Could This Be A New All-female Crayfish Species?

An all - distaff mega - population of jumbo crayfish clones wasdiscoveredin the German marine museum deal back in 1995 . call marbled ecrevisse or Marmorkrebs , they are very popular pets . However , when they escaped or were released into the wild , they rapidly became a threat to small , native crayfish in freshwater ecosystem in Central Europe and Madagascar .

While marble crayfish reproduce asexually –   that is , without fertilisation by males – they are actually   descendent of the sexually - reproducing slough crayfish ( Procambarus fallax ) of Florida and Georgia . Marmorkrebs , however , have three chromosome instead of the normal two – a condition screw as triploidy . Whether or not they ’re a separate mintage is unclear . After all , every marbled crayfish is genetically identical , and they all share a exclusive origin .

Now , based on transversal - breeding experiments and pedigree depth psychology ,   Günter Vogt   and fellow worker at theUniversity of Heidelbergargue that marble crayfish are , in fact , their own mintage and reproductively isolated fromProcambarus fallax . They aim calling this new autonomous nonsexual speciesProcambarus virginalis , the virtuous form of the genusProcambarus . Their finding are uncommitted onbioRxiv .

In experiments , the two species of crawfish copulated pronto , but slough crayfish male person could n’t fertilize marbled crayfish eggs . That indicates their reproductive barrier is set at the cellular   storey , and not the behavioural one . Furthermore , marbled crayfish show significant departure from their female parent species   –   both genetically and epigenetically ( which bear on to changes in DNA expression without a alteration in   the underlying desoxyribonucleic acid sequence ) . These epigenetic differences in all probability answer for for the superior size and fruitfulness of marbled crayfish . At 250 days after hatching , when females of both species touch sexual adulthood , marble crayfish weigh almost twice as much as slough crayfish female on median .

raw species typically arise gradually over long stop of time , Scienceexplains , but inherited analyses indicate that speciation in this case was near instant – something that bechance in plants but rarely in creature . It ’s possible that marbled crayfish came about through a estrus or stale shock during the sensitive phase angle of testis development in a single jailed slough crayfish female , possibly during transportation .