Escaped cloned female mutant crayfish take over Belgian cemetery
October 24, 2020 4:37 AM   Subscribe

Marbled crayfish can reproduce asexually and all their children are genetically identical females. "It's impossible to round up all of them. It's like trying to empty the ocean with a thimble," said Kevin Scheers, of the Flemish Institute for Nature and Woodland Research.

Marbled crayfish, which travel across land and water at night and eat whatever they can, do not occur in nature and are banned by the European Union.

Instead, the freshwater beasts, which are about 10cm big and voracious, are thought to have been bred by unscrupulous German pet traders in the 1990s.
posted by The Underpants Monster (73 comments total) 33 users marked this as a favorite
 
2020 Bingo is weird.
posted by prismatic7 at 5:04 AM on October 24, 2020 [43 favorites]


The EU banned possession and release of the uncanny crayfish in 2014 but it is impossible to trace the owners because all the crayfish are genetically exactly the same.

I realize this is a serious problem, but lol.
posted by Literaryhero at 5:32 AM on October 24, 2020 [33 favorites]


The Underpants Monster

I imagine they would be that if they got in, yes.
posted by inflatablekiwi at 5:38 AM on October 24, 2020 [7 favorites]


So, can they be harvested and eaten like regular crayfish?
posted by shoesietart at 5:41 AM on October 24, 2020 [7 favorites]


about 10cm big

Strangest damn things. They're man made. Little damn things. Smaller than my fist. But they're new!
posted by flabdablet at 6:03 AM on October 24, 2020 [6 favorites]


"It's impossible to round up all of them. It's like trying to empty the ocean with a thimble," said Kevin Scheers, of the Flemish Institute for Nature and Woodland Research.

But have they tried seasoning and boiling the ocean with some andouille sausage and corn? I think the wrong simile is being used here.
posted by Ouverture at 6:04 AM on October 24, 2020 [28 favorites]


So, can they be harvested and eaten like regular crayfish?

Belgium is pretty good for frites, so there's possibilities for quality fish 'n' chips here (finished off by some fine chocolate and a Trappist beer or three).
posted by Wordshore at 6:14 AM on October 24, 2020 [8 favorites]


Guess we can't call 'em crawdads anymore.
posted by JanetLand at 6:15 AM on October 24, 2020 [60 favorites]


It is particularly prevalent in Madagascar where its rapid spread in less than a decade is because of its popularity as a cheap source of protein.

I'm a little surprised that with zero genetic diversity it hasn't been wiped out by a pathogen.
posted by a robot made out of meat at 6:54 AM on October 24, 2020 [12 favorites]


a robot made out of meat, parthenogenesis isn't the default for reproduction, but there are species that are just parthenogenic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenogenesis
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 7:00 AM on October 24, 2020 [1 favorite]


Send in the Cajun Navy. “Aaaaiiiiiiieeeeeeat!”
posted by garisimo at 7:35 AM on October 24, 2020 [11 favorites]


I went to a very good crayfish boil in London a while ago which was mostly in aid of clearing the local waterways of an invasive species of crayfish (North Americal signal crayfish), which has been devastating our native population of white-clawed crayfish. It was very good, my friends and I kept count and cleared away a good 150 of them.

I think I'm prepared to do my part on behalf of Belgium.
posted by fight or flight at 7:50 AM on October 24, 2020 [30 favorites]


I would watch a series where Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles hunted down Escaped Cloned Female Mutant Crayfish.
posted by Gorgik at 8:10 AM on October 24, 2020 [4 favorites]


I saw an escaped cloned female mutant crayfish the other day. Horrible creatures, I avoid them when I can.
posted by Foosnark at 8:29 AM on October 24, 2020 [5 favorites]


I'm a little surprised that with zero genetic diversity it hasn't been wiped out by a pathogen.

