'Crawfishes of Louisiana' showcases nature

• By GREG LANGLEY
• Books editor
• Published: Apr 5, 2009

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There are plenty of crawfish in Louisiana. Not just the ones we elect to office, but the other kind who live in ditches (well, maybe both kinds live there) and get boiled in a pot and eaten by appreciative Cajuns.

Louisianians often take crawfish for granted. They’re just all over the place, making those curious mud chimneys on damp lawns, lending their name and image to festivals and ads promoting the state. Crawfish have become the most recognizable icon of Louisiana. But how much do you really know about them?

Did you know, for instance, that there are 39 known species of crawfish living in the Bayou State? You would if you read LSU at Alexandria biology teacher Jerry Walls’ lively little book Crawfishes of Louisiana (LSU Press, $27.50 paperback). And you’d learn right off the bat where the crawfish/crayfish debate originated.

“Crawfish is a commonly used southern U.S. name for what are called crayfish in writings by authors from the rest of the United States and most of the world,” Walls writes. So it’s us against them. The Yankees are wrong yet again. That makes 100 percent. Anyway, “crawfish” has been used since about 1817, Walls writes, but “crayfish” was first popularized by English biologist T.H. Huxley “in 1880.”

“Unfortunately, scuba divers and commercial fishermen around the world use the term crawfish to refer to the many species of marine spiny lobsters and slipper lobsters, and this usage has been standardized in the food trade,” Walls writes. Still, Walls allows as how he prefers “crawfish” even though he uses “crayfish” when it is part of a species’ scientific name. Walls knows his crawfish. He discusses how the little aquatic critters have become an ingrained part of Cajun culture and spread in popularity because of the interest in that culture. It’s not always been a good thing. Take the story of the wildly popular Red Swamp Crawfish, native to Louisiana.

“This amazingly adaptable and edible species had been introduced both on purpose and accidentally into much of the rest of the world between 1920 and 1960, and it took hold in many places. It carries a disease known as fungal crawfish pest, which virtually wiped out all the large native crawfishes of Europe. It also destroyed levees around rice fields in Africa and southern Asia, so in most places it was a pest and hunted only to be destroyed. In China, however, it adapted easily to rice culture methods and, as in Louisiana, became a second crop on rice lands. The Chinese took it one step further, however, and using cheap labor and some inventiveness, started reselling our crawfish to Louisiana.”

Red Swamp Crawfish is only one of the species Walls describes. In fact, he writes, Louisiana is a sort of biological Bosporus when it comes to crawfish species.

“Stream faunas of the Florida Parish pinelands and those of the western pinelands are almost totally different since the species have different origins. Stream species in the east have ancestors in the area from Florida to Mississippi and Tennessee, while western species usually have ancestors or relatives in Arkansas and Texas. These two faunas have been separate for at least twelve thousand years, before the end of the last Ice Age.”

If you want to know where to find each species, there are maps with color overlays and photos of each species along with descriptions to aid you. There is even a chapter on how to determine the sex of a crawfish and charts that label the crawfish’s body parts.

As the excerpts above probably reveal, this is not just a dry academic work, but a wide ranging examination of crawfish done in an accessible, clearly written style. If you’re a person who likes to peruse nature writing before you go to sleep, grab a copy of this and put it on your nightstand. It’s not National Geographic, but it’ll do in a pinch. 

Big Read discussions
As part of The Big Read: One Book/One Community program, the East Baton Rouge Parish Library will sponsor several reading and discussion group meetings. These discussions are free and open to the public. The program, sponsored by the East Baton Rouge Parish Library and the Baton Rouge Area Chamber, is a community-wide reading program. People from all walks of life are encouraged to read and then discuss important issues raised by the book, A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines.

Dates and locations are:

• 3 p.m. today, April 5: East Baton Rouge Parish Main Library, 7711 Goodwood Blvd.
• 3 p.m. today, April 5: East Baton Rouge Parish Library Jones Creek Regional Branch, 6222 Jones Creek Road, with guest moderator Patti Fox of Echad Awakening
• 7 p.m. Tuesday, April 7: East Baton Rouge Parish Library Bluebonnet Regional Branch, 9200 Bluebonnet Blvd.
• 11 a.m. Tuesday, April 14: East Baton Rouge Parish Library Zachary Branch, 1900 Church St.
• 6 p.m. Tuesday, April 14: East Baton Rouge Parish Library Greenwell Springs Road Regional Branch, 11300 Greenwell Springs Road, with guest moderator State Sen. Sharon Weston-Broome.

Visit http://www.ReadOneBook.org for a complete listing of reading and discussion group meetings and related programming. More information, call (225) 231-3745.