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Josh Courville has harvested crawfish his whole life, but these days he’s finding a less welcome catch in some of the fields he manages in south Louisiana.
Snails. Big ones.
For every crawfish Courville dumps out of a trap, three or four snails clang onto the boat’s metal sorting table. About the size of a baseball when fully grown, apple snails stubbornly survive all kinds of weather in fields, pipes and drainage ditches and can lay thousands of bubblegum-colored eggs every month.
“It’s very disheartening,” Courville says. “The most discouraging part, actually, is not having much control over it.”
Apple snails are just one example of how invasive species can quickly become a nightmare for farmers.
In Louisiana, where rice and crawfish are often grown together in the same fields, there’s now a second threat: tiny insects called delphacids that can deal catastrophic damage to rice plants. Much about these snails and insects remains a mystery, and researchers are trying to learn more about what’s fueling their spread, from farming methods and pesticides to global shipping and extreme weather.
It’s an urgent problem because in a tough market for rice, farmers who rotate the rice and crawfish crops together need successful harvests of both to make ends meet. And losses to pests could mean higher rice prices for U.S. consumers, says Steve Linscombe, director of The Rice Foundation, which does research and education outreach for the U.S. rice industry.
