The Mutant All-Female Crayfish, Which Reproduces by Cloning Itself, Is Filling Europe at Alarming Speed (atlasobscura.com) 279
The marbled crayfish looks much like any other freshwater crustacean. It has two claws, ten legs, and an attractive blue-brown marbled shell. Yet this six-inch creature, found in streams and lakes around the world, is far more sinister than you might expect. From a report: Its new scientific name gives a few clues: Procambarus virginalis. Every marbled crayfish, known as a marmorkreb in German, is female -- and they reproduce by cloning themselves. Frank Lyko, a biologist at the German Cancer Research Center, first heard about the marbled crayfish from a hobbyist aquarium owner, who picked up some "Texas crayfish" at a pet shop in 1995. They were strikingly large, and they laid enormous batches of eggs -- hundreds, in a single go. Soon, the New York Times reports, the hobbyist was beset with so many crayfish he was giving them away to his friends. And soon after that, marmorkrebs were showing up in pet stores upon Europe.
There was something very strange about these crayfish. They were all female, and they all laid hundreds of eggs without mating. These eggs, in turn, hatched into hundreds more females -- with each one growing up fully able to reproduce by herself. In 2003, scientists sequenced their DNA and confirmed what many owners already believed to be the case: Each baby crayfish was a clone of its mother, and they were filling Europe's fishtanks at alarming speed. Just 25 years ago, the marbled crayfish did not exist at all. Now, they can be found in the wild by the millions in Germany, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia, the Ukraine, Japan, and Madagascar.
There was something very strange about these crayfish. They were all female, and they all laid hundreds of eggs without mating. These eggs, in turn, hatched into hundreds more females -- with each one growing up fully able to reproduce by herself. In 2003, scientists sequenced their DNA and confirmed what many owners already believed to be the case: Each baby crayfish was a clone of its mother, and they were filling Europe's fishtanks at alarming speed. Just 25 years ago, the marbled crayfish did not exist at all. Now, they can be found in the wild by the millions in Germany, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia, the Ukraine, Japan, and Madagascar.
life (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:life (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:life (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, but unless we manufacture one, it's impossible to predict when Nature will get around to the job.
Which makes these guys (err... gals) an unstable invasive species. They may roll in, take over, settle into a niche... and then die out due to disease, causing a second major disruption when they do.
Creoles find a way (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Creoles find a way (Score:4, Funny)
Easy Solution [youtube.com]
Re:Creoles find a way (Score:5, Funny)
How do they TASTE?!?!?
I'm happy to say that crawfish season in the New Orleans area is just around the corner....YUM!!
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Re:life (Score:5, Insightful)
Wait. They're all clones, right ?
I bet a single virus could wipe them all.
It means they're more susceptible to all being wiped out by a virus; but, clones aren't necessarily 100% identical though. Mutations still happen. We're all descended from organisms that "cloned" themselves after, all. An isolated individual that wasn't hit by the virus could quickly repopulate.
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that virus would have to spread to all corners of the world to wipe them out.
The obvious solution would be for humans to help the virus spread.
You can even wage biological warfare in your own garden:
1. Gather up bugs that are causing problems, and put them in a jar.
2. Let the jar sit for a day or two until endemic disease spreads among the over crowded bugs
3. Dump the dead and dying bugs in a blender.
4. Spray your garden with the disease infested blend.
5. Watch many more bugs die.
Re: life (Score:4, Funny)
If you ever offer to make me a milkshake in the bug bioweapon blender, remind me to say no.
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Wait. They're all clones, right ?
I bet a single virus could wipe them all.
How do you deploy a single virus to every crayfish?
And they're "clones", but like a virus they're still undergoing their own slow asexual evolution. The virus needs at least some broad targeting to get most of the population. But once you make it more general you now have to deal with other complications like the virus mutating into something more harmful that harms other species, or something less harmful and not killing the crayfish at all.
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like a virus they're still undergoing their own slow asexual evolution.
They started asexual reproduction from a single female in 1995. Only 23 years is not enough time for significant genetic variation to arise from random mutations. It is highly unlikely that there will be much variation in their resistance to a virus.
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Wait. They're all clones, right ?
They aren't clones really. They reproduce by asexual reproduction like many other forms of life already do.
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But they are genetically identical to their parent, barring mutation. The process might not be called cloning but the end result is the same, no?
If this site is supposedly still News for Nerds and the topic is Biology, we should be talking in formal Biology terms. And honestly, asexual reproduction isn't terribly advanced. You learn about it in elementary school. Surely slashdot can handle subject matter of that educational level right?
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Time for a boil (Score:5, Insightful)
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Gumbo is the solution.