I think on a longer timetable this is inevitable, but species like this can still do well for a million years or whatever. It does make them great at colonizing. Underwood’s Spectacled Tegu and the Flowepot Blind Snake are two that have colonized a lot of the Caribbean.
posted by snofoam at 8:44 AM on October 24, 2020 [3 favorites]


I'm a little surprised that with zero genetic diversity it hasn't been wiped out by a pathogen.

see also: every commercial crop in the US. e.g. corn.
posted by j_curiouser at 8:50 AM on October 24, 2020 [3 favorites]


Beats grey goo, I guess?
posted by Meatbomb at 8:58 AM on October 24, 2020 [3 favorites]


Isn't this something where school kids getting a bounty on each caught crayfish can make a fast and efficient difference? It would be a fun way to get them away from their tablets. + crayfish parties for all, obvs.

Thinking of how many species we humans have driven to extinction, it's hard to believe the Belgians can't eat up those crayfish.
posted by mumimor at 9:16 AM on October 24, 2020 [2 favorites]


I was expecting this to be a scifi short story posted by brainwane.
posted by aniola at 9:25 AM on October 24, 2020 [29 favorites]


Nature... ah... finds a way
posted by Saxon Kane at 9:30 AM on October 24, 2020 [6 favorites]


But have they tried seasoning and boiling the ocean

Yes. This is currently be attempted.
posted by straight at 10:03 AM on October 24, 2020 [36 favorites]


mumimor: I was trying to find a source for the story about a similar bounty on Cobras and ran into this rather apropos quote from Mark Twain: "Once in Hartford the flies were so numerous for a time, and so troublesome, that Mrs. Clemens conceived the idea of paying George a bounty on all the flies he might kill. The children saw an opportunity here for the acquisition of sudden wealth. ... Any Government could have told her that the best way to increase wolves in America, rabbits in Australia, and snakes in India, is to pay a bounty on their scalps. Then every patriot goes to raising them."

Looking at the Wiki for the species, they're triploid (three copies of each chromosome). Which I find interesting, because creating triploid fish is one of the techniques people have been trying to use in Atlantic Salmon for commercial aquaculture, as the resulting all-female triploid fish are all sterile. Obviously that hasn't happened here, but it'd be interesting to know if someone was trying to introduce triploidy in these crawfish with the idea of creating a non-reproducing population, or if it was just a chance thing that someone noticed and exploited.
posted by Grimgrin at 10:04 AM on October 24, 2020 [9 favorites]


Perfect title
posted by Going To Maine at 10:10 AM on October 24, 2020


This is the best headline since "Nazi buddha from space might be fake".
posted by J.K. Seazer at 10:11 AM on October 24, 2020 [8 favorites]


I'd just caught up on the Fanfare threads for Lovecraft Country and popped over to the frontpage to see what's new today. I had a weird moment reading this thread title and my brain going, "no, that can't be right; there's some weird bleed-through happening."
posted by Fiberoptic Zebroid and The Hypnagogic Jerks at 10:22 AM on October 24, 2020 [11 favorites]


Psst. Hey.

Yeah you.

C'mere.

*opens coat to display wares*

Wanna buy some untraceable crayfish?
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 10:36 AM on October 24, 2020 [15 favorites]


Isn't this something where school kids getting a bounty on each caught crayfish can make a fast and efficient difference?

It can, but it can also have other effects.
posted by ArgentCorvid at 10:49 AM on October 24, 2020 [8 favorites]


Goodness. There are so many things you never knew if you grew up in a trusting and law-abiding society.

I still feel there must be a profit and a party to be had from these crawfish.
posted by mumimor at 11:28 AM on October 24, 2020 [1 favorite]


I still feel there must be a profit and a party to be had from these crawfish.

Old Bay arbitrage, perhaps?
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 11:37 AM on October 24, 2020 [5 favorites]


And to make tracking matters worse, they only spend in cryptocurrency.
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 11:48 AM on October 24, 2020 [9 favorites]


I'm paying stupid money to keep my Swedish wife in crayfish and the Belgians are complaining?!
posted by Iteki at 12:00 PM on October 24, 2020 [4 favorites]


I wouldn’t want to eat the ones that had been burrowing in a graveyard.
posted by clew at 12:06 PM on October 24, 2020 [7 favorites]


I wouldn’t want to eat the ones that had been burrowing in a graveyard.

