Crawfish Everywhere; Weather, water will make catch plentiful

The crawfish catch is starting to pick up in the Atchafalaya Basin, and the season looks promising thanks to weather conducive to crawfish growth, a local seafood store owner says.
“There’s going to be crawfish everywhere,” said Sidney “Peanut” Michel, owner of D&B Seafood in Morgan City. The Atchafalaya Basin and the marshes south of Berwick will be prime areas to catch crawfish. The recent rainfall has made Stephensville a good place to catch crawfish as well, he said.
Local fishermen have steadily been catching more and more crawfish during the past two weeks, Michel said.
Peak crawfish season normally runs from February until early or mid-July.
A combination of high water early in the season and a mild winter have made crawfish extremely plentiful. Those factors helped crawfish show up earlier than usual and grow faster, Michel said.
Crawfish ponds have lots of crawfish, too, he said.
Michel expects this season to be one of the better seasons the area has seen in last four or five years.
Crawfish prices “are holding solid” right now, but Michel expects prices may change after Easter. Live crawfish are selling for about $2.10 per pound. That price is slightly lower than this time last year “because the crawfish is a little more abundant,” he said.
“It all depends on the supply and demand,” Michel said.
Michel is getting most of the crawfish for his store from ponds in the Lawtell-Church Point area.
Still, there are more wild-caught crawfish on the market now compared to last year, he said.
The season usually lasts as long as the Atchafalaya River stays near flood stage, Michel said.
In a March 3 LSU AgCenter article, aquaculture researcher Ray McClain said producers started harvesting in November, which is early in the season. Weather conditions all the way back to the past summer have been ideal for crawfish production.
“We had ample rainfall during summer when crawfish are down in the burrows, which gave us fairly good brood-stock survival and reproduction,” McClain said in the article.
The rain continued in the fall, which encouraged females to emerge from their burrows, and the mild temperatures during fall and winter were good for growth.
While crawfish will be plentiful, the size may be smaller. “When crawfish population density is high, you typically get a way smaller crawfish,” he said in the article.