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Escaped cloned female mutant crayfish take over Belgian cemetery
Escaped self-cloning mutant crayfish created in experimental breeding programmes have invaded a Belgian cemetery. Hundreds of the duplicating crustaceans, which can dig down to up to a metre and are always female, pose a deadly threat to local biodiversity after colonising a historic Antwerp...
of course - it's 2020.....
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Escaped self-cloning mutant crayfish created in experimental breeding programmes have invaded a Belgian cemetery.
Hundreds of the duplicating crustaceans, which can dig down to up to a metre and are always female, pose a deadly threat to local biodiversity after colonising a historic Antwerp graveyard.
“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.
They are similar to the slough crayfish found in Florida but are parthenogenetic, which means they reproduce with themselves and all their children are genetically identical females.
The mutation, which occurred about 25 years ago, means populations can spring up rapidly from just a single Procambarus virginalis.
In 2018 scientists established the global marbled crayfish population was descended from a single female and didn’t need males to reproduce.
The crayfish have taken root in the pools and streams of the Schoonselhof cemetery in Antwerp, which is known as the Flemish city’s Pere Lachaise.
The beasts, which are the only known decapod crustaceans to solo-reproduce, have already been spotted elsewhere in Antwerp and in Leuven, another city in Flanders.
“The marbled crayfish [...] crawls around both in the water and over land at night,” Mr Scheers said. “That’s how they move to other canals and pools.”
The crayfish has spread rapidly through Africa and Europe and has been compared to the tribbles, which are a fictional alien species in Star Trek that reproduces extremely quickly.

Both the crayfish and tumours have “Epigenetic mechanisms”. This helps them adapt to different environments by switching certain genes on or off.
The animal has been reported in countries including Austria, Germany, France, Japan, Madagascar and Israel and is present in four continents, with the pet trade blamed for the population explosion.