Although Texas crawfish farmers emerged from a challenging growing season slightly better off than producers in Louisiana, 2024 is shaping up to be a dismal crawfish season for producers and consumers alike, according to a Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service expert.

A plate of crawfish with an ear of yellow corn

Thanks to several factors, producers and consumers are feeling the brunt of a dismal crawfish season. Currently, consumers are paying an additional $3-$5 more per pound when the freshwater crustaceans are even available. (Michael Miller/Texas A&M AgriLife)

Todd Sink, Ph.D., AgriLife Extension aquaculture specialist and director of the AgriLife Extension Aquatic Diagnostics Lab, Bryan-College Station, said that while both states dealt with severe drought and record-breaking temperatures, Louisiana, the nation’s top crawfish producer, also had to contend with the added impacts of disease and invasive species.

White spot syndrome, a lethal virus affecting only crustaceans, was first confirmed in Louisiana in 2007. Since then, Sink said cases have been reported annually.

Currently, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service has not received any reported cases of white spot syndrome in Texas crawfish.

Louisiana crawfish production has also been hit by invasive apple snails, Sink said.

Sink said these snails damage rice crops in crawfish ponds, reducing harvestable rice yields and competing with crawfish for the limited rice stubble forage. The competition for resources further reduces crawfish growth rates.

While the invasive snails are present in several watersheds in Texas, they aren’t yet having the same impact on the state’s crawfish farms.

Drought, temperatures wreak havoc across both states

While Texas crawfish producers largely avoided the impacts of disease and invasive species, they weren’t immune to the record-breaking temperatures and extreme drought seen during the summer of 2023.

As temperatures warm during the summer, crawfish burrow several feet into the ground to access cooler temperatures and moisture. This is especially important for crawfish grown in rice fields that are drained for rice production or harvest.

“Adequate ground moisture and humidity during the summer is critical for survival rates, and we just didn’t get enough rainfall to help with the excessive heat,” Sink said. “Not only was there not enough ground moisture, but soil temperatures also were reported as high as 140 degrees in some areas.”

He said as dark soil that is high in organic matter dries, it absorbs solar radiation and becomes warmer than the surrounding air temperature, essentially trapping and baking the crawfish in their burrows.

“Because there are crawfish farmers in Texas who aren’t necessarily focused on rice production, they use a longer-term flooding cycle than what is typically seen in Louisiana,” Sink said. “That helped mitigate soil temperatures and some loss, but the industry still struggled.”

Additionally, Sink said a hard freeze in Southeast Texas and Louisiana earlier this year impacted surviving crawfish that had begun to emerge from their burrows.

Poor season impacts consumer wallets, but some relief is possible

Consumers are weighing their options when it comes to shelling out more money per pound for crawfish — if they can be found.

“Many retail outlets in Texas cities outside of the Houston or Beaumont area are simply listing crawfish as ‘not available’ or ‘out for the season,’” Sink said. “This leaves many major metropolitan consumption areas such as Dallas-Fort Worth and San Antonio largely without a supply of crawfish.”

Sink said demand and cost of crawfish typically surges around the Superbowl and Lent, the 40-day period beginning on Ash Wednesday and ending the Thursday before Easter.

Live crawfish in College Station were $6-$6.50 per pound compared to $3 per pound at this time last year. Boiled crawfish prices were $3-$5 higher per pound than last year. In College Station, boiled crawfish were around $10-$12 per pound while mudbug lovers in Dallas were paying upwards of $15-$18.99 per pound.

“The farther away you live from Louisiana and Southeast Texas, the more you’re going to pay for crawfish,” Sink said.

During a traditional season with normal production, he said prices typically drop during the midpoint of the season as more crawfish become available.

The price then ticks back up as the season ends around early summer, producers discontinue the harvest, and the crawfish supply becomes more limited.

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NATURAL RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

ACCORDING TO EXTENSION WILDLIFE SPECIALISTS

We are discussing what a common term we use means – that term being “habitat management.”

So, first and foremost, habitat is an area that offers a particular species food, water, cover, and space. The “particular species” part of that definition is often ignored, and in doing so, can cause a lot of headaches for biologists, land managers, etc. Different species have different needs; habitat for a penguin is not habitat for a Rio Grande turkey. Always have the species in mind when you think of habitat! This doesn’t mean that you can’t manage for multiple species. Habitat management practices often benefit multiple species, but it is best to identify which species you are managing for and, if multiple species, determine an order of priority because there are tradeoffs among management strategies. Another consideration is timing. For example, we often don’t think about deer habitat until deer season, but habitat should provide the needed resources all year long, regardless of what life history event (e.g., gestation, lactation, antler growth, etc.) the animal is going through. Habitat is 365 days a year!

For the most part, the definition of habitat is intuitive, but what does space mean? Space means the arrangement and connectivity of the other components – food, water, and cover. You can have food, water, and cover within an area, but if they are separated by a distance or barrier that makes them unattainable by your species of interest, that is a problem. For example, having a 10ft high fence around the only water source on your property may be fine if you are only concerned with doves, but not so much if you want to manage for deer.

So, what does habitat management mean? I have found (in my opinion) some very convoluted definitions of habitat management, but here is mine – habitat management is manipulating the landscape to produce or enhance the resources needed by a specific species. To manipulate the landscape, we use our habitat management tools, which can’t be mentioned without Aldo Leopold’s famous quote: “… game can be restored by the creative use of the same tools which have heretofore destroyed it – axe, cow, plow, fire, and gun.” We can add herbicides to that list these days.

Wait, how is a gun used to manage habitat? Well, you can manage to increase the amount of food, water, and cover to go around or reduce the number of individuals needing it. Of course, this depends on your goal. If you are trying to increase the number of individuals your property can support, then you will want to increase the amount of resources.

Another thing that can’t be stressed enough is that habitat management is wildlife management! Even something like harvesting animals to mitigate disease spread works because there are more resources to go around and therefore animals can spread out.