Early reports from pet owners

I was searching around on some of my old CD backups of data, and I found I had saved a copy of this post from the CRUST-L listserver. To this best of my knowledge, this may have been the first introduction of Marmorkrebs to the English-speaking scientific community. Jeff Shields' comment is wonderfully prescient, as was my recognizing that this post was interesting enough to save, something I don't have a habit of doing.

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Subject: [CRUST-L:629] Re: "Marmor"-Crayfish
Date: Fri, 07 Apr 2000 08:20:57 -0400
From: Jeffrey Shields
To: "Kai A. Quante"
CC: crust-l@VIMS.EDU

Here's an interesting one. Please respond to Kai Quante, and not to me.

Thanks, Jeff

At 11:26 AM 4/7/00 +0200, you wrote:

Hello,

I've a complicated question. Since more than two years it is possible to buy a crayfish in Germany which origin is unknown. The crayfish reaches a maximum sice of 12 cm and is usually brown. In hard alkaline water they become a little bit blue like older ones. In Germany it is called Marmor-Krebs without a scientific name :-(

The interesting thing is that there are reports that crayfishes which were kept alone for there whole life had eggs and childs. All reports say that every crayfish ever kept had eggs once or more in their life....

Please help! We are searching for the scientific name since two years.

THANKS in advance for any kind of help!

Kai

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The message above has been edited to remove potentially obsolete email addresses and web links. Kai Quante does still maintain an aquarium page, but I do not read German and have no idea if it is still up-to-date. And I see now that there's even links to a webpage on "Marmor-Krebs," with further links to notes on reproduction dating from 1997.