Try as I might, I could not get Dr. W. Ray McClain to reveal the vitally important information that I’m sure he was holding close to his chest. Namely, whether the 2016 crawfish crop is going to break the scales and how much these colossal crustaceans are going to inversely lighten our pockets. Prompted by a relatively warm winter (as of press time, of course; there's still plenty of winter left), and with spring seemingly on the cusp of breaking, I called McClain to ask whether conditions would grant us a motherlode of crustaceans this year?
Pond-reared—as opposed to wild-caught—crawfish are Dr. McClain's expertise; he is a professor of aquaculture at the LSU AgCenter. He drilled me on the factors that affect size and cost. The warm winter does bode well, McClain explained, as crawfish are "cold-natured animals and their metabolism and growth rate are influenced highly by water temperature. So the warmer the water temperature, the faster the crawfish grow [and] the more active they are, so they are easily attracted to traps."
A variable often left out of the equation, though, is the number of acres that are dedicated to farming crawfish—a number that McClain said has increased steadily over the last couple of decades. This year, there's "substantially more acreage in production than ever before."
So what's the prognosis, Dr. McClain? "Well, if you tell me what weather conditions are going to be from now through the end of the season … If you can tell me what demand is going to be for the rest of the year, I could be more precise. … All I can say is conditions have been favorable." In other words, Economics 101, ma'am.
The only firm-ish conclusion he was willing to offer was that there is likely more early production of crawfish this year, and that conditions have been favorable. Given the variables he described—a relatively wet summer and fall, a mild winter, and increased acreage—I'm willing to go out on a limb and predict that crawfish will be plenty and plus-sized. You heard it here first.
