Crayfish invasion brings taste of Louisiana to Michigan

VICKSBURG, MI -- If you can spare an hour to make a meal, especially with the season edging ever closer to cool fall, crawfish etouffee can be a simple but fulfilling option.

Etouffee is a thick, warm seafood stew popular in Louisiana. Once you've got the ingredients together, most of it is letting the pot sit so the rich flavors can cook into the base.

Attendees at the crayfish festival at Sunset Lake Park on Saturday, Aug. 19, got to experience that firsthand when they watched an etouffee cooking demonstration and then wolfed down a fresh bowl of the dish.

Vicksburg Cray Day

When red swamp crayfish, a key feature of Louisiana's economy, were spotted in Michigan, Lafayette Travel quickly organized a one-day pop-up festival. The group contacted the Michigan Department of Natural Resources to help arrange it, and things swiftly fell into place.

"(The department) wanted to make this an educational event, and we were as curious as them about the crawfish up here and had as many questions as they did, and it led to some really good conversations," said Jesse Guidry, the vice president of communications for Lafayette Travel. "I think basically we just wanted to give people a taste of Lafayette, Louisiana, and southern hospitality up here."

The way it was planned, the festival worked to serve dual purposes. It was fun, exploring crayfish as a Louisiana cultural icon and delicious source of food.

The event was also educational, however, teaching people about crayfish -- like the fact that whether you call them crayfish or crawfish just depends on where you're from -- and how the invasive red swamp crayfish can be damaging to Michigan's ecosystems.

There were games set out, a face painting station, crayfish-themed souvenirs, and Lafayette Travel even teamed up with Lafayette restaurant owner Sean Suire to serve up some crawfish etouffee and corn for attendees.

All of this was paired with an information booth run by the Department of Natural Resources, along with displays showing people crayfish-catching equipment and a documentary screening on Louisiana's crayfish industry.

"We've gotten a lot of questions answered, eaten some food. That etouffee, ooh," said Debby Puplis, of Vicksburg.

Puplis and her husband, Allan, had found out about the crayfish invasion into Sunset Lake from a news article three weeks ago and were shocked and eager to learn more about how it had happened. They saw an announcement for the event and decided to attend.

Crayfish panel got a bit heated

There was even a panel featuring Suire, who was a crayfisherman for many years before opening his restaurant, The Cajun Table, and Nicholas Popoff, the aquatic species and regulatory affairs manager with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.

Suire talked about the process of harvesting crayfish, how in Louisiana they alternate growing rice with harvesting the crayfish and even mentioned that the "birth to eating" timeframe for crayfish was about two months.

Popoff ended up having to justify his department's approach to the invasive crayfish to concerned attendees. He was asked how the Department of Natural Resources kills the red swamp crayfish and why they couldn't find another way of attempting to deal with the creatures.

He had to explain that this situation was less than a month old for the department, which was still in the process of studying the crayfish and trying to contain the spread as much as possible.

The Michigan Department of Natural Resources is here to protect Michigan's natural resources and its $2.4 billion fishing industry, Popoff said. Not being proactive with the crayfish situation endangers that.

Michigan crayfish situation as it stands now

Sunset Lake has surfaced several dozen of the invasive crayfish over just the past 10 days, but a whopping 2,600 were found in a small retention basin in Novi a few days after the Sunset Lake discovery. At this point, it's hard for the Department of Natural Resources to say how the crayfish ended up in Michigan.

"You could import live red swamp crayfish for food up till 2015 when Michigan prohibited them, so what we're guessing is that either people imported them and some got loose or perhaps they were purchased at a food market for bait and utilised live and got loose or perhaps even they're available in aquarium trade as pets and people think it's more humane to release them into waterways, which is actually illegal in Michigan," said Joanne Foreman, the Michigan DNR invasive species program's communications coordinator.

Those crayfish are prohibited in Michigan for a reason. They can change ecosystems, remove important vegetation and even damage the integrity of the ground around bodies of water.

The department is currently examining waterways, connected bodies of water and nearby unconnected bodies of water to determine how bad the invasion is in the Vicksburg area.

Meanwhile, the crayfish festival was a good way to educate the locals on the situation while giving them a fun time.

The whole festival was funded by Lafayette Travel.

"From the money that we spent putting this together, if one person plans a trip to Lafayette with two kids it'll pay off," Guidry said.

For those who can't make that trip, making etouffee is a much more attainable goal. Of course, live red swamp crayfish are prohibited in Michigan, and any caught in Michigan should be frozen and turned in to the Department of Natural Resources.

People who don't want to just buy the meat can turn to any of Michigan's own native crayfish instead as options for fishing and cooking.

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