shipment of marbled crays comes in the morning

[rodbigelow]

have an order of 4 juvenile and baby marbled crays coming in the morning. Feeling like a kid waiting for christmas. This is sorta a detour for me. I became interested in all the wonderful, colorful little freshwater  shrimp and decided I wanted to do some breeding programs with them. So I set out doing the research. One of the best methods I've found in this day and age of the interwebs is to go to vendor sites and see what they say and link to, so in the process of checking out shrimp I stumbled across the Marbled Crayfish. As soon as I read the words "self-cloning" I was on the hook and not letting go. In nature there are relativly few critters of any complexity that have the ability to reproduce asexually, and a crayfish?!? reading on about water tolerances,etc I knew no matter how deep I got into shrimp these guys were part of the plan.There is so much potential for a critter like this that reproduces on it's own. Just the numbers of critters that could be reached quickly from an animal that does not rely on two sexes is astounding:

 

1crayfish= 50eggs(just as an example)

51 crayfish= 2550 eggs

2550 crayfish= 127,500 eggs

127,500 crayfish= 6,375,000 eggs

you get the picture.......

 

So needless to say there will be experimenting going on trying to find useful real world applications for this little wonder.

 

and lets face it, even if I don't find some pot of gold in them, they are pretty darned neat looking, and just that would be enough.

 

Still working on making sure I can keep stable parameters for shrimp, so these guys are a bonus side project while I fine tune my shimp tanks.