It Seems Too Fantastical To Be True,

if you buy a marbled crayfish it will be a female,

photograph Wikimedia Commons, it will lay eggs and keep them until they hatch and they will all be female, and with out any males be able to reproduce making viable offspring! how? Dr. Lyko and his team were the first to sequence the genome of the marbled crayfish. They learned that it evolved from a species called the slough crayfish, Procambarus fallax, which can only be found in the tributaries of the Satilla River in Florida and Georgia. The first specimen resulted from the mating of two of these slough crayfish, one of which had a mutated sex cell. It had two copies of each chromosome, and somehow the two sex cells fused and produced a female crayfish embryo with three copies of each chromosome instead of the normal two,

scientists aren’t sure how all the extra DNA didn’t cause any deformities in the resulting mutant crayfish, but she did get the ability to reproduce asexually and pass on identical copies of her three sets of chromosomes to her offspring, which were essentially clones, it was only in 2003 that scientists confirmed the marmokrebs’ ability to effectively clone themselves, and by that time, the crustacean was no longer just an aquarium animal, it had already started its quest for world domination, it is easy to understand how marbled crayfish wound up in lakes around Germany and then all over Europe. Hobbyists who started out with just a couple of specimens, quickly found themselves taking care of hundreds of them, and many simply dumped them in nearby bodies of water. It turned out that apart from its amazing cloning ability, the marmokreb was extremely adaptable, being able to thrive in the wild, Frank Lyko, a biologist at the German Cancer Research Center, told the New York Times that in certain lakes in Germany, marbled crayfish are so numerous that, on any given night, he and a few colleagues can catch over a hundred specimens with their bare hands, “It’s extremely impressive,” said Dr. Lyko. “Three of us once caught 150 animals within one hour, just with our hands.” what an amazing creature, and it is spreading with feral populations of marbled crayfish being reported across Europe, in countries like Hungary, Czech Republic, Croatia and Ukraine, hopefully it will not colonise here, but it is not looking good for native crayfish species, almost anywhere in the world.