From Public Radio for Northeast Texas:
Call them crayfish, crawfish, crawdads, or mudbugs, ’tis indeed the season for crawfish – and the clay chimneys they leave for a calling card – in yards and ditches all over Northeast Texas.
If there’s a love ‘em or hate ‘em animal living deep in the soil beneath your otherwise manicured lawn, it is the crawfish. Foodies and animal lovers love them (for admittedly different reasons); people mowing their yards hate the mounds and holes they leave everywhere.
So let’s say you hate ‘em. Let’s say you want to rid them from your property. What exactly can you do about it? Well, the short answer is, you can get used to them.
“It’s almost like mosquitoes,” says Dr. Rusty Gaude, a crawfish expert at Louisiana State University. “If your habitat is acceptable to them, then you will eventually have them.”
And, like mosquitoes, they’re not easy to get rid of because they’re ubiquitous, they move fast, and they’re patient.
Gaude is aware that some people might consider using a pesticide to get rid of the crawfish on their property. Don’t. For one thing, there are no pesticides approved for use on crawfish. Those little mudbugs are highly resistant to poisons and they live near the water line under the soil anyway. That means that even if there were a poison for them, you’d have to use supervillain-level amounts of pesticide to reach them. And that would contaminate the groundwater.
And, Gaude says, even if you killed off all the crawfish on your property, the next rainfall would just bring them skittering over from your neighbor’s yard.
