Water's right in the Basin, so crawfish are back

The 2021 Atchafalaya Basin crawfish season is off to an earlier start, while progress is being shown in the pond season.
The storm surge from hurricanes prompted the crawfish to appear, so while crawfish in the Atchafalaya Spillway would appear in late February or early March, they were being caught in December, according to Sidney Michel, owner of D&B Seafood in Morgan City.
Mark Shirley, an LSU AgCenter crawfish specialist, said that water levels have been between 12 and 15 feet at Butte LaRose during the last month, and when water levels hit those levels, it is good for the crawfish industry.
Michel said prices are high at the moment due to a limited supply of crawfish, but he said the sales are still good.
While the hurricane surge, which brought mostly fresh water to the basin, was good for this area, to the west, saltwater intrusion affected coastal crawfish ponds below Erath and in the Henry area, said Barry Toups, who represents the Crawfish Industry on the 2020 Louisiana Seafood Promotion & Marketing Board.
The hurricanes also brought bad water and flooding issues in August and September in ponds.
“It really, in some cases, caused those ponds to flood too early when temperatures were still very high, and the plant matter in the ponds was decaying and causing poor water quality,” Shirley said. “So that may have affected production this year, and we’re still not sure to what extent the hurricanes impacted the crawfish population.”
Toups said he was unsure if rains from hurricanes affected his crop this year, which he said is the “worst start ever” for him.
“I kept some of that water,” he said. “I think I lost my first crop, to be honest with you. I’m starting to see crawfish now.”
However, his numbers aren’t anywhere close to where they have been in the past, noting that the average farmer brings in 500 pounds per acre each year.
“I’ve had some years where I’ve caught 1,000 pounds to the acre,” he said. “I don’t know what my number’s going to be right now. I’m starting to see crawfish now. It might just be a later season. The cold weather slowed them down.”
Cold weather will slow crawfish growth, which is something that Shirley said the area has experienced recently in the pond industry.
With rising temperatures in the last week, there has been progress.
“We’re starting to see a little bit of activity in the ponds,” Shirley said, adding that recent cold days will cool the water again.
While hurricanes can have positive or negative impacts, Shirley said COVID-19, which fishermen, processers and restaurants had to endure on top of hurricanes, was worse.
He said that March, April and May is the peak time of the pond season. But instead of thriving, markets were shut down and restaurants were restricted and group gatherings were limited during the year.
“So it couldn’t have come at a worse time for the crawfish industry,” Shirley said.
Toups, who runs a Kaplan-area bed and breakfast that offers crawfish excursions, said “the price of crawfish dropped to hardly nothing” and many ceased fishing.
“We had trouble moving them, and the price had dropped to a dollar something a pound,” he said. “You still had people doing it, but I wasn’t going to give it away.”
Shirley said many farmers were limited to how much crawfish they could sell to buyers.
“So that meant instead of fishing every day, six or seven days a week, some of them were on a restricted harvest of maybe one or two days a week, so it definitely hurt their harvest or their income,” he said.
Because restaurants had limited capacity or were closed, the crawfish processers suffered, too, because demand for crawfish meat was down, too, during the summer, fall and winter, Shirley said.
While Toups said he doesn’t run a large crawfish farm, as his property consists of 40 acres for crawfish, he said the COVID-19 pandemic also shut down his bed and breakfast from mid-March through the summer. He said business didn’t resume until Sept. 1, and that’s around the time hurricanes devastated southwest Louisiana. So he did have business in September through November due to the storm.
In Morgan City, Michel, who said crawfish is about 60% of his business per year, said COVID-19 didn’t affect him overall because his business involves take-out. He said he had to make adjustments with the COVID-19 guidelines in place.
However, because he is a retailer as well as a wholesaler, he said that the retail business picked up with customers eating crawfish at home because they couldn’t eat them at restaurants.
“So they did a lot of boiling themselves,” he said.
This year’s crop will not necessarily produce bigger pond or spillway crawfish, either, just because it didn’t get picked a year ago, Shirley said.
“Some of the ponds that left crawfish in the field last year, if those crawfish survived until this season, it may cause population to be a smaller size,” he said. “Crawfish growth is very much influenced by the population density. So when crawfish are crowded in a pond, they tend to stay small, so some of those fields that have a lot of crawfish to carry over to this season may have a large population that will wind up being small to medium and very few large crawfish.”
However, he said new ponds that began being stocked last May or June for the first time may produce medium and large crawfish in February and March because they are new.
The older ponds may produce more small and medium crawfish and fewer larger crawfish, he said.
In the spillway, a lot of different animals eat crawfish, meaning that many crawfish likely were eaten in the past year and won’t have carried over to this year, although some will, Shirley said.
“The basin crawfish have to run that gamut and survive all those predators and … it kind of depends on water levels and vegetation as to how well those crawfish can hide and get away from those predators, or conversely if there’s too much water, the fish predators can get at them anywhere,” he said.