Shadow area and partitioning influencing mortality, healthiness and growth of juvenile Red Swamp Crayfish Procambarus clarkii (Decapoda)

Crayfish show both shelter-seeking behaviour and agonistic behaviour. Agonistic interactions among crayfish combatants can be triggered and released by the access of shelter, which is a necessary resource for crayfish. The use of shadow as a shelter has not been thoroughly tested in experiments. In this study, we provided the Red Swamp Crayfish Procambarus clarkii (Girard) with different shadow area and shadow partition to test if shadow can act as a solid shelter. Eleven different treatments designed with different shadow area and partition, and 2640 juvenile crayfish were used. The survival rate increased with the increase of shadow area ratio. The shadow area contributed less to the body weight gain and the number of the survivals without injury. The growth variance of the juveniles under shadow conditions was significantly lower than those maintained without providing shadow. Under the recent experimental settings, generally, more partitioned shadow resulted in lower mortality. With 60% shadow area, more partitioned shadow led to higher body weight gain. The more the partition was provided, the fewer were the injury events, and the lower body weight variance observed. Our experiments indicated that both area and partition of the shadow influenced the growth of juvenile Red Swamp Crayfish.