Escaped Cloned Female Mutant Crayfish Take Over Belgian Cemetery
The Telegraph | 10/23/2020 | James Crisp

Escaped self-cloning mutant crayfish created in experimental breeding programs have invaded a Belgian cemetery.

Hundreds of the duplicating crustaceans, which can dig down to up to a meter and are always female, pose a deadly threat to local biodiversity after colonizing a historic Antwerp graveyard.

“It’s impossible to round up all of them. It’s like trying to empty the ocean with a thimble,” said Kevin Scheers of the Flemish Institute for Nature and Woodland Research.

Marbled crayfish, which travel across land and water at night and eat whatever they can, do not occur in nature and are banned by the European Union.

Instead the freshwater beasts, which are about 10cm big and voracious, are thought to have been bred by unscrupulous German pet traders in the 1990s.

They are similar to the slough crayfish found in Florida

… who do not pay $150 to wrestle leopards …

but are parthenogenetic, which means they reproduce with themselves and all their children are genetically identical females.

The mutation, which occurred about 25 years ago, means populations can spring up rapidly from just a single Procambarus virginalis.

In 2018 scientists established the global marbled crayfish population was descended from a single female and didn’t need males to reproduce.