February 12, 2015 — Mardi Gras crawfish may remain in short supply as Fat Tuesday and Lent approach, in part because of changing temperatures in recent days, producers and experts said. That means prices are expected to stay high until the weather levels out more regularly above 60 degrees day and night.
"Overall, it's going to be a tight Mardi Gras and Lent but it will improve as time goes on and by Easter it will be stronger," Bayou Pigeon crawfish supplier Ricky Phillips said of the season's outlook.
The average price of boiled crawfish in the metro New Orleans area reached $6.57 per pound on Thursday (Feb. 12), an increase of 83 cents from last week. Meanwhile, hardly any retailers were selling live crawfish because of low supply, smaller profit margins for the live critters and crawfish's presently thin shells, they said.
It appears sudden warm weather recently caused most crawfish in Louisiana ponds to molt their shells, crawfish biologists, producers, suppliers and local retailers said. In turn, many of the critters hide and don't eat, waiting for their shells to harden before they make themselves vulnerable to predators.
"Once the water temperature does warm up even for a few days or a week, you see a molt of a lot of the crawfish in the pond all at once, 50 to 60 percent of the crawfish with one good warming up in the weather," AgCenter aquaculture and crawfish specialist Mark Shirley. He said crawfish then stop feeding for two to three days, and then need another couple days to wait for their shells to harden before many of them start to eat again.
"The fishermen are trying their best to catch as much crawfish as they can to supply the market right now, but biologically (the crawfish) aren't coming to trap," Shirley said.
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