The crawfish supply remains limited this season and experts cannot pin down the exact cause of this year’s disappointing harvest so far.
LSU Ag Center Aquaculture Specialist Greg Lutz says this late in the season we could be looking at a mixed bag when it comes to size and quantity of the crop.
“There are a lot of crawfish out there that are young and growing, and probably will find their way into someone’s pot, but the season only lasts so long.”
The WBRZ Baton Rouge area crawfish price index put the average cost for a pound of bugs at 4.82 as of Friday.
He says so far they have two leading theories as to why the mudbug class of 2019 appears to be smaller in both size and number. One of them is the irregularly long winter that featured some bursts of brutally cold weather.
“Most of our nighttime temperatures were pretty cold throughout the winter, so the water did not warm up a whole lot, and that slows down their growth.”
The other theory is that the crop is getting hit with white spot virus, which pops up when there’s radical shifts in temperature patterns. Lutz says white spot has become a bigger problem in recent years for the crustaceans since popping up about ten years ago.
“It’s a crustacean virus, doesn’t hurt people at all, but when it is in a crawfish population a lot of times most of the big crawfish die before they get harvested.”
Lutz reiterated that the virus does not effect humans, or even fish, it’s restricted solely to crustaceans.
