Stein says in just a decade's time, they've been able to grow from occupying a space the size of Rhode Island to occupying a space the size of Ohio. Marbled crayfish are currently found throughout Europe and Madagascar. Not only would this provide a buffer from inheriting a genetic mutation, but it may also help the species adapt to a host of different environments. Lyko says this likely influences how genes are expressed in each new marbled crayfish. Most animals have only two sets: one from each parent. Researchers were also surprised to find that marbled crayfish had three sets of chromosomes. "If we had more than one animal as a founder, we would have greater genetic differences," Lyko adds. In fact, they found only a few hundred variants in the crayfish's large genome. "The scale of this tree is extremely small," he says. It added to a study published in 2003 that found the species essentially reproduced through cloning, a process called parthenogenesis.Īfter sequencing the genome of about a dozen marbled crayfish, scientists were able to work backwards to find the original female, says study author Frank Lyko, a researcher from the German Cancer Research Center. He and a team of researchers recently sequenced the genome of this new, marbled species and published their find in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution. "That one animal founded the whole species, and now we have billions worldwide," says Wolfgang Stein, a neuroscientist at Illinois State University. Since then, the world has been invaded by that one crayfish's daughters. Unable to care for the rapidly increasing offspring, the original owner took them to pet shops where other hobby aquarium keepers bought them. Then, for reasons unknown, that slough crayfish became a new species called a marbled crayfish ( Procambarus virginalis) after it began reproducing asexually, essentially cloning itself. and taken to an insect fair in 1995 where a hobbyist bought it. A slough crayfish was fished from the Everglades in the U.S.
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