Giant snails, tiny insects threaten the South’s rice, crawfish farms

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 o…