Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I remember reading something years ago that said You should not feed crayfish to turtles because of a disease that affects the shell of the turtle? Can anyone shed any light on this?

I havn't heard of any particular disease that relates to what you mentioned, but wild-caught prey is generally not great because of disease/parasite/toxin risks. Captive bred crayfish would be awesome though; I wonder if they are hard to breed in an aquarium?

Yes, I've heard this also. It's some kind of bacteria.

Beneckea chitinovora is the name of the bacterium carried by crayfish which is thought to cause shell infections in aquatic turtles.
Another reason not to feed crayfish is something that happened to a friend of mine.
He fed crayfish to his sliders, one of them got bits of crayfish shell stuck in his intestines & nearly died from it.
Luckily a vet was able to save the turtle so after that my friend never tried feeding them crayfish again. :-x
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PHRatz

Just cook em first.
Softshells and several map turtles consume huge amounts of crayfish in the wild.
DBTS, snappers and larger kinosternids love em too.
Just, you know, cook em.