NEW ORLEANS — Way down South, where football and food are close to religions, tailgate parties could turn into crawfish boils a few autumns from now if a Louisiana State University project works out.
"I certainly hope so. It would be a nice option to have," said Greg Lutz, an aquaculture specialist at the university's agriculture center.
Lutz has placed about 2,000 juvenile shrimp crawfish into 60 outdoor tanks and is studying how they are growing and whether they could be raised profitably, like their distant kin, red swamp crawfish and white river crawfish. Those species are a staple of spring get-togethers in Louisiana and other areas of the South, but they're gone before the first kickoff.
Shrimp crawfish, however, lay their eggs about the time the current commercial varieties are harvested and would be full-sized in October and November.
"I would like them so we could get part of the football season," said David Snell, who runs a Dallas-area catering business called Cajun Crawfish Company. "All the tailgating that goes on, if we were able to get crawfish earlier, with a good size and at a reasonable price, I'd be interested."
To read the rest of the story, please go to: Associated Press.
