
Crawfish prices much lower at this point when compared to last year
The historic snowstorm last week will have little impact on crawfish this season, according to LSU AgCenter crawfish agent Todd Fontenot.
“With our weather warming up, we think it’s going to be a fairly quick rebound,” Fontenot said.
He said when it gets cold, crawfish get as low as they can in the mud to protect themselves, and that it takes some time for the crawfish to get moving again.
“They’re going to have to warm back up basically and get moving again and get back into eating and growing,” he said. “The thing we have to remember is that this was short term. It was very cold, but the water doesn’t get as cold as the air temperature.”
Fontenot said he saw crawfish moving in the traps after the storm.
“The traps had ice on top, but if you broke a trap out of the ice, the crawfish in the trap were alive,” he said. “They were moving very slowly, but they were alive.”
He said he did not see the storm affecting the market drastically one way or another, and that this season was looking better than last year’s crawfish season.
“All the indicators were that we were going to have a more normal season,” Fontenot said.
Willie Hebert, owner of Hebert’s Seafood, said prices were down from $12.99 a pound last year to $7.99 a pound for boiled crawfish this year.
“The season was looking very promising until this snow,” Hebert said. “The ponds are generally 12 to 18 inches deep, and if the crawfish that came out [of the mud], they might not have survived the cold-water temperatures, so only time will tell.”