Should i put a crawdad/crayfish in my Oranda goldfish aquarium?

Crayfish are very opportunistic omnivores. You may indeed find your plants in little pieces some morning. They are also night feeders and may attack you goldfish when they are more or less asleep. Crayfish, if short of food, will even attack and consume each other.

Crayfish are neat and I've been fascinated by them for a long time. But they are best kept by themselves or a well-fed few in a large, spacious tank with lots and lots of hiding places.

One of the drawbacks to having algae eating "working fish" is that the algae is there in good part because of extra nutrients in the water. When they consume the algae, a lot of those nutrients are passed right back into the water.

Likewise having scavengers to eat leftover live or frozen foods is wise because those can rot and rapidly foul the water. But again a lot of those proteins in the form of ammonia are returned to the aquarium water upon digestion.

A better gravel "scavenger" would be one of those gravel vacuums. How big it would be depends upon the size of your aquarium. That way though you get a lot of the dirt and feces that percolate down into the gravel. Since the nitrogen cycle breaks down the very toxic ammonia into the merely toxic nitrites and then into the only eventually toxic nitrates, you are still going to have to remove that stuff anyway. So the gravel vacs get you off to a good start on the way to your 50 to 70% weekly partial water changes. (At least that is the plan.)

Then with about 10-gallons per adult goldfish, they can thrive and live to their 20-25 year potential.

The best companions for goldfish are other goldfish. That works if we keep space and water quality factors in mind.

Good luck and all the best!

Hi, Very sorry to hear about what happened. I would say he's one tough fish-give him the best chance you can to recover. If you have somewhere you can set up a new tank do so as quickly as you can with well aerated water & new filter. As bad as the situation is your first priority has to be to make your Oranda comfortable-you can salvage the rest of your belongings once he's sorted. Good luck to you both.

he will eat your plants and goldfish go with some otos or shrimp if you want something to clean your tank but nothing is going to eat the goldfishes poop so you still have to clean the tank if you want something to eat left over food corys will do it but most fish you put with goldfish are gonna die bc goldfish are so dirty but some ghost shrimp should be ok!

yes theres videos of them eating goldfish on youtube unless he is well fed or a dwarf species of crayfish he WILL eat the goldfish 100% sure of it. get a borneo sucker loach or weather loach.