My brother and I used to catch them in the creek when we were kids, except we called them crawfish. I think he wanted them as fishing bate. Lol!

party - that's what we called them too. I never ate crawfish until I went to New Orleans.

Were they good, seagrass? I've never been to N.O. and still haven't ever eaten a crawfish. :)

They are tasty.... unless they've been caught by a boat dock, then they taste like gasoline. (Ask me how I know.)

party - yes, they were. As I recall, though, you had to eat a lot of them to make a meal. They're small. We had them in étouffée over rice, and in a spicy mixed boil. They also call them "mudbugs".

@colleenoz, I hope you enjoy Where the Crawdads Sing as much as I did. My youngest granddaughter told me about it and I had to go on a waiting list at the library to get it.

Grew up in the northeast.....we called them crayfish and never thought of eating them.

We called them crayfish in the PNW, too, and I never knew they were eaten until I visited NC and a friend came from New Orleans and cooked étouffée for us...my first time. They were pretty tasty in that dish, but small bites for sure.

When I was a kid, I didn’t know that humans ate them either! I just knew they were cute and looked like miniature lobsters. :) Ummmmm... are they eaten with their full shells on? Heads and all?* Lol.

sorry, colleenoz, I took this straight to the cooking topic. Lol!!!

*ETA: I'd never seen head-and-shell-on shrimp eaten until a family friend from Vietnam made her shrimp toast. I found them physically difficult to eat. lol!!!

Wednesday morning - I 100% agree with you. We live on Cape Cod and have access to fresh Atlantic seafood - fish and shellfish. Shrimp and crabs are two exceptions. We went to the south several years ago for a winter - indulged ourselves with shrimp fresh off the boats. Such a treat!! Little harbors with 4 or 5 shrimp boats and a restaurant that cooked them right there.

Thanks for the info, Wednesday morning!

My girls grew up catching them and eating them in the local "creeks" and streams while fishing. We called them "crawfish". Groups of teenagers would go fishing and if they were unsuccessful they would catch crawfish, build a fire and boil them on the spot. They never ate the heads because no one liked them, they just picked that bite out of the tail and ate it, usually with pirated packages of catsup from the local restaurants.

Annie

There are hundreds of crayfish species of varying sizes. I've been working in aquatic ecology for many years and at various times, was dealing with hundreds and hundreds of them almost daily. The idea of crawdad soup or any other way of eating them did occur to me. But as bottom feeders and omnivores, they end up with a lot of pollutants in their bodies, so I decided to take a pass. The places I was hauling them out of were not pristine to say the least . . .

Laurie, we've found a couple in our pond that are blue and one nearly as big as my hand. The boys came dashing up to the house to tell me they had found a lobster. I told them I only wished I had a pond full of lobster, LOL, but this guy was pretty big and a very pretty blue. I'd only seen the regular brown/tan river crawfish before, so we just let him go.

Annie

Yes, we found one of those once on one of my crayfishing excursions. It ended up being the first time that species had been discovered in the region. One of my coworkers went on to get his masters in biology specializing in crayfish. He was amazingly driven by his love of crayfish. He kept them as pets too. Did a comprehensive crayfish survey of the region around his university. Like, crazy-detailed the number of places he was willing to go to look for crayfish.

Here's a link to a description of some of the blue crayfish. They are moving around from their native habitats because people use them as bait, and they are sold in the aquarium trade. The one we found was Procambarus acutus.

https://www.bluecrayfish.com/different.html

wow, they're pretty in blue! I saw a huge blue lobster once at a museum in Maine.... they also had one that was half white, and half orange, iirc.

Never heard of the other names. When we lived in NewOrleans it was crawDads and mudbugs. We do get them in our filter, clogging, on occasion in the mountains. NY upstate. Mountain stream that feeds our garden.

Not yet tempted to make a meal. Would take an entire summer to make a meal. 😜...freeze and stock up. (?) no interest.

A good boil in the south years ago but would not seek them out now.

Yes, mudbugs is a New Orleans term for them. Like crabs, they are bottom feeders and you. have to be suspect of what it is on the bottom that they are feeding from.

I remember when the tsuamini hit years ago and all of those bodies were washed out to the ocean and people were still buying bottom feeding seafood from that part of the world.

The best seafood that I ever had was some shrimp right from the boat down in the Outer Banks. We bought it and cooked it ourselves.

Seafood is, in my opinion, highly over rated.

Otherwise the best is the fried poboys at Mandina's in New Orleans. Surely they have the best, right? Oh well, once in a while...............I love the half shrimp, half oysters poboy. Since I don't get to Mandinas very often, I am not going to over obsess about the purity of it. It IS good!

I don't buy any kind of fish or seafood at all, otherwise.

Crawfish offer only a small bite of flesh. Otherwise, eating crawfish is a group experience. If you don't suck the head, you are missing half of the crawfish eating experience.. Of course the crawfish are boiled in a pretty strongly spiced water so the "fat" in the head has a lot of flavor. Without that nicely spiced water to cook them in, the fat in the head would probably not be very attractive to the taste.