Crawfish producers are predicting a less abundant season of smaller, thinner and yet more expensive mudbugs. 

“We didn’t get any rain in this parish. I don’t think we got one drop in September and October. Another factor, we’ve never seen before, is this heat that we had in September,”  Don Benoit, owner of D&T Crawfish told WWLTV in Louisiana. 

Because of the dry, hot weather, crawfish hotspots in Louisiana are seeing less of the small, lobster-like crustaceans bubbling up from the mud as usual. 

D&T’s production for November and December was only at 5%, Benoit said. 

The southern delicacy usually grows alongside coastal rice crops, which mostly survived the hot and dry conditions. Crawfish mate along the rice fields. After the fields are drained, the tiny crustaceans burrow beneath the rice and reemerge anytime from December through March.

However, some of the underground burrows where crawfish spend the summer are cracking open because the ground is drying out, threatening their survival, PBS News Hour reported. The lack of rain has increased salt levels in water sources that producers use to flood their ponds. All the while, there are concerns over whether the rice and other grasses that crawfish use for food in the winter will survive the drought as well.

With a tropical climate that usually makes it one of the country’s wettest states, Louisiana is the largest harvester of crawfish in the nation. But this year the state experienced one of the driest in 129 years, according to PBS News Hour. 

In addition to weather challenges, crawfish farmers also are dealing with rising production costs and increased competition from overseas importers.