Art of invasive species

From Bluesky user charlie comes these art pieces of four invasive species, with Marmorkrebs in the middle:

 

 

The other three invasives are apple snails, round gobies, and European water chestnut plants.

Marmorkrebs at the ready

Spotted on Reddit:

 

 

I always worry if Redditors are okay.

 

External links

 

Weaponized Marmorkrebs! Don't leave home without one.

Fun for people of all ages! Marmorkrebs colouring

I stumbled across a page with a coloring book style blank illustration of Marmorkrebs! While the page says it’s for kids, there’sa a lot of fine detail that makes me think some young ones may find it a little on the high end of the difficulty scale.

 

 

The shape of the claws looks much more like Louisiana red swamp crayfish than Marmorkrebs, though.

Marmorkrebs in silhouette

In case you need a representation of a marbled crayfish to pop into one of your figures, or any other kind of organism, try Phylopic. While I was tooling around there, I found this image of Marmorkrebs by Kamil S. Jaron:

Presumably, a couple of legs are being held under the body. And I wouldn’t trust this page for taxonomic information, as the authority given for Marmorkrebs is incorrect. Not sure how easy it is to fix that.

Update, 9 November 2018: It’s fixed on both counts! Woohoo!

New link for new image is here.

External links

Phylopic

Cover cray

Nice cover accompanying this blog post. It’s covering the Marmorkrebs genome paper that came out back in February, but better late than never! The photo is aces in any case.

External links

Decoding the mutant, all-female, self-cloning crayfish

Conference hashtag #IAA22

I was unable to go to the International Association of Astacology meeting this year, but have been following along on Twitter, using the #IAA22 hashtag. Those following from home have been fortunate to have Maggie Watson sketchnoting many of the presentations, and I can’t resist sharing her Marmorkrebs notes here and here)!

If you go to a conference, tweet about it. More people want to attend than can attend.

The crayfish apocalypse

Of over a hundred news articles, blog posts, and other miscellaneous things I have seen on the Internet about Marmorkrebs since the genome paper came out, this Non Sequiter comic by Wiley may be my favourite of all of them. And that includes articles that quoted me or used my Marmrorkrebs picture.

Click here to read it.

Hat tip to James Murray.

Pic of the moment: 14 December 2015

Exactly five years ago, I posted some word clouds made up of abstracts of Marmorkrebs papers. It’s long past time for an update!

This word cloud was made of the abstracts of Marmorkrebs papers from 2011 to 2015. Perhaps the biggest change from the earlier word clouds is that the genus name Procambarus is now reasonably large, with the specific name virginalis also appearing, albeit a bit smaller than the genus.

And just for fun, here’s an alternate version:

Related posts

Pic of the moment: 14 December 2010

#Marmorkrebs #NoFilter

Here’s a collection of Marmorkrebs pics on popular social media site Instagram. I like scrolling through these pics, because it’s interesting to see the variation in colours or people’s crayfish. But as I’ve written before, make no mistake: if these are Marmorkrebs, their colour is diet and condition dependent. Their offspring won’t necessarily have that colour unless their conditions are similar.

Related posts

The curious case of crustacean colours

Versus

The monster movie fan in me is utterly tickled by these pictures.

This one reminds me of Gamera being swarmed by small legion creatures, in Gamera: Attack of Legion.

From a Craigslist ad.

The colours, man, check out the colours...

These images I found on a Craigslist ad caught me attention as being a bit... brighter than most Marmorkrebs pictures I see.

I think there may be a little Instagram-style filtering going on...

What I’d like the next Syfy movie to be

Yes, in the wake of the viral success of Sharknado, I cannot help but pitch the next Syfy movie...

Volcanic base by Kröyer on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

“Five clawed” crayfish

Check this claw!

A fisherman collected this crayfish in Schoharie Creek, near Delanson, New York and took this quick picture before using this as bait. Here’s his reaction, recorded with his phone:


Being a neuro guy, I wondered if the extra segments have muscle and neurons, or whether they were just “blank” exoskeleton. The word I received was that the extra claw was not moving.

The picture and video made its way to a colleague, Frank Dirrigl, and eventually to me. I have never seen a deformity like on this crayfish before. Anyone ever seen anything like this before? Leave word in the comments!

Additional, 18 July 2013: This deformity is unusual, but not rare. You can get these sorts of outgrowths fairly easily following injury. In particular, Nakatani and colleagues (1998) show pictures that are very reminiscent of the one above. Thanks to Joe Staton, Marina Araújo, and Gerhard Scholtz for these references:

References

Araújo M, dos Santos TC. 2012. New record of malformation in the true crab Ucides cordatus (Linnaeus, 1763) (Crustacea, Decapoda, Ucididae), at Brazilian coast. Revista Nordestina de Zoologia, Recife 6(1): 15-19.

Mantellatto FLM, O'Brien JJ, Alvare F. 2000. The first record of external abnormalities on abdomens of Callinectes ornatus (Portunidae) from Ubatuba Bay, Brazil. Nauplius 8(1): 9-97.

Nakatani, I., Oshida, Y., Kitahara, T. 1998. Induction of extra claws on the chelipeds of a crayfish, Procambarus clarkii. The Biological Bulletin 195: 52-59.

Przibram, H. 1921. Die Bruchdreifachbildung im Tierreich. Wilhelm Roux Archiv für Entwicklungsmechanik der Organismen 48: 205-444.

Shelton, P.M.J., Truby, P.R., Shelton, R.G.J. 1981. Naturally occurring abnormalities (Bruchdreifachbildungen) in the chelae of three species of Crustacea (Decapoda) and a possible explanation. Journal of Embryology and Experimental Morphology 63: 285-304.

Pinheiro MAA , de Toledo TR. 2010. Malformation in the crab Ucides cordatus (Linnaeus, 1763)(Crustacea, Brachyura, Ocypodidae), in São Vicente (SP), Brazil. Revista CEPSUL - Biodiversidade e Conservação Marinha 1(1): 61-65.

Crossposted at NeuroDojo.

The parthenogenesis slideshow

The Science Now blog, part of Science magazine, has a nice slideshow of animals that undergo parthenogenesis. Marmorkrebs appear as entry number five out of eight. The caption reads:

The parthenogenetic form of the North American crayfish Procambarus fallax, marmorkrebs are a popular aquarium pet. Their capacity for virgin birth was first discovered in Germany in 2003, when aquarium owners noticed that crayfish housed alone were laying eggs that developed into healthy adults. Genetic analysis and laboratory experiments confirmed that the animals were reproducing through parthenogenesis. Ecologists worry that their accidental release into the wild could seriously harm native crayfish, because a single individual can start a self-sustaining population, leading some states to prohibit their ownership.

“Some states” is currently a bit of an overestimate, since that number is, as far as I know, one.

Check out the other seven entries here.

I’d read that

Marmorkrebs return to Nature

Marmorkrebs made their official “debut” to the English speaking scientific world in Nature, so I’m pleased that they are back in the pages of that journal, even if only in a small way. An article on poster sessions used a Marmorkrebs poster from last year as an illustration.

The article is available for free at the Nature Jobs website.

Reference

Powell K. 2012. Billboard science. Nature 483: 113-115. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nj7387-113a

Motto

Anyone need a new desktop wallpaper?

Rough translation: “My army of marbled crayfish will be invincible.”

LOLcray

Based on picture here.

Pic of the moment: 3 May 2011

Picture from here.

Pic of the moment: 29 March 2011

Marmoratus rex! But is it a predator or scavenger?

From here.