Warmer Texas winters drive better crawfish harvest, longer fishing season

From Houston Public Media:

Wearing a camouflage wetsuit, long rubber boots and baseball cap, Christian Burns steered his fishing boat into a rice field in Anahuac, about an hour east of Houston.

Burns works for his cousin, who owns a crawfish farm there. He harvests roughly 20 sacks of crawfish each day — enough to feed up to 200 people.

Burns said the harvest in any given year really depends on the weather.

“Warmer weather means we’re able to catch more crawfish just because they’re more active,” he said. “Once the water gets below 50 (degrees), they don’t really do a whole lot of moving around and feeding.”

Texas is the nation’s second-largest crawfish producer, behind Louisiana. Despite a slow start to the crawfish season this year, due to a late freeze, Texas farmers brought in a plentiful harvest as the state had its warmest winter on record since 1895.

As Burns fished, he dumped the mudbugs into a tray on his boat. After filling the tray, he scraped the red crustaceans into large mesh sacks. While some of the crawfish will go to a restaurant on the farm, the rest will be sold and cooked at seafood boils and businesses across Texas.

“The catch has all been good – we have really good-sized crawfish right now,” Burns said.

Dominic Mandola, the owner of the Ragin’ Cajun restaurant in Houston, agrees.

He said crawfish season has been plentiful this year, in part due to the warmer weather. When there’s a freeze, he said that slows down the harvest.

“There’s been some times where we’ve ran out of crawfish on Fat Tuesday throughout the last 50 years because of the freeze,” Mandola said.

But while milder winters can help kickstart crawfish season, hotter summers can hurt the harvest. That’s what happened two years ago, after triple-digit temperatures in the summer and a drought killed off crawfish before the winter fishing season. Still, Mandola said that kind of drought is rare.

“When we had the drought, nobody had seen that in 40 years,” Mandola said.

Warmer winters are becoming more common in Texas, according to assistant state climatologist B.J. Baule.

“Texas winter temperatures have generally been warming up over time, over the last several decades, particularly since about the 1980s,” Baule said.

Nikki Fitzgerald, a coastal and marine county resources agent with Texas A&M AgriLife, said as Texas winters have gotten warmer, she has seen a shift in when crawfish season begins.

“In the early ‘90s, crawfish season typically would start at the beginning of March,” she said. “And as people have really started enjoying crawfish, you know, the warmer seasons have actually encouraged the fishermen to get out quicker.”

Now, she said, some fishermen are beginning the season as early as January, or even December.

“The crawfish are a little bit smaller, but, you know, they are still catching because with the warmer waters, the crawfish are coming out of their burrows a little bit earlier,” Fitzgerald said.

Burns, from the crawfish farm in Anahuac, is among the fishermen beginning their harvest in December.

“There was only like a three-month period this year where we didn’t do any fishing,” he said.

And, Burns added, the farm is growing.

“We’re getting really close to being able to figure out how to fish them year round,” he said. “So I’m looking forward to that.”

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