Re:Time for a boil (Score:5, Funny)
*Good* gumbo is a colloidal suspension...
And they're tasty! [Re:Time for a boil] (Score:5, Informative)
Apparently they're tasty. From the article in Nature [nature.com]:
"Julia Jones, a conservation scientist at Bangor University, UK, who first identified4 marbled crayfish in Madagascar in 20074, says that the species’ spread is due largely to their popularity as a food source. In 2009, she met a man on a bus carrying a plastic bag full of them that he planned to dump into his rice fields in the hope of creating a sustainable stock, she says.
"Stopping their spread in Madagascar will be “almost impossible”, says Lyko. Collaborators there have begun campaigns urging people not to transport them or release them into rice fields. The message is a hard sell in a country where poverty levels are high and marbled crayfish are a cheap and popular source of protein. Lyko’s colleague brought a few dozen that she had caught to a family barbecue. “This went down quite well,” he says."
formatting lost [Re:And they're tasty!] (Score:2)
And, before the sarcastic comments on the statement that Julia Jones "first identified4 marbled crayfish in Madagascar in 20074" start-- that's slashdot stripping out formatting. The "4" should be a superscript, which refers to reference 4:
[4] Jones, J P. G. et al. Biol. Invasions 11, 1475–1482 (2009).
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Grab a really big pot, and some seasoning, I'm hungry.
You won't get much meat off a marmokreb. The work to meat ratio is pretty low.
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Re:Time for a boil (Score:4, Informative)
After cooking (in the boil)...
Twist it in half to separate the tail from the body (thorax). Hold the tail to your mouth, suck and squeeze the tail. Repeat for body. Discard rest.
They also can be mechanically separated, as you can buy crawfish tail meat by the pound. Which go great as a substitute for lobster in many dishes and makes a very fine crawfish roll. They are related to lobsters, after all.
Also, they're nice and sustainable so what everyone needs to do is just munch away.
Re:Time for a boil (Score:4, Informative)
You've obviously never been to a crawfish boil down here in LA.
I can knock out 10lbs of boiled crawfish so far it will make your head spin.
I learned a powerful lesson in college here...if you can't eat them fast, you end up hungry.
It takes me about 2-3 seconds to pop the tail, suck the head and slurp the tail meat out almost in one fluid motion.
It isn't that hard if you know how to eat them...and they are properly boiled.
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Invasive species (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Invasive species (Score:5, Funny)
Alternatively, tell the Chinese these crayfish cure erectile dysfunction, diabetes, cancer, and aging. They'll be wiped out in less time than they took to spread.
Re:Invasive species (Score:5, Funny)
Actually the Chinese eat crayfish for food. Procambarus clarkii, the Louisiana crawfish, is an invasive species in Chinese rice paddies, but many Chinese farmers welcome them as a secondary crop. They call it xiao long xia -- the little dragon shrimp. While it threatens native Chinese fisheries, it has considerable economic value.
It so happens I'm half Chinese, half Cajun. There probably isn't an animal that creeps through the forest of swims in the water that's safe for me.
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You meant safe from you, not safe for you, you coon ass chink ;-p
Some Cajun-Asian fusion sounds mighty tasty!
Actually the Chinese eat crayfish for food. Procambarus clarkii, the Louisiana crawfish, is an invasive species in Chinese rice paddies, but many Chinese farmers welcome them as a secondary crop. They call it xiao long xia -- the little dragon shrimp. While it threatens native Chinese fisheries, it has considerable economic value.
It so happens I'm half Chinese, half Cajun. There probably isn't an animal that creeps through the forest of swims in the water that's safe for me.
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You know, Asian activists are sensitive about the automatic association of Asians with food, but when my family gets together we eat ourselves silly and talk about food.
It gets worse too: I grew up in something that probably doesn't exist in the US anymore: an Italian immigrant neighborhood. I'm talking grannies who made paper-thin tortellini, families with an auxiliary basement kitchen (for cooking fish), late summer nights in back yards under a grape arbor hung with plastic Japanese lanterns, huge pots o
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Tell them for every 10,000 they catch, they get a free Sydney apartment, next 10,000 a Vancouver one and the final 10,000 one in both Melbourne and Auckland!
Oh wait, they've already got those.
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Be careful, introducing a species to control an invasive species can become a new invasive species. Today procambarus virginalis, tomorrow Homo sapiens nawlins
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How can you tell you're at a zoo in Louisiana?
Next to the description of the animal is a recipe.
Could be an invasive species (Score:2)
Easy solution (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a quick, easy solution to this.
How do they taste?
