Keep your Fiddler Crabs alive by building a fiddler crab habitat. Follow these easy steps to learn fiddler crab care.
Catch Fiddler crabs and keep them alive by the thousands by building a Fiddler Crab habitat! Many people have a fiddler crab tank but fiddler farms can keep crabs alive for extended periods of time by the thousands. Learn what to feed fiddler crabs and much more.
The methods described in this video will not apply to sand fleas. It will teach you long term fiddler crab care and habitat. When no one else has any fiddlers for bait, you will be catching sheepshead!
By creating or building a habitat for your fiddlers, it will keep them alive overnight and even for weeks. We show in full detail (like no one ever has) how to keep fiddler crabs alive by creating a fiddler crab Farm with a cheap cooler, construction sand or playground sand, brackish river water, a few rocks, some hiding places for the crabs and a few other tricks. We keep around 6,000 fiddler crabs alive using four separate crab habitats at right at my home. Keeping sand fleas alive is a different habitat we'll show in a later video.
Keeping your fiddler crabs alive at home is really more of a hobby than anything, and little time and effort is needed. They do require a little maintenance in the winter time and a brackish water source which we will reveal how simple this all is. We hope you enjoy the video how to and learn from it as we have.
A few facts about fiddler crabs
1. Fiddler Crabs cannot withstand direct exposure to cold air. This is why they dig deep into the sand and mud flats.
2. Fiddler Crabs do not like wind. It irritates their eye antennas sending them into the ground.
3. Fiddlers are not hard to keep alive when properly cared for in a habitat.
4. Fiddler Crabs do not like straight ocean salt water. It will kill the crabs when in captivity. Brackish water from back water creeks and rivers is the perfect water source for fiddlers.
As a 30-year guide, sheepshead is a big Target of ours in Northeast Florida and in Southeast Georgia. In this video, I personally reveal a few tips and tricks about keeping them alive for extended periods of time. Going out to catch fiddler crabs is definitely not my game. But, very good crab Catchers in our area the catch up to 20,000 fiddler crabs in just an hour or two. Meaning, it's very easy to purchase thousands of crabs for very little money if you have a fiddler crab habitat in place to keep them alive, you'll never buy them again this season if you tend to the crab habit as shown.
There's a few things Fiddler's do not like. They do not like wind over 5 miles per hour. Fiddler crabs do not like cold weather whatsoever and dig deep and become extremely difficult to locate and catch. Nothing short of a backhoe would dig these fiddler crabs out of the ground when the air temperature is below 50 degrees. With that said, the guys who catch fiddler crabs for a living can only catch them on days that there are thousands crawling across sand Flats which makes catching thousands of fiddlers easy. This occurs in the salt marshes all over the southeast. This is when you need a fiddler Farm to capitalize on those times when fiddler catchers have thousands to sell. Even if you don't need fiddler crabs for bait at that time, get them.. Because you will need them.
When you are able to get fiddler crabs in big numbers your farm will become handy immediately. This is when you need to get the crabs.. when they're available and you can keep them until the cold weather sets in and you will have the river and ocean to yourself because no one else will have Fiddlers.. but you will!
So the bottom line is, this is a wintertime problem for people who like to sheepshead fish in the winter. And as luck would have it, the winter season happens to be the time you need the fiddler crabs the most as the largest sheepshead of the year will be feeding from January through March.
This also happens to be the time when the fiddler crabs are hardest to catch or even find due to the windy and cold weather here in the south at that time. So without the fiddler crabs, it makes it far more difficult to catch them regardless of opinion. People often use clams sea urchins and other tricks for catching Sheepshead, but it's very nice to have a bucket full of 300 fiddler crabs on the boat or on the bank or jetty rocks because you've got plenty and you can fish all day everyday because remember, you've got a fiddler farm with 1000 to 4000 Fiddlers at home and you can sheepshead fish as much as you'd like. And again, you can fish when no one else has the best bait for Sheepshead, the beloved Fiddler crab... But you will have them! So, Fish on!
