Many nights, Trudy Luke is up all night monitoring her blue crabs.
Producing soft-shell blue crabs is all about the timing — being ready to take a crab from the tank in the small window after it has shed its hard shell — which often means tending to the crabs in the middle of the night.
"Soft-shell crabbing is like taking care of a newborn baby. It's a full-time job," said Luke, owner of Luke's Seafood in Dulac. "You lose a lot of sleep."
But for Luke, it's worth it. She loves caring for the crabs, and it's become her way of life since she opened up her seafood business in 1999. However, she is an outlier in the Louisiana soft-shell crab industry, which has been rapidly losing producers in the last few decades.
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