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No distinction or difference. A crawfish in a tank isn't going to be in danger of predators, so it will be free to eat and reproduce to its heart's content.
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There's a quick, easy solution to this.
How do they taste?
From what I understand like lobster.
Re:Easy solution (Score:5, Informative)
When the colonists first came to the Americas, the coastal areas were overflowing with Lobsters, with stories of 100s washing up on the shore at a time. By the late 1700s, lobsters were considered "prison food", because there was so many of them. Lobsters begin to rot almost immediately when killed which is why they are cooked alive in the pot, and the shells horribly stink... in a culture without refrigeration and modern sanitation, these would quickly turn into a strong negative.
After the US Civil war (1860s), canning was invented and cooked lobster would last for a long time. With the expansion of the railroads, the interior and west coast of the US began to demand canned lobster for its high-protein value. Then they realized that it tastes even better live, and with refrigeration, lobsters began to ship live all over the country. After that, the demand for lobsters skyrocketed, and we have the high prices we see today.
Since the 1990s, apparently the Maine lobster crops have been booming, some say proportional to the rising sea temperatures, combined with sustainability policies restricting farming of female (only chicks that have not yet spawned, male or female, are allowed to be legally caught). Also, humans have overfished the cod stocks in the northeast, which have been known to eat lobster for food. By killing the predators, we've turned lobsters into the chickens of the sea.
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"tis a good example of successful marketing. From fertilizer/poor person food to gourmet food, mostly due to being able to ship it somewhere where it was unknown. Another example of successfully marketing a bug that most would never eat is escargot, put them on a menu in a fancy French restaurant and people are willing to pay out of the nose for poor persons food, namely those snails that infest the vineyards.
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This is backwards. Using an animal as a food source guarantees its prevalence, not the other way around.
that's not really true at all.
This sounds like the work of Cyrano Jones! (Score:3)
Sinister? Hah!! (Score:5, Funny)
It's the first sign of the matriarchal utopia...
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Such a species will pretty much decimate any body of water if gets into.
Yet we wouldn't have beer without yeast.
Kinda freakish (Score:2)
Re:Kinda freakish (Score:5, Informative)
The Quick part isn't a surprise (Score:4, Informative)
It's kind of freaky that it's population is growing so quickly and exponentially.
Actually no surprise.
These are not animal that care for their offsprings.
So they tend to lay a ton of eggs in hopes that a few of them manage to survive into reproductive adulthood.
The surprise isn't the massive amount of egg. (that would be a surprise for mammals like humans. that's the normal modus operandi for crayfish)
The surprise is that without any fertilization happening, the eggs are able to hatch and grow into an adult egg-laying female.
(Wikipedia mentions the animal having some chromosomic aberration and being triploid - thus the meiosis going wrong when trying to produce egg cells)
I wonder what kinds of havoc it is wrecking on local ecosystems.
Well, given that its current ecosystem is "aquariums" : its mostly pissing off their respective owner who simply don't know what to do with all the newly hatching crayfishes.
If let out freely in the nature :
- it should have predators in the nature. Not all eggs will hatch and grow to a reproductive adult. There's a reason why the reproductive strategy of all similar animals is "lay as many eggs as possible in the hope that some survive".
The population is currently explosing only because it's happening in the sheltered environment of aquarium, with humans taking care of their pets, and not much predation.
- if too many offsprings do hatch, they'll have to eat : they'll be in competion with all other animal in the environment, and they'll be in competition with all the other offsprings.
So mostly they'll probably stave very quickly, either by being outcompeted by other animal and/or by depleting the resources in their immediate environment.
So the damage to the environment depends on how fast they'll die.
Was this thing man made?
Technically, given that it currently survives because it's living in aquariums : yes, we human have contributed a bit to it.
But no, it definitely doesn't look like something coming out of some lab.
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It seems to be more common that evolution creates an ecosystem that stabilizes - niches filled with specialists that are too highly adapted for their niche for some other local species to out compete them even after a few beneficial mutations.
Thus the theory of punctuated equilibrium - evolution is NOT generally a steady march, but has long periods of stasis until something disrupts the system and creates new opportunities. That Chicxulub asteroid did wonders for mammals, as particularly large-scale exampl
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until something disrupts the system and creates new opportunities.
Which happens all the time. In any particular ecosystem, one side or the other is always pushing ahead.
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If you're not going to read my post and respond in a meaningful way, why bother responding at all?