I don't think you should do too much research into shellfish in general. Or eels. Forget about eels. Go vegan.
posted by mumimor at 12:13 PM on October 24, 2020 [13 favorites]


À bientôt, ma petite; I’m off to the graveyard to catch dinner...”
posted by The Underpants Monster at 12:20 PM on October 24, 2020 [7 favorites]


And to make tracking matters worse, they only spend in cryptocurrency.

Looking for venture capitalists to invest in my new crayptocurrency: craycoin.
posted by otherchaz at 12:29 PM on October 24, 2020 [6 favorites]


I, for one, welcome our new marbled crustacean overladies.
posted by otherchaz at 12:50 PM on October 24, 2020 [14 favorites]


It isn’t the carrion I’m unhappiest about, it’s the lead caskets and the embalming fluid.

Now imagining a casket full of eels, toothy ones, very Hallowe’en, thank you.
posted by clew at 12:58 PM on October 24, 2020 [4 favorites]


Take me down little Susie, take me down
I know you think you're the queen of the underground
And you can send me drawn butter every morning
Send me drawn butter by the mail
Send me drawn butter to my wedding
And I won't forget to pick crayfish from your grave
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 12:59 PM on October 24, 2020 [18 favorites]


I went to a very good crayfish boil in London a while ago which was mostly in aid of clearing the local waterways of an invasive species of crayfish (North Americal signal crayfish), which has been devastating our native population of white-clawed crayfish. It was very good, my friends and I kept count and cleared away a good 150 of them.

I remember watching an episode of countryfile where they explained how to repurpose a BMX rim into a crayfish trap so you could fish crayfish in the canals to help out with invasion control. I thought it was peak West-Midlands.

(Also having spent a lot of time on canal towpaths there is no way in hell that I'd ever eat anything that came out of those canals.)
posted by srboisvert at 1:40 PM on October 24, 2020 [3 favorites]


"I'm dosing a caterpillar"

-Walter Bishop.
posted by clavdivs at 1:44 PM on October 24, 2020 [2 favorites]


Most of the comments in this thread are some variant of "possibly edible therefore lol".

Crayfish are weird, but humans are much weirder.
posted by splitpeasoup at 1:46 PM on October 24, 2020 [4 favorites]


Harcourt Fenton Mudd!
posted by clavdivs at 1:53 PM on October 24, 2020 [3 favorites]


Most of the comments in this thread are some variant of "possibly edible therefore lol".

Humans: good at creating problems and then eating our way out of them.
posted by fight or flight at 3:03 PM on October 24, 2020 [11 favorites]


"Escaped female mutant crayfish" can be sung to the TMNT theme song. Crayfish power!
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 3:58 PM on October 24, 2020 [6 favorites]


Please fund my grant proposal for teaching murder hornets to attack mutant crayfish, and vice versa.
posted by LarryC at 4:15 PM on October 24, 2020 [10 favorites]


Humans: good at creating problems and then eating our way out of them.

But not nearly as good at that as xenomorphs.
posted by notoriety public at 4:17 PM on October 24, 2020 [4 favorites]


I went to a very good crayfish boil in London a while ago which was mostly in aid of clearing the local waterways of an invasive species of crayfish (North Americal signal crayfish), which has been devastating our native population of white-clawed crayfish. It was very good, my friends and I kept count and cleared away a good 150 of them.

So, on the one hand, getting people to see a species as a food source is a fantastic way to depopulate that species.

On the other hand, eating bottom-feeders from urbanized waterways seems like a questionable decision.
posted by Dip Flash at 4:32 PM on October 24, 2020 [7 favorites]


Presumably a pathogen will get them eventually but that might be ten thousand years.
posted by interogative mood at 4:33 PM on October 24, 2020


> Please fund my grant proposal for teaching murder hornets to attack mutant crayfish, and vice versa.
Do the next steps of this plan involve Chinese needle snakes and a fabulous type of ophidian-munching gorillas?
posted by Fiberoptic Zebroid and The Hypnagogic Jerks at 4:59 PM on October 24, 2020 [5 favorites]


I'm a little surprised that with zero genetic diversity it hasn't been wiped out by a pathogen.

