Local Crawdads Need Your Help: You Can Help By Eating the Invading Rusty Crayfish

Have you ever eaten crawdads? Call them what you want, they're also known as crayfish, crawfish, mud puppies and (gross,) mud bugs, I call them delicious! For all of you, who like me, love a little crayfish boil, I'm making a plea for the smallest of our freshwater crustacean friends...

The Rusty Crawfish, native to the states of Kentucky and Ohio, used to be confined mostly to the Ohio river basin, but have now invaded much of Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan... even as far up north as Ontario! A common held idea of how they may have become so pervasive: Inexperienced and out-of-state anglers using the Rusty Crayfish as bait on fishing trips.

"What's the problem with another crayfish?," you may ask... Well, the Rusty Crayfish is much larger and more aggressive than many of our native crawdad species. A Rusty Crayfish can eat more than twice the amount of food as similarly sized native crawfish, disrupting the food supply for native crawfish and smaller fish, as well.

The Rusty Crawdad, unlike many other crawfish generally do not dig burrows, instead, they prefer to live under large rocks and logs at the bottom of the river bed. Like their non-Rusty brethren, they are opportunistic bottom-feeders, eating whatever comes along, as well as, large amounts of vegetation. This vegetation is where the native crayfish feed and hide when not in their burrows. Smaller fish also use this vegetation as cover from larger predators. Often frogs spawn in the more shallow and densely vegetated edges of these ponds, too.

Highly territorial, the Rusty Crayfish drives smaller native crayfish out of the areas where they feed and spawn when not in their burrows. Driven closer to the the banks these native crayfish are then easily picked off by larger predators. New regulations have banned the use of crayfish as live bait, but the Rusty Crayfish continues to out populate the smaller crayfish native to Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota.  They also appear to reproduce more quickly than the average crayfish.  An invasive species, the Rusty is now being considered one of the top threats in these states, alongside the Asian Carp and other proliferating non-native species of aquatic life.

My suggestion... let's cook 'em!  Crayfish are absolutely delicious when prepared with finesse.  While catching, cleaning and cooking crawdads takes some effort, they're so worth the time put into getting them onto a plate.  As a child I loved catching crayfish and look forward to enjoying it again with my daughter.  I've always had an affinity for crawdads, in elementary school I actually had one as a pet, caught from our local lake as part of a science experiment.  (I didn't eat this one, it was purely pet until I left for the summer to go to Florida.  I probably should have released it back into the lake, sadly my mom refused to feed it.  Can you blame her?)  Here's a video on how to make a crawdad pot, an excellent method for trapping crayfish if you have a stream or lake near home where your traps will remain undisturbed.

If you don't have the space to lay out traps, you can always catch them by hand.  This, of course, takes an epic amount of patience, but it a fun family activity!  One way you could gather enough crayfish, (hopefully Rusty's,) is to spend a few weekends at it, catching them, then containing them in an aquarium filled with local lake water and fauna.  Crayfish eat just about anything, mine survived solely on fish food for months, but of course, they won't get good and juicy eating just fish food, try supplementing their diet with some of your common household groceries, such as leaf lettuce, bacon and carrots!

Of course, if catching them yourself seems like too much hassle or if you wanted to do the classic Louisiana crawdad boil and can't catch enough to oblige, there are reputable companies out there that will ship crawdads directly to you.  Also, many seafood markets carry crawfish in season, check around for one in your neighborhood.