As Floyd passed by, I asked him what happened to the crawfish this year. There is often at least a tiny grain of truth behind a conspiracy theory. I got Dr. Michael Masser, associate professor and extension fisheries specialist. I asked him which crawfish conspiracy theories to believe. Everybody is hurting, and there's a lot of blame flying around.
Water levels are low thanks to the very dry winter.
And there haven't been many big storms like we usually see in the spring, either. The crawfish just didn't come out of their burrows. He went on to tell me that a new insecticide called Icon, a rice seed treatment used to control water weevils, was recently introduced in the rice fields. Since this year happened to be a horrible year for crawfish, some crawfish farmers thought it was more than a coincidence. But the folk at the Louisiana State University Rice Research Station have already looked into these reports, and they can find no evidence of any connection, Masser told me.