From a stream in Florida to a pet shop in Germany and on to Japan and Madagascar.
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Mutant crayfish got rid of males, and its clones are taking over the world
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The primary advantage is that 100% of your population is producing offspring.
This allows you to recover faster from population drops. Others have pointed out the primary disadvantage.
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Also (potentially) less energy wasted on mating rituals. I've no idea if crayfish have any.
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You are apparently nowhere near as well read on the topic as you seem to think. Try going back, oh, about 20 years, for the studies. We don't do it because it is difficult, pointless, and ethics committees are a bitch, but the tech. to implant and carry a fetus in the abdominal cavity of a male has been available for ages.
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Speedr hasn't had much interaction with post-pubescent female humans, I get the feeling. :-/
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I don't think that this applies to these crayfish(certainly better if it doesn't); but you can combine the benefits of clonal reproduction with the benefits of frequent genetic reshuffling.
It's one of the big tricks to being a bacterium: asexual cell division allows you to reproduce absurdly fast as long as resources are available; while horizontal gene transfer via plasmids allows for something sort of like 'inheritance' without the inconvenience of having to have the right parents, or parents at all.
I'm not sure how much, if any, horizontal gene transfer is exploited by any larger organisms. There is some, typically undesired and unintended, sloshing around courtesy of viruses; but if that has turned into a plasmid-level strategy anywhere I've never heard about it(but if you have, do tell).
Edit: they don't use it for gene transfer within their own species; but there are some parasitoid wasps that have a pretty damn badass relationship with what straddles the line between 'symbiotic virus' and 'external cell organelle': they have one of a fair number of polydnavirus strains permanently incorporated into their DNA; not active as a virus but reproduced along with the rest of the DNA with every cell division.
In the oviducts of egg-laying females; the polydnavirus is copied out of the more or less inert storage in the genome and packaged up as a functional virus; which is then injected, along with eggs and specialized venom, into the still-living caterpillars that will serve as food and housing for the ravenous larvae when they hatch. The venom, among other things, suppresses host immune response to protect the eggs shortly after they have been injected. The polydnavirus, an effective pathogen of the caterpillar, suppresses its immune system in the longer term and modifies its cellular metabolism a bit to increase the nutritional value of its hemolymph to the wasp larvae. The live viruses are doomed to die with their host; but their actions contribute to the success of the larvae; which all have the virus contained in the DNA of every one of their cells, so the virus effectively gets reproduced as part of wasp reproduction.
Luckily we don't know of any species with a taste for mammals.
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That works both ways, you can call them Eurasian. I'm sure they'd hate that.
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Going rate in the US for a surrogate mother seems to be about $30k plus living expenses for nine months. With the donated egg and IVF and the hospitalization for the pregnancy, it gets to about $200k for a gay couple to have a child.
None of the technology you are talking about exists right now. In the lab we can fertilize mouse eggs with other mouse cells. In the lab we can also clone sheep and so on. But we aren't doing it with humans. Even IVF, which we've been doing for decades, has a very high rate of failures and complications.
You're advocating *for* using technology to get to an all-female society, so I think the standard of proof is on you to deliver. Why is this such an advantage?
For disadvantages: Women tend to be sexually attracted to men. Having something like 80-90% of the population unable to find a suitable sexual partner might be a slight bummer. That's about the worst thing I can think of off hand.
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In the context of this article, I think "crawmoms" would be more correct.
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I think it would be a dangerous move to make society 100% dependent on medical interventions for reproduction. Two human women cannot produce a child on their own without medical help. F-F fertilization is possible, and that's fine if you want to do it, but it's not unassisted. I suspect that if child-bearing could occur only with medical assistance, reproductive rates would drop significantly.
Beyond that, I think it's fair to say that diversity is beneficial for a functioning society. Take any non-trivial trait and remove all the variance, and I think you will come out behind.
I also disagree with the claim that we are moving towards "a female society." I would like to think we are moving towards an egalitarian society, and that involves giving more attention to female perspectives than we have historically, but I don't think it would be accurate to say we have reached that egalitarian midpoint, much less swung the pendulum in women's favor.
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they'd not be able to reproduce, the'd fight themselves to death unless they starved first?
do you even understand how female led cultures work? extreme hierarchy and hen pecking?
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logically you'd just create tanks to act as external wombs, and all females would simply go 'extinct' as they'd only exist as these specialized tanks used to create new life/things
+ saw some stupid comments earlier, this one is obviously a take on popular sci fi, but its literally the most logical extension of humanity if we decided to eliminate a gender
its also the only way society wouldnt destroy itself, or die due to lack of advancement
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It is not necessary to be disrespectful of religion in order to support science. I fail to see how insulting people and their beliefs will help the cause of science. In fact, it leads readers to an easy logical fallacy that studying science makes one a mean, bitter, nasty secularist.
Or to be more succinct, you catch more with honey than vinegar.
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What the species gains in the ability to reproduce sexually, it loses in its inability to diversify genetically through sexual reproduction.
The biggest thing that kills dominant species is disease. When a population of any dominant species becomes concentrated, disease can spread quickly through that population to become a legitimate threat to the species as a whole. Think black plague in Europe during the dark ages, or smallpox in America that literally killed off nearly 90% of the native American population after being brought over from Europe.