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But no, it definitely doesn't look like something coming out of some labBut no, it definitely doesn't look like something coming out of some lab"
If it came out of a lab, odds are that it's have a prominent copyright notice built into it's shell, and you'd owe Monsanto 3 cents for each one you ate.
sinister? (Score:2)
I had no idea that crawfish are left-handed
Imagine if humans became like that (Score:5, Funny)
a feminist's wet dream, a world without male privilege where everyone is equal (because everyone is female and identical clones)
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Serious question: (Score:2)
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And if your imagination isn't firing on all cylinders today, you can also read the book [depauw.edu].
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Hint: anyone that keeps saying "nice guy", uses the phrase for himself, pulls the "not all men!"
You've lost me here. Are you suggesting that all men are identical?
Re:Imagine if humans became like that (Score:5, Funny)
a feminist's wet dream, a world without male privilege where everyone is equal (because everyone is female and identical clones)
But who would they blame for everything???
Re:Imagine if humans became like that (Score:5, Funny)
But who would they blame for everything???
Russians.
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canada?
it isn't even a real country anyway.
Trade offs (Score:5, Insightful)
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But how much damage will they do until that factor is encountered?
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Sexual reproduction is critical for spreading favorable genes like resistance to predators, poisons, etc.
No, there are quite a few pathenogenetic species. Sexual reproduction allows for better mixing of genes, but it's hardly critical for spreading them. These animals will simply operate more like a bacteria. Those that survive will replace those that did not, instead of spreading the resistant genome through the population.
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But still, there are specie alive on this planet today that have cloned themselves for millions of years and haven't died out yet.
It's probably not a great survival tactic, but given a wide spread enough species, and a large enough extant population, I'm still pretty sure you end up with enough genetic variation through simple background mutations during cloning to survive.
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You mean parthenogenetic.
And as another person has already commented, bacteria have other mechanisms for mixing genes.
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Yes, I wasn't comparing parthenogenetic animals to bacteria, simply that their methodology of survival would be similar.
There are species of insect that have been cloning themselves for millions of years without dying out. Could they die out? Sure.
Is it an overall decrease in adaptability? Probably. You're relying on nothing but background mutation rate (remember- none of these are *perfect* clones.)
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It will be interesting to see what happens. Sexual reproduction is critical for spreading favorable genes like resistance to predators, poisons, etc. Since these are all clones they aren't going to have those advantages and sooner or later will encounter some factor that wipes them out. Apple farmers face a similar problem since each variety is a single genetic variant that is grafted onto other trees.
I suspect things like this have happened in the past but the resulting species are evolutionarily unstable since they can't evolve quickly enough to escape threats and eventually die out. Sexually reproducing predators will figure out how to make them an easy meal and competing species will out specialize them in their niches.
Of course this might take a few hundred or thousand years, in the meantime it can wreak havoc on whatever ecosystem it's screwing with.
I'm curious to know why it's so successful right
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I suspect things like this have happened in the past but the resulting species are evolutionarily unstable since they can't evolve quickly enough to escape threats and eventually die out.
Lots of single celled organisms divide asexually (meiosis). They are successful primarily because they can reproduce quickly. They adapt with a massive number of generations in a short amount of time. Complex organisms don't usually reproduce quickly, so parthenogenesis has some very significant disadvantages for them.
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you're right. I was going to go on a tangent about amoebas and how they can do both, but I lost the point and ended up editing it out of my post and not proof reading it. I did get a good grade in high school biology, some decades ago.
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They are not clones. The article is wrong about that.
How is an egg produced? You basically have a 'normal' cell that splits into two. That means the chromosome pairs split up into halfs, and the two egg cells have a random set of chromosomes.
Humans have 21 chromosome pairs, 42 chromosomes. That makes 2 ^ 42 possible eggs and sperms. Never wondered why not all kids of two parents look identically?
Just imagine you have a zipper, left side is red, right side is blue. Suppose you open the zipper, it would crea
Launch Secret Weapon (Score:5, Funny)
Cajun Navy deployed. Have Hot Sauce will Travel.
Genetic drift? (Score:2)
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It seems they are all identical clones with no genetic variation. This is typical of asexual reproduction. The big downside is that something like a single virus could easily wipe them all out.
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Sorry to not answer your first question, I am not an expert, but there have been known species (trees) that have cloned for thousands of years with no genetic defects I believe. Didn't they say this particular crawfish has 3 copies? I would imagine that only a mutation would cause a change in the genetic code and it would take an external influence to cause that. I'm sure someone more knowledgeable could answer you.
Mystique? (Score:4, Funny)
Europe is being overrun by all-female blue mutants?
Do they look like Jennifer Lawrence?
People (Score:3)
They aren't lobsters, they're CRAB PEOPLE!!!
