KAPLAN, La. (AP) — 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 southern 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.