The marbled crayfish or marmokreb, a mutant species that didn’t exist 25 years ago, is considered one of the most invasive freshwater creatures in the world, and it’s all due to its remarkable capacity to clone itself.

The rise of the the marbled crayfish as an internationally recognized invasive species can be traced back to the mid 1990s, when German aquarium hobbyist whom experts prefer not to identify, for privacy reasons, bought a large crayfish described to him as a “Texas crayfish”. The man was immediately stunned by its size and the enormous batches of eggs it could lay. He started bragging about it to his friends, and giving away specimens. Marmokreb-mania was in its infant stages, but as marbled crayfish started appearing in pet shops, aquarium hobbyists started noticing something peculiar…

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A restaurant in Shanghai, China, recently made headlines for employing two young crayfish peelers who do the dirty work right at the customers’ tables, while they check social media or play mobile video games.

Wouldn’t it be nice if someone could handle those nasty crayfish shells and then just hand you the succulent flesh?Well, at one particular restaurant in Shanghai’s Huangpu district, you can actually request a crayfish peeler that will be glad to take care of the dirty work while you watch or chat with your friends or play on your smartphone. Crayfish are really popular in China these days, so the two young peelers usually handle around 100 crustaceans every day, which earns them a nice monthly salary of over 10,000 yuan ($1,500).

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