Crab People,
crab people,
taste like crab,
talk like people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
The huge advantage of sex (Score:4, Insightful)
Cloning is the most ancient form of reproduction. It's so simple and easy to implement. Sexual reproduction is much more complex, but took over for complex species because it allows individuals of a species to all differ slightly in every characteristic. When facing environmental stresses, these small differences show up as lesser or greater reproductive advantage. In a sexual species, any reproductive advantage means swift adaptation of the species to new environmental conditions.
These asexual crayfish (Procambarus sheldoni?) may be reproducing fast now, but like the Cavendish banana, they will be apt to succumb to some disease that a sexual species could adapt away from.
Parthogenesis (Score:2)
Of course this is completely different from the microbial Mitosis.
The ones I've heard about are mostly island dwelling lizards, but I've only seen stuff on about a half dozen parthogenic species.
I wonder if their successful invasiveness is boosted by a lack of predators in the case of these crayfish.
They might be good for farming, if they are large enough to eat and taste good.
Well, at least until a plague strikes. That'
AND ! (Score:2)
They can be found in Ukraine, not THE Ukraine (Score:2)
Now, they can be found in the wild by the millions in Germany, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia, the Ukraine, Japan, and Madagascar.
The country's name in English is Ukraine. There's no "the" anymore. Look at their website for any Ukrainian embassy in an English speaking country. It was OK, although a bit unusual, to call it "the Ukraine" when it was part of the USSR, but Ukrainians don't like the use of "the Ukraine" any more. It's now just Ukraine.
1) Ethnic Russians who disagree and cite ancient, Soviet era English grammar books to justify the use of "the" can suck it.
2) Rules can be different for non-Englis
biggest piece of info left out of TFA... (Score:2)
How do they taste?
I, for one... (Score:2)
welcome our new crayfish clone overloards.
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I, for one, welcome our new crayfish overlords.
Meh, they're bottom of the barrel crayfish. Most other crayfish species would eat them. The only reason they're taking over in Europe is there aren't many other crayfish species there.
Replicative fading (Score:5, Informative)
Wasn't there supposed to be some sort of replicative fading where the telomeres or some such got shorter over time until the clones were not viable?
Yes : *body* cell lines have such kind of control to avoid cells replicating too much.
But eggs are formed from *germ* cell lines, which are (by Nature's "design" - as its supposed to be the way a specie reproduce) not having any replication limit.
These are not "dolly the sheep"-style clones (a body cell used to form a new clone by transfering the nucleus, and might inherit some of the replication limits of the body cell).
These are parthenogenesis-style (see christian mythology about virgin mary) clones : some how, an non-fertilized egg-cell managed to grow into a full grown individual (usually, in other species, there's some kind of bug in the "meiosis" - the process is supposed to split the normally "diploid" genome into half "haploid". The wikipedia mentions that they are "triploid" - so having triplets instead of chromosome pairs - so it's quite a big bug in the meiosis procedure).
But it is an egg cell (although a chromosomaly abnormal one) that produces the whole individual, so no telomeres problems nor any other cell division limitations.
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How do you know Jesus was male? Did someone see his dick? I don't recall that part of the bible.....
And lo, did Jesus uncoil his serpent of manhood, and those near to him turned away from its majesty.[17]
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There is definitely symbolism and flowery language in the Bible, particularly in the prophetic books of the old testament, as well as in Revelation, however, I am far more interested in this:
1. Your hypothetical quote, given the Bible's propensity for reusing imagery, makes the story of Adam and Eve take a really weird twist.
2. I'm not Jewish, so I don't know all the rules, but the concept of a circumcision involving anything that needs to *uncoil* is terrifying to me. It just seems like it would be prone
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Jesus was Jewish, and was (according the Gospel of Luke) circumcised 8 days after birth, in accordance with tradition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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And lobsters use telomerase to add telomere repeat sequences to their chromosomes after normal cell division. You can make viable clones for millions of generations this way.
Re:Wait so Star Trek was wrong? (Score:5, Funny)
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I suppose this is referencing TNG s2e18 Up The Long Ladder, where a hightech society is in danger of extinction because it's composed entirely of clones which will eventually become nonviable. Acquiring more genetic material (I recall them tricking Riker) would just delay the problem. Even if their society returned to sexual reproduction, they didn't have enough of a gene pool. I mainly remember that episode for the comic relief of the rustic Irish colonists. The two groups having to get along for the benef
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We have Tribbles.
Words of wisdom...
The only thing that I can figure out is that they're born pregnant... which seems to be quite a timesaver.
And, from my observations if seems they're bisexual, reproducing at will. And brother, have they got a lot of will.
All we have to do is quit feeding them. We quit feeding them, they stop breeding!
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