Floods to affect crawfish less than first thought

The seafood industry expects August flooding in south Louisiana to have less of a negative impact on crawfish pond production than originally believed.
Mark Shirley, an aquaculture specialist with the LSU AgCenter, said the damage to the state’s crawfish ponds from the August floods shouldn’t be as bad as initially expected.
Most ponds are doing all right. Within the past six weeks, small crawfish have started hatching, “and it’s looking pretty much like a normal crawfish year, at this point, early in the season,” Shirley said.
Sidney “Peanut” Michel, owner of D&B Seafood in Morgan City, said it’s too early to tell exactly how much impact the August floods may have on crawfish supply to the area.
“With the holiday season coming, it really doesn’t pay to get excited about not having them because everybody’s limited to what they’re going to do with their money,” he said.
Usually, after Jan. 1, people start looking forward to getting seafood, Michel said.
Michel gets his supply of pond crawfish from St. Landry Parish and Church Point. Ponds in the Abbeville area were most heavily affected by the flooding, he said.
Farmers aren’t harvesting many crawfish yet, but the catch should pick up slightly in the next few weeks, Shirley said. A few ponds in the Acadiana region that were flooded by August rainfall for more than a week aren’t doing well, though.
“Those ponds that had the extended flood waters over them, those crawfish emerged from the boroughs, and a lot of them moved out with the water,” Shirley said.
There’s also been a slight increase in acreage dedicated to crawfish ponds this season due to low rice prices, Shirley said.
“Rice farmers are adding more acres of crawfish to kind of balance out the lower prices of the rice,” Shirley said.
Projections for the Atchafalaya Basin crawfish harvest is uncertain because officials never know exactly where the “water level is going to be throughout the winter and spring,” Shirley said.
Water in the basin is “still way too low” to start catching crawfish yet, according to Michel.
“It’s actually still a little early,” Michel said. “You don’t really want your waters to start coming up until early January.”
When the basin water level starts getting high in January or February and the water stays high, “that usually means a pretty good production year from the basin,” Shirley said. In good production seasons, the crawfish catch continues into July.
If there’s enough water and the water quality is good, the basin “can produce a tremendous amount of crawfish,” Shirley said.
In the event of a drought where the basin water levels drop and stay low throughout the spring, the basin will produce much fewer crawfish, Shirley said.
But, however the basin crawfish season turns out, Shirley doesn’t expect the August floods will have much impact on the basin.
“The basin crop is still there, and it’s just a matter of if the water conditions are just right to where fishermen can access all traditional areas,” he said.
If that’s the case, “they’ll be able to haul out a good bit of crawfish,” he said.