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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday February 06 2018, @03:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the you-say-crayfish-I-say-crawfish dept.

No one knows exactly when the clones first appeared, but humans only became aware of them in the early 2000s.

It was a German aquarium owner who first brought it to scientists' attention. In 1995, he had acquired a bag of "Texas crayfish" from an American pet trader, only to find his tank inexplicably filling up with the creatures. They were all, it turns out, clones. Sometime, somewhere, the biological rule that making baby crayfish required a mama crayfish and papa crayfish was no longer inviolate. The eggs of the hobbyist's all-female crayfish did not need to be fertilized. They simply grew into copies of their "mother"—in a process known as parthenogenesis.

Crayfish specialists were astonished. No one had seen anything like it. But the proof was before their eyes and in 2003, scientists dubbed the creatures marbled crayfish, or Marmorkreb in German.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/attack-of-the-crayfish-clones/552236/


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 07 2018, @01:14PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 07 2018, @01:14PM (#634388)

    If they taste bad to normal humans, we just need to develop a line of self-cloning humans genetically engineered to find them tasty.