First, are crawfish important in the grand scheme of things?
Mai, yeah! They are a wonderful part of our cuisine, and they are thusly an important part of our economy. They provide many jobs (from catching and selling to processing to selling back to customers like us to serving in restaurants and shipping around the nation). What would the world be like with no boiled crawfish or etouffe? I wouldn’t want to know. What kind of crawfish do we have in America’s WETLAND? We have two commercial species: Red Crawfish (Procambarus clarki) and White or River Crawfish (Procambarus acutus). Before you get confused, they both look red when cooked with good seasoning. The easiest way to tell them apart is that in the Red Crawfish, the pinchers are heavy and thick; the White Crawfish have at least one long and slender pincher. In general, Reds are found in swamps, bayous, and ditches, and Whites are more in large, deeper bodies of water such as lakes. However, they may be found living together. Almost any sack of crawfish will have mostly Reds and a few Whi