The only reason humans survived either of those epidemics is because certain portions of those populations had genes that made them more resistant and allowed them to survive the disease by developing the correct antibodies in time to save the host.
These critters have no such genetic diversity. Because they are all essentially clones, when (not if, when) they run across a disease that the species can't handle, it's going to kill the entire population, not 90 or 99%. 100%, because they are all identical.
It's basically the whole reason sexual reproduction is so dominant across our biosphere, and asexual reproduction only occurs in single celled organisms. Sexual reproduction produces the genetic diversity a population needs to survive disease and adapt to changing environments. Single celled organisms only get by without it because they divide and reproduce so quickly that natural mutations fill the need for diversity and adaptability.
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Ars is not as civilized or enlightened as you think. People will be people, whether they believe in religion or in science. One might be objectively more correct, but neither will make people any *better*.
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Demolition
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Well, without men around, who is going to open all the stubborn pickle jars?
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Sigh no. Religions are belief-systems, which started out as tools for social cohesion, and remain (much less important) tools for social cohesion. As with most things, they're not good or bad, they just are. And people need belief systems because that's part of (most) people's psyche, because the concept that we're slightly better organized lumps of protein that are here for a blink of an eye and don't really mean much, is generally not conducive to mental health.
Plus, look at ones like Buddhism or Hinduism or Zoroastrianism. Perfectly (mostly) harmless.
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Don't forget Astacus astacus, the species used in traditional French and European cuisine.
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It's been done already, see the results...Could we send it to Mars
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I think it is safe to assume that they rarely survive the boil though.
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I don't think it needed a comparison with other countries or how Ukrainians feel about it, it's just that the standard English language usage for this country is Ukraine, not the Ukraine. The only time you would use "the" is to refer to a specific context, like in the Ukraine of Leonid Brezhnev, or the Ukraine of 1800.
By the way, about the USA and America, a recent trend developed in French: Instead of calling their inhabitants Americans ("Américains"), which is too vague in some context but mostly usurps the right of other American countries, they're called USians ("États-Uniens"), a word first used in Quebec in the 1930s. The first time I heard it was on French national radio about 30 years ago, and everybody immediately understood why it was used and so much more appropriate and PC for other American countries. A small innocent jab at American pride and hegemony, or a willful stab for the more revengeful and bitter anti-Americans...
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What I really don't understand after reading this article: who the f*** keeps a crayfish as a pet? I have seen lots of aquariums in people's home and if I ever saw a crayfish in one I would get out ASAP and call the police to avoid being trapped in that person's dungeon.
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For your first point: if you read any older geography books, printed in English, they will always refer to "the Ukraine", just like you today refer to "the Netherlands". It is a bit weird to use it today but it's not any more wrong than referring to Cote d'Ivoire as Ivory Coast, which people also still do.
For your second point: I am a French speaking American citizen who has lived most of my life in French-speaking European countries and no one ever normally refers to US citizens as "Etats-Uniens" although it is a word that people would recognize. I have filled out umpteen forms of my nationality as "American" and never, ever, had anyone mention it as "hey u need 2 be more specific about wat cuntry ur from". It's only for pedantic pricks that it matters, like "where are you from" >> "EARTH Lolllllll u dumb or wat".
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"This rapid spread may be a problem for ecologists that are trying to preserve native species,"
Most likely they just need to wait a bit. Genetically identical organisms normally get extinguished by a disease sooner or later. Bananas come to mind.
Most likely they just need to wait a bit. Genetically identical organisms normally get extinguished by a disease sooner or later. Bananas come to mind.
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Note all of those are plural. Ukraine is the only non-plural country I can think of that still has the article in English. Note however that this is different in other languages. In German for instance Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine and several other countries are both singular and have a definite article (fun fact: Switzerland is apparently a feminine country)
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Placental Mammals are part Herpes, that is how we can have a placenta. At some point a common ancestor of platapuses and placental mammals had a nasty herpes infection and gave birth to an animal that was part herpes and could give live birth. It also why we can not become immune to herpes.
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All of them are. Die Schweiz die Ukraine die Türkei And last but not least die USA. Interesting actually never thought of it. We also have male countries "der Kongo"
We seem to have removed "Das" from the countries with normal endings. Land( Country) Or reich( area?) both of them neutral. I.e. Frankreich England ( Land of the angels) etc.
Although not even that is true since Polen doesn't have an article. So what can I say. German language is weird.
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You need a couple of individual to start a local community through sexual reproduction, whereas you only need a single individual for the cloned version, so it definitely has a competitive advantage with respect to accidental introduction.
That said, once the population has reached a certain size, there is no particular advantage (poluation growth becomes limited by resource availability, not just ability to reproduce willy nilly). And, as other posters have noted, clone based populations are particularly suceptible to be wiped out by deseases, predators, change of environmental conditions, etc., since they won't be able to adapt to new threats (which, in the case of desease and pretators, can on the contrary adapt to them).
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As an American who has done a lot of traveling in South America I find it is rather arrogant to call myself an American there as well. The problem being that there isn’t really a better term that makes sense. In Spanish it is estadounidense. (Literally United Statesean but that doesn’t make sense in English.)
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Little typo throughout the article: Marmorkrebs (Marmor = marble, Krebs = crayfish).
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