Then I left them in their foam box and over a couple of hours, added cupfulls of the new water to their box.
When they were finally just covered with water, bit-by-bit with the cups of waterover the hours, I left them about 10-15 mins to get used to it, then pulled them out and popped them into the tank.

This should be interesting.

what, no pics?

Well, I only have one pic of the little guys and its blurry and under water. forgot to take some before we stuck them into the tank... give them a few days to adjust and I'll pull one out for you to see

There is one which I've nicknamed 'pinchy' who is looking like he might need a warm bath... a VERY warm bath.


But of course I can't do that just yet... can I???

Was going to drop mine in one at a time but they kept wanting to bite me. So I just poured em in. 80 yabbies bee-lining for the deep end. The water temp was close. I'll be more careful with fish. only dead ones I got were a couple that had a hard time in transit.

If you grab them just where the body part of their shell ends in a V at the tail... they can't get ya!

I was lucky. I thought I'd get mostly males... but turned out to be almost exactly half and half... guess which ones will be eaten first??? Sorry fellas.