...and crockery.
Posted on 02/05/2018 2:08:22 PM PST by BenLurkin
The marbled crayfish is the only crustacean that reproduces asexually, with the all-female species making clones of itself from eggs unfertilized by sperm...
Since its discovery in 1995 in Germany, the marbled crayfish has spread across Europe and into Africa in huge numbers. “They eat anything—rotten leaves, snails or fish broods, small fish, small insects," says Frank Lyko, a molecular geneticist at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg. “This crayfish is a serious pest,”
...
Lyko and his colleagues sequenced genomes of about a dozen marbled crayfish from different parts of the world and performed less detailed genetic analyses of two dozen more from across Madagascar. At 3.5 billion DNA bases in length, the crustacean’s genome is bigger than the human genome, but contains about the same number of genes, 21,000, they report today in Nature Ecology & Evolution.
...
As suggested by some preliminary evidence, the marbled crayfish has three sets of 92 chromosomes, not the usual two, and each set is essentially a version of the chromosomes belonging to the slough crayfish (P. fallax). Two of the three sets of chromosomes are virtually identical, but the third is different enough that Lyko’s team concludes the marbled crayfish likely arose from the mating of two slough crayfish from different regions of the world thrown together in an aquarium. One must have had an abnormal egg or sperm that retained two copies of its chromosomes instead of the usual single set that is in such germ cells, Lyko explains. The bringing together of the two distant slough crayfish enhanced the genetic variation within the new clonal “species.” Such a union “would never happen in the wild,” he asserts.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencemag.org ...
How do they taste?
LOL
>>I think I saw this movie. It didn’t show Kurt Russel dying in the end . . . . but it didn’t look good.<<
Outer Limits episode: The Sand Kings.
The original (Russell was in the remake) scared the hell out of me as a kid.
Every now and then you have to clear the decks.
You’re saying that, without the males to attract for reproduction, that the females just eat and eat and eat?
Spawn of native Floridians conquers the world...
Guardians of the galaxy 2?
Yep, dem coonasses take good care in makin gumbo!
Yes. Good eatin’!
I remember eating one like that 45 years ago - was a 21 pounder.
Marbled Crayfish
> How do they taste?
Being clones, I expect they all taste the same.
Why do these things intent on taking over the world always seem to come from Germany;?
The YECs say we’ve never seen a new species evolve...
I for one welcome our Crayfish overlords.
Taste funny.
Oh wait, that’s clowns.
nvrmnd
I guess they are easy to trap but more importantly, they're great eating...............The word needs to be spread far and wide!
I remember it, it was great. The remake series of the Outer Limits had great episodes, I was disappointed when they were discontinued........
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