I read this and laughed!  Please, this is under Humor so there is nothing political about it.  And if you have never tasted Chesapeake blues, you have not tasted Crabs!  So just read and laugh!

GLOUCESTER POINT -- Just in time for light summer reading: a story about a half-male, half-female blue crab with schizophrenic tendencies.

The unusual creature initially made sexual overtures to a female crab it was introduced to but reconsidered and ate the erstwhile love interest for breakfast the next day, said Rom Lipcius, a scientist at the Virginia Institute of Marine Resources.

The crab -- named Jerry Springer after the talk show host known for his off-the-wall guests -- is on display in an institute aquarium while scientists field questions from eager news reporters.

"We've gotten calls from all over the world," said Lipcius whose audience usually consists of graduate students bent on the staid labor of crafting predator-prey relationship studies or plotting crab migration routes in the Chesapeake Bay.

Now, he's got on his hands a crab that is perfectly split down the middle sexually. The cryptic crustacean is female on one side, male on the other.

"It's called bilateral gynandromorphy," Lipcius said, the first example of its kind he has seen in 25 years of academic research on the bay. "It's an oddity, for sure."

The tip of the crab's right claw is red, just like a female. Its left claw is tipped with the characteristic blue pigment of a male crab. The belly apron that encloses the bottom of its shell is equally divided: It's shaped like the Capitol Dome on one side, like a female, while the other half bears the Washington Monument shape associated with males.

"There's only one in several million chances to see this in crabs," Lipcius said. "There are well over 600 million crabs caught in the bay every year and if this were even remotely common you'd see more of it."

Lipcius said he looked and could find only one reference to a hermaphrodite crab, a specimen that was caught in Maryland in 1979.

Middlesex County waterman David Johnson named the crab Jerry soon after catching it in the bay offshore of Gwynn's Island last month and then took it to Lipcius for his opinion.

Lipcius said Johnson observed Jerry cradling a female crab that was ready to breed in his peeler crab float one day, as a normal male crab would, only to discover that Jerry abandoned the protective male instincts and ate the female crab the next day.

Because of the barnacles on Jerry's shell, scientists believe the crab is old enough to have been impregnated by another crab, or, perhaps, itself. For now, Lipcius can only speculate. Geneticists at VIMS and the University of Maryland will be able to tell, he said. "We're waiting to see if it produces an egg mass."

Despite the lurid overtones, Jerry could yield insights into the sexual development of blue crabs, a field that is little understood, Lipcius said.

It could also shed light on blue crab genetics, which in turn could lead to advance blue crab and lobster aquaculture, a potentially lucrative business, Lipcius said.

"One of the two main reasons why clawed lobster aquaculture has failed is they are so aggressive" and cannibalize one another if confined together, he said.

It would be worth looking for a genetic key, he said, that would make the creatures more compatible.

Let this be a lesson!  Dont mess with a mixed up crab!  Bwuahhhahahahaha