HOLLOW TAIL CRAWFISH TRICK
🦞 The dark color does not mean that a crawfish is bad to eat.
This only applies to crawfish that have just come out of their burrow. You can tell it hasn’t been out very long at the beginning of a new crawfish season because of its dark red shell, which means it has not molted yet.
The other crawfish you see with a lighter color have already molted. That means they’ve been out of their burrows longer. You’ll notice their tail meat is thicker, juicier, and more full because they’ve had time to eat and fill that tail back out.
The darker crawfish, on the other hand, usually have an emptier tail. They need time to eat and fill in that tail before we really start harvesting them. For this reason, we aren’t in a rush to start trapping hard out of our ponds. We give them time to come out, go through a molt, get healthy, lay their eggs, and build up a strong crop of crawfish.
However, we are currently shipping crawfish out of South Louisiana. It’s a bit warmer there, so we’re already starting to see the fishermen produce.