Setting up your Yabby home 

The first thing we did was fill our 50L tank with water to settle for a few days until we brought the yabbies home. This was to dechlorinate the water, and also for some reason we thought the yabbies would like water that was a bit stagnated. Like a pond. (spoiler: they don't like this) We chose a spot by the door for maximum viewing reasons, and added sand from the sand pit.

Unfortunately, the sand was children's play sand, and dissolved in the water. Also, the children took the tank full of water as an invitation to throw all of the toys and their socks and their shoes and also their drink bottles into it. We tried adding water clarifier, which promptly turned the water poo brown. While draining the tank, we managed to crack it down the middle. So that was the end of that.

After a bit more research on my part, we discovered that to successfully keep yabbies as pets you will need:

• At least a 20L tank for one yabby, then an additional 10L for every other yabbie after that. 
• A filter
• A lid (to stop the yabbies climbing out and the children climbing in) 
• A good amount of small substrate like small pebbles, gravel, and even beach sand. (You can buy substrate at pet stores, aquarium shops, and even the Reject Shop) All of these need to be washed before they go in the tank. There should be enough for the yabbies to dig around in. 
• Water ager/conditioner and aquarium salt
• Decorations such as large rocks, driftwood, sticks, small pieces of PVC piping, small terracotta pots, those ceramic fish tank ornaments, etc. These provide hiding places for the yabbies so they feel safe and secure. You need to have at least one hiding place/cavey thing per yabbie, to avoid territory wars.
  If you're adding driftwood or sticks, soak it for about 2 weeks in a bucket of water (make sure it is submerged) to ensure it doesn't float when you put it the tank, and to get rid of any tannin, which is naturally occuring in wood and will turn the water a dark orangey red.
  If you don't care about this/don't want to do this, tie the wood to heavy rocks inside your tank.
  

We set up our new 50L tank (a tip shop find) in front of a window and added our ornaments and substrate. We aged the water but decided to leave it overnight to get rid of any chlorine just in case.
And we added our yabbies (one male and one female) in the next day!
We didn't soak our wood so it was floating everywhere and had made the water yellow but it looked great with the sun streaming through from the window!

A few months ago, I bought a pair of common yabbies (Cherax destructor) for my class of 2-3 year old toddlers. Mainly because we had been given a huge fish tank but wanted something a little bit different!

Since then, I've discovered that yabbies make awesome pets! They are low maintenance, low cost to set up and practically free to maintain, and so interesting to watch, making them perfect for little ones!

Unfortunetly, there's not a great deal of information on keeping these guys as pets online, or at least, not in one place. As we await the birth of our 300+  yabby babies, I thought I'd share my discoveries and knowledge on these crazy little crayfish.