Live Crawfish Facts
Everything You Ever Wanted To Know
About Louisiana Cajun Crawfish

Whether you call them Crawfish, Crayfish, Mudbugs or Crawdads,
we've tried to put together a few facts on these interesting Cajun critters.

On July 14, 1983, Louisiana’s governor approved a law designating the crawfish and alligator as the state crustacean and reptile.
Louisiana thus became the first state to adopt an official crustacean.
The crawfish was adopted because of its commercial importance. They’re good to eat, whether they're caught in the swamp or raised in a crawfish pond. Crawfish look like tiny lobsters, to which they are related. But lobsters live in the sea, while most crawfish are at home in freshwater. There are more than five hundred species of crawfish. More than half of them live in North America. They are especially diverse in the Mississippi Basin in Louisiana. In Louisiana, wild crawfish are especially abundant in the Atchafalaya (uh.CHA.fuh.lie.uh) Basin. This is the largest river hardwood swamp in the nation. Acadians have long harvested and eaten Atchafalaya crawfish. Crawfish are often called “crawdads” in Louisiana. Outside Louisiana, they are usually called crayfish.

So how did the lowly crawfish gain such prominence in our culture? Well, actually, Native Americans in the area were the first credited with harvesting and consuming crawfish even before the Cajuns arrived on the scene. They used to bait reeds with venison (deer meat), stick them in the water and periodically pick up the reeds with crawfish attached to the bait. By using this method, the Native Americans would catch bushels of crawfish for their consumption. By the 1930s nets were substituted, and by the 1950s the now ubiquitous crawfish trap was widely used. The trap is still the current method of harvesting mudbugs.

Louisiana leads the nation in the production of crawfish with approximately 100 million pounds of crawfish per year. About half of the production comes from the Atchafalaya Basin and half from an extensive aquaculture system which involves some 135,000 acres of ponds throughout the state.

If you have Real Video Player or Windows Media Player on your computer, we have a video clip called "Cajun Crawfish: Catching, Cooking and Eating" that we think you'll enjoy. Just click the link to play.

RealOne Player     Windows Player
Courtesy of "Folklife in Louisiana" at http://www.louisianafolklife.org/

Sources: Kenneth Delcambre, Breaux Bridge City Historian; Jim Bradshaw, History of Acadiana; Jimmy Avery and Dwight Landreneau, Lousiana Crawfish, LSU Agricultual Center, and www.geobop.org

     
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