When a Facebook user left a comment on BB’s Tex-Orleans’s page asking about this year’s crawfish offerings, the restaurant’s social media manager had to break the depressing news: “Unfortunately, we don’t know yet. Climate change has really affected the season this year.”

Cajun Kitchen’s Facebook features regular posts updating diners about the current crawfish shortage, from the comedic—a “7 Stages of Crawfish Grief” chart—to the sobering reality of limited supplies and raised prices. Over at Pit Room in Montrose, the restaurant's season started on February 8 at a whopping $13.99 a pound, when early prices around this time of year would usually hover around $10.

“I would say the price [of crawfish per pound] is 300 percent higher than we were paying last year,” says Brooks Bassler, CEO and founder of BB’s. “For that reason, we’re not selling crawfish right now.”

It should be the most wonderful time of the year for mudbug fans, but the punches seem to keep coming. The 2024 crawfish season is shaping up to be one of scarcity, where once the small crustaceans seemed almost ubiquitous. Ecological factors, particularly last year’s agonizing Gulf Coast heatwave and drought, are to blame.

“When there’s some kind of hot weather or ice or something, [crawfish] can burrow down into the mud. But if they don’t succeed in getting down there, and it gets too cold or too hot, they’re sunk,” says Dr. Mary Wicksten, biology professor at Texas A&M University and curator of marine invertebrates at TAMU Biodiversity Research and Teaching Collection. “A lot of the ditches that used to interconnect places dried up last summer, places where we’d find crawfish the rest of the year.”

When asked about how much the population has dwindled over the past year, Wicksten noted that exact numbers are difficult to come by, as there may still be crawfish burrowed two to three feet down into the soil that have yet to emerge. She says it may take “enough mild rain to open up all the ditches” for populations to improve, particularly during the mating season that runs March through July.

Dr. Mark Shirley, crawfish aquaculture and coastal resources specialist at both LSU AgCenter and LA Sea Grant, penned an open letter regarding the current crawfish crisis and the dire environmental circumstances that contributed to it. East Texas typically produces around 2 million pounds of farm-raised and wild-caught crawfish annually, but the state tends to import a lot of it from neighboring Louisiana—around 3.9 million pounds. When Louisiana’s ecology suffers, so too do the farmers and restaurants who depend on crawfish season for economic survivability.

“As mentioned in the LSU Drought Impact Report that came out right after Thanksgiving, there were over 45,000 acres that could not flood up due to a lack of water or canal water being too salty,” Shirley says in his letter. “Another 45,000+ acres, though flooded, will not produce any crayfish. The remaining balance will see a significant reduction in total catch. These were the predictions in November. From what I’ve seen since then, the situation is even worse now.”

Crawfish perform an essential role in local ecosystems. Their burrowing habits act as natural soil tillers, kicking up sediment, evenly distributing nutrients and water, and oxygenating—this interdependence is a major reason why farm-raised crawfish are often cultivated alongside rice and soybeans. Filling Texans’ tummies are hardly the only stakes at risk.

Wicksten also points to development as another contributor to the decline of crawfish this season.

“Some of the various places where you find crayfish are actually interconnected by streams or ditches or something like that. And we’ve had an awful lot of construction. This destroyed a lot of those areas, so that is a problem for repopulation,” she says. “The crayfish can actually get desperate. They’ll crawl across the lawn… but they can’t go across I-45.”

Along with responsible environmental stewardship practices in general, Wicksten encourages Texans concerned with crawfish populations and the consequences of decline to go exploring. Look in wet, muddy areas where crawfish might thrive, and if any are found, log the information and send it to nearby researchers. Sometimes it even takes “a helpful cat,” she says, to accidentally walk up with a mouthful of mudbug for the professor and her students to know where they’re hiding these days. Citizen science can make a significant impact on getting a clearer picture of what needs to be done to save the crawfish. Bassler holds out hope that future crawfish harvests could see greater yields once the necessary rains return.

“I think it’s a cycle. Once we can look back and see 50 years of Houston consuming crawfish… what does it look like?” Bassler says. “We’re going to see [the current situation] again at some point, and we’re also going to see early stocks again. So I just think it’s cyclical, and this is a cycle related to the climate that causes this to happen.”