About 25 years ago, the marbled crayfish did not exist. But a single drastic mutation in a single crayfish produced the marbled crayfish in an instant. Over the past five years, Frank Lyko, a biologist at the German Cancer Research Center, and his colleagues have sequenced the genomes of marbled crayfish, which they say is one of the most remarkable species known to science. The mutation that created the crayfish also made it possible for the creature to clone itself, and now it has spread across much of Europe and made its way onto other continents. In Madagascar, it now numbers in the millions and threatens native crayfish. For nearly 20 years, marbled crayfish have been multiplying like crazy. So owners drove to nearby lakes and dumped that creatures, which established growing populations in the wild. The mutant crayfish have sex cells that contain two copies of each chromosome. Somehow the two sex cells fused and produced a female crayfish embryo with three copies of each chromosome instead of two. But it did not suffer any deformities as a result of all that extra DNA, and instead, the all-female species grew and thrived.
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