Free Republic

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...

When scientists at the Dalian Natural History Museum in China copped a load of a fossil unearthed in the Lower Cretaceous Yixian Formation, they couldn't believe their eyes. The eight-legged beastie looked like nothing anyone had seen before. Exceptionally preserved. They described it as a new spider, publishing their analysis in the journal Acta Geologica Sinica, and named the species Mongolarachne chaoyangensis. There was just one problem: the fossil was a big old fake. The cunning ruse was discovered by invertebrate paleontologist Paul Selden of the University of Kansas, whose spidey senses started tingling when he got his hands on...

Escaped self-cloning mutant crayfish created in experimental breeding programmes have invaded a Belgian cemetery. Hundreds of the duplicating crustaceans, which can dig down to up to a metre and are always female, pose a deadly threat to local biodiversity after colonising a historic Antwerp graveyard. "It's impossible to round up all of them. It's like trying to empty the ocean with a thimble," said Kevin Scheers, of the Flemish Institute for Nature and Woodland Research. Marbled crayfish, which travel across land and water at night and eat whatever they can, do not occur in nature and are banned by the...

When researchers discover fossils of species that are new to science it’s only natural that they attempt to find a place for them in the colossal tree of life, matching them up with related species that may even exist today. A newly-discovered species of ancient creature is pushing that practice to its absolute limit. Tiny fossils discovered in both Colombia and the United States reveal the existence of a pint-sized marine animal that lived some 90 million years ago. It’s being called a crab, but the researchers who discovered it are quick to point out how dramatically different it is...

The crayfish cut its own claw of to survive being boiled alive (Picture: Jiuke) _______________________________________________________________________ A crayfish made a remarkable bid for freedom after cutting off its own claw to escape a boiling pot of soup. The desperate animal was filmed sacrificing its own limb to survive being boiled alive at a restaurant in China. Posted on Chinese social media site Weibo by a user called Jiuke, the crayfish is seen struggling to escape the spicy soup. The heroic crayfish then slices off its own claw before wriggling away to freedom. The clip has racked up more than a million...

This is the remarkable moment a crayfish escaped certain death in a bowl of soup - by chopping off one of its claws. A video posted on the Chinese social media site Weibo showed the small crustacean struggling out of a bowl of piping hot spicy soup. But the creature realised one of its claws was slowing its escape and without any hesitation used its other claw to slice it off and wriggle free. The dramatic footage, posted by a user called Jiuke, has now been shared around the world and viewed more than a million times. Many Weibo users...

Most species of crayfish reproduce the same way that humans do: by having sex. But one species of crayfish that evolved out of the pet trade can do something unique—clone itself—and this ability has led populations of the crustacean to spawn out of control. For a study published today in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution , researchers sequenced the genomes of 11 marbled crayfish, both from the wild and from the pet trade. They found that the genomes in all 11 animals were nearly identical, meaning that they don’t reproduce sexually, and that they are officially a different species...

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...

"Jambalaya" is one of the world's greatest songs. What could possibly make it better? Bagpipes! I record my songs under the stage name of Hopalong Ginsberg. Slings and Arrows was already registered with ASCAP. That's not a joke.

Crayfish, Caribou, and Scientific Evidence in the Wild by James J. S. Johnson, J.D., Th.D. * An unusual law has helped some creation science evidence to “go wild.” Unsurprisingly (for Bible believers), mounting evidence increasingly shows that only the Genesis explanation of our world’s origin—and Earth’s present ecological equilibrium—makes sense. Animal ecology is purposefully balanced; it’s not a simple hodgepodge of evolutionary “accidents.” We can thank Congress for much of what we now know about American wildlife, specifically, the Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration [Pittman-Robertson] Act (P-R Act) in 1937.1 The P-R Act focuses financing of scientific research projects involving...

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...