13 November 2007

The closest relative of Marmorkrebs?

Digging back through the CRUST-L archive again, to bring forth this helpful post from Keith Crandall, dated 24 May 2006.

Scholtz called this crayfish Procambarus fallax in his wonderful paper in Nature describing the most interesting parthenogenesis phenomenon. I was skeptical with that definition (having worked on the Florida crayfish a bit and seeing a picture of the marbled crayfish - it looked much more like a Procambarus alleni to me) and therefore asked a few different folks in Europe to send me tissue samples from the marbled crayfish. I received samples from to different folks (Austria and Germany), sequenced these samples, and compared them to our extensive database of crayfish sequences. Our analyses clearly support the idea that the marble crayfish is indeed a Procambarus alleni - a species native to central and southern Florida in the US.

That said, in some follow-up emails to Keith, he recommended against calling the parthenogenetic marbled crayfish P. alleni and just calling it Marmorkrebs for now.

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