As spring rolls around, stores around Louisiana will be showing a welcome sight: fresh and boiled crawfish for sale. For decades, Louisiana farmers have been producing and selling crawfish using practices that have worked consistently throughout their lives. But as droughts and diseases become more common, there is now a need for more robust research into management systems.
Kaelyn Fogelman, a recently hired professor of aquaculture at the LSU AgCenter, hopes to facilitate new research into not only crawfish management, but into the entire aquaculture program.
“I came to LSU to do aquaculture and have a world-class aquaculture program,” Fogelman said. “I knew that when I took my permanent professor position that that’s where I wanted to be forever. I wanted to be at a university with a program that wanted to grow and had the opportunity to do that.”
Fogelman first found her love for aquaculture as an undergraduate student at Susquehanna University, where she graduated with majors in biology and ecology. During this time, and after finding a passion in scuba diving, she began working with aquatic macroinvertebrates, an interest that has persisted through her career.
After completing her undergraduate education, Fogelman attended Auburn University, initially for her master’s degree in aquaculture. That work soon turned into a doctorate as she found an interest in working with freshwater mussels. At Auburn, she studied mussels in Texas to learn more about the eating habits of the organisms, which led her to her main research focuses: energetics and stress tolerance.
This work brought Fogelman to Troy University, where she got her first role as a fulltime professor and she continued to study mussels as well as crayfish, which include the red swamp crawfish that are eaten. Here, she learned a devastating fact about the existence of crayfish around the world that has motivated her to dedicate much of her time to research them.
“Fifty percent of crayfish are at risk of extinction,” Fogelman said. “We have a lot of burrowing crayfish that don’t live in surface water. They live in terrestrial burrows that are disconnected from the surface water, and they’re really understudied because they’re harder to sample.”
After a few successful years at Troy, Fogelman decided to make the next big jump in her career in July 2025 to build up the aquaculture program at the LSU AgCenter.
Her first project will start to rectify the lack of research into crayfish. Fogelman, in February, will begin to study best management practices for producing red swamp crawfish, focusing on using water aeration systems to see how much dissolved oxygen needs to be in the water for crawfish to be the most productive.
To do this, Fogelman will take juvenile crawfish and place them in three different situations: one without any aeration, one with aeration every night, throughout the night and a control setting that will aerate only when the dissolved oxygen in the water gets below the hypoxic level.
She hopes to do studies on sturgeons, mussels and more crayfish in the future, but mostly she is excited to rebuild and establish the aquaculture program as one of the best in the county.
“I’m so impressed by the legacy of LSU aquaculture,” Fogelman said. “I’m really, really grateful to be a part of continuing that.”