Or contageous ("clonally transmissible") cancer
posted by krisjohn at 5:14 PM on October 24, 2020 [1 favorite]


Previously.

Apparently they're triploid instead of the usual diploid. The fact that they're marbled reminds me of calico cats where different patches of color correspond to different X chromosomes being inactivated, so maybe something similar is going on with these crayfish. And it could imply that the origin wasn't three identical sets of chromosomes, but more likely a normal fertilization of an egg with two identical sets of chromosomes, or even double fertilization of an egg which would give them three different sets of chromosomes.

If one entire set of chromosomes is inactivated in every cell, cellular machinery might work very much as it does in normal crayfish and they wouldn't get like overdoses of gene products, and if that inactivation is more or less random at a cellular or even a tissue level, that might give them a kind of pseudo genetic diversity which would help them resist pathogens.
posted by jamjam at 5:17 PM on October 24, 2020 [6 favorites]


...the passenger pigeon project pod in Petoskey is making progress in plumpness.
posted by clavdivs at 5:20 PM on October 24, 2020


Crawdad nemesis
Parthenogenesis
Everybody's hungry when the bugs come home
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 5:49 PM on October 24, 2020 [19 favorites]


Crayfish Clones Conquer Cemetery
Clerics Curse Crustaceans As Caterers Converge
posted by InfidelZombie at 6:05 PM on October 24, 2020 [7 favorites]


This is turning into a Can I eat this? thread.
posted by waving at 8:49 PM on October 24, 2020 [6 favorites]


And to make tracking matters worse, they only spend in cryptocurrency.

Mining can be difficult, but there's a lot of them so it's not tomb much trouble.
posted by otherchaz at 9:29 PM on October 24, 2020 [2 favorites]


Metafilter: possibly edible therefore lol
posted by Hairy Lobster at 10:02 PM on October 24, 2020 [2 favorites]


So after we finishing laughing, how serious a threat might this become to biodiversity?
posted by blue shadows at 11:45 PM on October 24, 2020 [2 favorites]


Do the next steps of this plan involve Chinese needle snakes and a fabulous type of ophidian-munching gorillas?

Unfortunately, this plan falls down because due to global warming, it no longer gets cold enough in winter to kill the gorillas, and before you know it Belgium is hip-deep in gorillas. Is that what you want? Because that's what'll happen.
posted by Fuchsoid at 12:05 AM on October 25, 2020 [4 favorites]


This actually reminded me of the of the giant red king crabs deliberately introduced in the 1960s by Soviet scientists and currently invading the Norwegian seas. Up to 1 metre across *including legs) but apparently delicious.

We can only pray that the two populations never meet.

New crustacean overlords etc....
posted by Fuchsoid at 12:17 AM on October 25, 2020 [1 favorite]


Marbled crayfish, which travel across land and water at night and eat whatever they can, do not occur in nature and are banned by the European Union.

We can expect them to all come scuttling through the Channel Tunnel then, while Boris Johnson blames Emmanuel Macron.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 1:10 AM on October 25, 2020 [3 favorites]


So after we finishing laughing, how serious a threat might this become to biodiversity?

They were found in Tuscany back in 2008, and their expansion has been studied, often in competition with another invasive crayfish, the Louisiana procambarus clarkii; both species are on the EU-wide list of 49 damaging invasive species (among about 12,000 of identified allochthonous species). In the decade they’ve been in Madagascar, they’ve greatly expanded their grounds.

It definitely takes a toll on local biodiversity, and is to be counted as a contributing factor of the current sixth mass extinction, for sure. It’s not the first time that’s happened, but, on a par with global heating, the speed and scale of species upheaval is unprecedented, and definitely tracks with current human habits.

