Selling invaders

Myrmecos has a post looking at the online sale of exotic, and invasive, ant species. His take is simple:

This store needs to be shut down NOW.

I don’t know why anyone would have an ant as a “pet,” but regardless... Regardless of what you consider a pet, be responsible.

The #SciFund Challenge launches!

The wait is over.

The final version of Doctor Zen and the Amazon Crayfish Civilization is now ready for viewing at RocketHub! If you have three minutes, you have more than enough time to learn about my project in the #SciFund Challenge!

Why can’t you watch the video here? Because I want you to go to RocketHub, and not only watch mine, but look at the other insanely cool projects that have come in from around the world. If you don’t want to support me, please consider supporting someone else.

The #SciFund Challenge is an experiment in funding science. Over the next six weeks, I will be asking for your help in raising money for a research project. I’ll be talking more about the whys and wherefores in the next few days.

Want to learn more? Or perhaps even... donate?

You should go to RocketHub right now!

Celebrate diversity: Absent fathers might not be missing fathers

That you don’t see males around when a female gives birth or lays eggs doesn’t mean that a male wasn’t involved. Females of many species can store sperm for long periods, sometimes their entire lives. Queen honeybees, for instance, go on a single “nuptial flight”, and the the sperm they gain on that flight is enough for the rest of her life, which can be several years.

A rattlesnake (Crotalus adamanteus) is making the news with this point. A female that had been isolated for five years recently had nineteen little snakes. After having been alone for so long, parthenogenesis seemed a possible candidate to explain the happy occasion.

Not so. Genetic tests showed the offspring had genes from another animal besides momma, so this female had mated at some time in the past. How far back? Not known.

All of this means that determining parthenogenesis is trickier than it first appears.

Crayfish can also store sperm (Albaugh 1973), but how long is the upper limit? I’m not sure. So pet owners, just because the lone crayfish you got a while ago had babies doesn’t mean it’s a Marmorkrebs or is reproducing asexually. It may have just been biding its time.

References

Albaugh DW. 1973. A case of long-term sperm retention by a female crayfish (Decapoda, Astacidae). The Southwestern Naturalist 18: 97-98.

Booth W, Schuett GW. 2011. Molecular genetic evidence for alternative reproductive strategies in North American pitvipers (Serpentes, Viperidae): long-term sperm storage and facultative parthenogenesis. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society: In press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1095-8312.2011.01782.x

Photo by OZinOH on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Coming soon...

Tracking your colony: SAPling

Where was this when I started my Marmorkrebs colony?

A new article in The Journal of Experimental Biology describes a software package called SAPling that is intended to track the pedigree of entire colonies of asexually reproducing animals. You can find the software at: http://genomics.princeton.edu/schoetzlab/software.html.

I’ve downloaded the software, which is written in Java. I have not quite figured out how to run the program yet, though. There’s no standard *.exe file to run. If anyone knows how to get Java *.class files going, I would be most appreciative of any pointers!

Reference

Thomas MA, Schötz E-M. 2011. SAPling: a Scan-Add-Print barcoding database system to label and track asexual organisms. The Journal of Experimental Biology 214(21): 3518-3523. DOI: 10.1242/jeb.059048

Going small without going home

Over at the SciFund Challenge blog, I have a guest post about how the current grant proposal system strongly pressures scientists to ask for lots of money, even if the project doesn’t need it.

Big science is a wonderful thing. But we need new ways to fund small science. There are many projects where a few bucks here and there will grease a lot of wheels. We shouldn’t have to have the same level of difficulty in getting, and spending, small pots of money as the big pools of money.

I will be promoting Marmorkrebs research as part of this crowdfuning challenge in November. It will be fun!

The SciFund Challenge

I’ve been very pleased that non-scientists have been good enough to support Marmorkrebs.org projects in the past with a bit of their time. The contributions of pet owners have been featured in two papers from my lab to date.

In that spirit, I will be participating in the SciFund Challenge! This is an experiment in social networking and crowdfunding. In November and December, participating scientists will try to raise a small amount of money for a research project. This will be conducted in association with Rockethub.

I will have more details as we get closer to the official launch of the project. In the meantime, check out the SciFund blog for more news and explanations for the rationale behind this project.

References

Faulkes Z. 2010. The spread of the parthenogenetic marbled crayfish, Marmorkrebs (Procambarus sp.), in the North American pet trade. Aquatic Invasions 5(4): 447-450. http://dx.doi.org/10.3391/ai.2010.5.4.16

Jimenez SA, Faulkes Z. 2010. Establishment and care of a laboratory colony of parthenogenetic marbled crayfish, Marmorkrebs. Invertebrate Rearing 1(1): 10-18. http://inverts.info/content/establishment-and-care-laboratory-colony-parthenogenetic-marbled-crayfish-marmorkrebs