From a stream in Florida to a pet shop in Germany and on to Japan and Madagascar.
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Read the whole story
Mutant crayfish got rid of males, and its clones are taking over the world
- Thread starter JournalBot
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Playing Subnautica. This would come in useful.
Is this edible? Would it make a viable farmed food source? Could we send it to Mars
?
Is this edible? Would it make a viable farmed food source? Could we send it to Mars
?
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ApplePaladin
Ars Praefectus
This will be a handy response for all of the "we've never observed evolution in human lifetimes" trolls.
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I, for one, welcome our new pinchy overlords....
Amazing range, although how mich of a threat does this pose, simply by being able to breed endlessly? Also, I'm really curious why we don't see more large animals like this. Sure, there's likely long term downsides, but is it just that thry can spread with globalisation and not wind up in a tiny area and essentially overcompete to death?
Amazing range, although how mich of a threat does this pose, simply by being able to breed endlessly? Also, I'm really curious why we don't see more large animals like this. Sure, there's likely long term downsides, but is it just that thry can spread with globalisation and not wind up in a tiny area and essentially overcompete to death?
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Playing Subnautica. This would come in useful.
Is this edible? Would it make a viable farmed food source? Could we send it to Mars
NOOO bad idea Terra Formars says why.
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Show them this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plVk4NVIUh8
"The Evolution of Bacteria on a “Mega-Plate” Petri Dish (Kishony Lab)"
Harvard Medical School
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It's a virgin birth. They might end up worshiping the things.
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As the article said this is both fascinating and terrifying depending on which scientific or environmental lens you view it through.
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Not really. For starters, they're immune to evidence and facts. Secondly, for every scientific explanation given, they can come up with a myriad of excuses to deny scientific reality. Even when the excuses suck or pile up to improbable odds, they are content with their excuses.
... don't forget there is the super awesome E. coli experiment on hand if learning is the goal.
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I wonder if this doesn't present the one valid use case of an infectious biological control agent. A virus that is highly targeted to an essentially monoculture population that would effectively wipe it out almost instantly.
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Playing Subnautica. This would come in useful.
Is this edible? Would it make a viable farmed food source? Could we send it to Mars
According to Nature it's tasty enough that people in Madagascar are deliberately introducing them to rice paddies, from which they inevitably spread.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-018-0467-9
But having them in a tank would update the cyberpunk staples of catfish and tilapia
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Lack of genetic diversity starts to become an issue when diseases crop up. If I recall, Tasmanian Devils have such a similar makeup that cancer can spread from one to another without triggering an immune response.
Given the mention of surplus chromosomes in crayfish, I wonder if an epigenetic influence on expression could create enough of a generational difference that one bad disease doesn't wipe them all out.
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I grew up in Louisiana and my first thought was, how do they taste?
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For example, see bananas, which are also a population made entirely of clones. All it takes is one good disease to take hold and they're all wiped out. It's happened before, and it'll likely happen again.
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1) Please don't buy these as pets. There is too much danger of them being "set free" and becoming invasives. As far as I know the only US states to ban them so far are Missouri and Tennessee, but it's best to consider them off-limits.
2) Even if you want them as pets, they will destroy nearly any aquatic plant in the tank and the adults are also territorial/cannibalistic.
3) As far as human food, most Procambarus sp. are "dwarf" crayfish and not very desirable. P. clarkii, the Red Swamp Crayfish, is about the only good eatin' and tend to be larger.
2) Even if you want them as pets, they will destroy nearly any aquatic plant in the tank and the adults are also territorial/cannibalistic.
3) As far as human food, most Procambarus sp. are "dwarf" crayfish and not very desirable. P. clarkii, the Red Swamp Crayfish, is about the only good eatin' and tend to be larger.
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Hopefully, the same thing happens to this species as does to virtually all sexless species- something evolves (rapidly) to eat them, and they promptly go extinct, because they have no genetic variation to allow survival long enough to adapt.
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Does the cloning actually provide any competitive advantage over non-clone crayfish, or did it just make it easier for them to escape?
Would they actually out-compete native US crayfish?
Would they actually out-compete native US crayfish?
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Man, your post history is just a litany of useless and flame-baity garbage, isn't it? I think I'm gonna dump your ass on the ignore list and forget you ever existed.
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I was trying to find the low / high temperature range for this crayfish. I didn't find it. Far as I know this species has not established it self in Iceland but has been present in aquarium trade for some time now and it must have escaped in some cases or let loose into rivers in Iceland.
But winters in Iceland are long and cold and that might just kill any crayfish in the wild right off after the summer (that are also not that warm either).
But winters in Iceland are long and cold and that might just kill any crayfish in the wild right off after the summer (that are also not that warm either).
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The NYT article I read went into this a little bit:
Asexual breeding is a powerful short term strategy because it allows a critter to reproduce more efficiently, as we can see by how quickly this goober has spread.
But it's a crappy long term strategy because all these crayfish are almost genetically identical with limited ability to develop and re-combine new adaptations due to ditching sex. It's a monoculture, vulnerable to the first threat that penetrates the defenses it currently has.
We don't see it often because it's a great way to get plagued into extinction.
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I can vouch for this. I use to keep native species in some of my tanks, partly out of fun and partly because they're hell on snails-- snails help restrain algae, but snail reproduction puts rabbits and rats to shame. Crayfish love to dig and manipulate their environment and will disrupt a tank to their satisfaction, digging holes under rocks, exposing undergravel filters, eating plants, and taking opportunistic pot-shots at any fish that aren't wary.
I'm surprised that any pet store actually sells crayfish for aquarium fauna. Most people likely don't know what they're getting.
Mmm... red crayfish. Them's good eatin'.
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I'm sure that you relish the extinction of now-minor indigenous languages with equal enthusiasm...?
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Two quotes from the article:
“The species seems to have three sets of chromosomes instead of the usual two.”
“The new genome sequence confirms that this was the case, as marmokrebs carries two sets of nearly identical chromosomes, along with a third that's more distantly related. (Since crayfish apparently have a lot of chromosomes to begin with, this means that these animals carry around 276 individual chromosomes).”
I don’t understand what this is saying. How do the 276 chromosomes come into it?
“The species seems to have three sets of chromosomes instead of the usual two.”
“The new genome sequence confirms that this was the case, as marmokrebs carries two sets of nearly identical chromosomes, along with a third that's more distantly related. (Since crayfish apparently have a lot of chromosomes to begin with, this means that these animals carry around 276 individual chromosomes).”
I don’t understand what this is saying. How do the 276 chromosomes come into it?
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Stop feeding the troll. Just check through this person's post history and you'll see the pattern emerge rather handily. Ageist, sexist, and not especially bright. Ignore and move on.
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If you're a guy, you should try out that hypothesis on yourself and let us know the results.
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