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Over the last few decades, the planet has been at the mercy of a ten-legged, many-clawed crustacean ravenously creating a clone army bent on world domination. No, it isn’t an interplanetary interloper or the result of an uncontained government experiment. This is biology gone wrong, or if you happen to be a marbled crayfish, biology gone horribly right. What’s unusual is that instead of the expected two copies of their chromosomes, marbled crayfish have three. Their genetic composition is similar to the Slough crayfish, a close relative, leading scientists to conclude that the first marbled crayfish was born through an...

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...

BANGKOK, Thailand - A Russian dubbed the "Merchant of Death" for allegedly supplying weapons to Africa's bloody conflicts over power and diamonds was arrested Thursday in Thailand on suspicion of conspiring to smuggle guns to Colombia's leftist rebels. Viktor Bout, 41, whose dealings reportedly inspired a 2005 movie about the illicit arms trade, was arrested at U.S. request in his hotel room in Bangkok, said police Lt. Gen. Pongpat Chayapan. Bout had eluded arrest for years and was finally seized after a four-month sting organized by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. In New York, federal authorities unsealed a criminal complaint...

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. The U.S. International Trade Commission voted unanimously Tuesday to keep the anti-dumping tariff on Chinese crawfish tail meat for another five years - a move that spares the south Louisiana crawfish industry, officials say. "We won!" said a jubilant state Agriculture Commissioner Bob Odom. In deciding on whether to keep the five-year tariff, the commission looked at how sanctions hurt and benefit the crawfish industry. The 4-0 ITC ruling, made at the commission meeting in Washington, D.C., was based on the likelihood that removing the import duties would "lead to continuation...

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. JONESBORO, Ill. (AP) — There's not a beach or seaworthy boat anywhere near Bobby Boyd's house in the southern Illinois woods, but the 20,000 Malaysian prawns living in his ponds taste like they came out of the Pacific Ocean. Boyd is one of a tiny but growing number of people in the Midwest raising the 6-inch crustaceans, once raised only in big hatcheries in the Deep South. Since researchers discovered the prawns can grow in cooler climates, farmers in Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, Missouri, Illinois and Ohio have been dumping buckets of...

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. WASHINGTON (Reuters) - After a month's vacation at his Texas ranch, President Bush let loose at Iraqi President Saddam Hussein on Wednesday with a blast of down-home rhetoric. "For 11 long years Saddam Hussein has sidestepped, crawfished, wheedled out of any agreement that he had made," Bush told reporters on Wednesday, launching a new verb if not a military strike at Iraq. Back in Washington after spending August in Texas, Bush was outlining plans to seek the support of Congress and the United Nations for action against Saddam. "I'm going to...