When climate activists speak about system change, this is part of what they are referring to. (That said, the crayfish are indeed delicious...)
posted by progosk at 1:18 AM on October 25, 2020 [5 favorites]


I’m worried they don’t have enough Crystal in Belgium to appropriately deal with this problem.
posted by thivaia at 3:24 AM on October 25, 2020 [2 favorites]


Escaped cloned female mutant crayfish take over Belgian cemetery

Anybody else try to sing this to the tune of the TMNT cartoon theme?
posted by panama joe at 4:18 AM on October 25, 2020 [3 favorites]


often in competition with another invasive crayfish, the Louisiana procambarus clarkii

Just FYI, that Louisiana one came to China as an invasive species in the 50s / 60s, and is now a much loved feature of Chinese cuisine. Common item in any fish market here.
posted by Meatbomb at 4:56 AM on October 25, 2020 [2 favorites]


Anybody else try to sing this to the tune of the TMNT cartoon theme?

I'll have you know I'd already thought of this but hadn't gotten around to commenting it yet

escaped female mutant crayfish
escaped female mutant crayfish
escaped female mutant crayfish
critters on a casket
crayfish power
posted by Huffy Puffy at 7:28 AM on October 25, 2020 [5 favorites]


escaped female mutant crayfish
escaped female mutant crayfish
escaped female mutant crayfish
critters on a casket
crayfish power


I'm surprised to see that the 80s UK Messthetics/Bedroom Tapes /Post-Post-punk music scene never produced a band called Duplicating Crustaceans.
posted by ryanshepard at 8:34 AM on October 25, 2020


... giant red king crabs deliberately introduced in the 1960s by Soviet scientists and currently invading the Norwegian seas. Up to 1 metre across *including legs) but apparently delicious.

Can confirm, they are! We went to a place near the Russian border where they take you out on a zodiac boat in the freezing water and a diver in a wetsuit goes down to get a crab. Then they take you back and cook it for you. It was a lot for two people but we did it.

I asked, “so you have the crabs in a cage down there don’t you?” He happily confessed that they did. There are lots of crabs, he said, but you can’t be sure of finding one of the right size every time.
posted by sjswitzer at 9:50 AM on October 25, 2020 [6 favorites]


Aren't the red king crabs one of the main targets on the "Deadliest Catch" TV show?

[and seemingly less deadly than the less-expensive winter-harvested Opilio/"snow" crabs, TO DERAIL FURTHER]
posted by Huffy Puffy at 10:02 AM on October 25, 2020 [1 favorite]


I'm surprised to see that the 80s UK Messthetics/Bedroom Tapes /Post-Post-punk music scene never produced a band called Duplicating Crustaceans.

There is a Dutch metal band called Crustacean; you can buy their album "Greed, Tyranny & Sodomy" on Amazon. Whether they duplicate is not known.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 10:56 AM on October 25, 2020


We went to a place near the Russian border where they take you out on a zodiac boat in the freezing water and a diver in a wetsuit goes down to get a crab. Then they take you back and cook it for you.

At this one kitchen where I worked, whenever someone would order the crabmeat sub, we’d sing while we made it:

Under the C,
(Doo doo doot doot doo doo doo doo)
Is an R, an A and a B!
(Doo doo doot doot doo doo doo doo)

One time we sent one out with eyestalks made of long toothpicks and black olives, but nobody else thought it was funny so we never did it again.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 7:51 PM on October 25, 2020 [3 favorites]


This is cray. It’s cray-cray. It’s cray-cray-cray-cray
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 4:49 AM on October 26, 2020 [3 favorites]


that Louisiana one came to China as an invasive species in the 50s / 60s

Similar to the situation in Africa in the 70's. I looked, but can't find the article about it becoming an important part of local cuisine (even as it damages local biodiversity, by being extraordinarily good predators of fish eggs and fingerlings).
posted by porpoise at 6:09 PM on October 27, 2020 [2 favorites]


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