sorry guys i'm gonna have to clear up a few facts on this thread ok.
Marron are Cherax tenuimanus and are native to WA, they are extremely intolerant to high water temps and succesptible to water with low oxygen levels (dissolved oxygen) I they're tolerant up to 25 degrees and will die at 31 degrees optimum temperature is 21-25 degrees
I'm not sure when they breed (maybe september) but they breed once a year and have a brood size of 25-1000 eggs per spawn.
Blue marron are a naturally occuring "morph" of our standard black marron, and they were sold to us originally because the food market won't accept a blue marron, as a food product. Marron have also been discovered as red and as white specimens, but so far blue marron have been the easyist to breed, because the other 2 colours have been hard to find/ obtain specimens.
Also to give your marron a hiding place, use some shade cloth, and they'll crawl and hide in it. If your gonna try to breed the marron you'll probably want to put them in a pond, but you'll need to make some "hides" which is a basically a long strip of shade cloth tied to a rock to weigh it down, and a float so you know where the hide is and where to pull it up. If your interested I can show you how to make one during the holidays, it's kinda fun, well it was last week when i went up to a farm. All up a hide costs less then $1 in material, that is given though that they bought a whole roll of shade cloth
hides though are what you use when stocking crays into ponds
Feeding-
Marron Pellets, they have a formulated diet for a reason, not sure of the costs and I don't know any aquarium stores that sell it but you could always buy a 10kg bag, lol
Glen Forrest Stock Feeds- Marron Pellet seems to be really popular, and it's West Australian
I'm not sure as alternative diets but I was playing with yabbies for a week for a feed trial and they ate apple, lemon peel and onions. My apple yabby ate from my hand, which was kinda cool
hope some of that info wasn't too boring
I've been studying freshwater crayfish farming for nearly a term now, lol so that might explain my thread