Beetle evolves resistance to Bt

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/333078/title/News_in_Brief_EarthEnvironment_

Beetle evolves resistance to Bt
One of agriculture’s most devastating pests, the western corn rootworm, has evolved resistance to corn genetically engineered to make a poison derived from the Bacillus thuringiensis — or Bt — bacterium. Bt’s lethality to many pests has made genetic engineering of its toxin into crops a primary pest-control strategy. The July 29 report in PLoS ONE by scientists at Iowa State University in Ames is the first confirmation of any beetle or weevil’s ability to survive on corn making Bt toxin (although some butterflies or moths are resistant). The Iowa State team attributes the rootworm resistance to too few Bt-free corn refuges that allow sensitive insects to flourish. —Janet Raloff

http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0022629


Who could have seen that coming? :banghead:

[mike_c]

1. everyone saw it coming....

Insects-- with their long evolutionary history detoxifying plant chemical defenses-- will ultimately evolve resistance to just about any chemical control measure, including natural ones like Bt. That's especially true when the bacillus and it's coevolution is taken out of the interaction. That's a well known problem. There simply isn't any known solution, so ALL insecticides are short term solutions to an ancient problem-- how to compete with our strongest competitor for food and fiber? We cannot do nothing-- that would doom millions to famine and disease. Even today, insects consume about one third of the human food supply, and that's WITH all the effort we invest to manage their populations.

Bt has been one of the better tools in that effort, but ALL such efforts will ultimately be defeated. This is the main argument against over exposure to Bt, but failure to try just isn't really an option, so we have to understand that whatever we do will have only short term success, then we have to find another tool.

[DCKit]

3. "...how to compete with our strongest competitor for food and fiber?"

Easy. Stop poisoning their predators and move back to an integrated system of agriculture.

Additionally, healthy soils make strong plants, and strong plants are far more resistant to insect and disease predation.

We spend far too much time looking to chemicals and genetic engineering to solve these problems.

[mike_c]

5. I know it's fashionable to think so...

...but you're quite simply wrong. Before the 1940s there were no chemical insecticides in wide agricultural use-- there were arsenic salts and the like, but the era of organic chemical control (not to be confused with organic farming, LOL) did not begin in earnest until after WWII. People tend to forget that, but prior to WWII happy peasant farmers didn't live in balanced organic bliss with their busy insect neighbors. Pest insects where a scourge on agriculture. They cause wholesale famine somewhere in the world 100 percent of the time. The most fearsome impediment to European settlement in the North American great plains was a grasshopper. Pest insect populations waxed and waned according to demographic stochasticity and habitat quality, with little that farmers could do other than hope they'd leave enough to live on until next year. And, of course, the human population that needed feeding was a fraction of its size today.

IPM is a FAR better balanced and intelligent approach than mindlessly dumping pesticides, but every IPM manager on Earth knows that it must be an adaptive strategy and that unless one is prepared to lose substantial productivity, it usually includes some element of chemical control, hopefully mostly environmentally benign, like Bt but usually more. I know there are plentiful data supporting high yield and labor intensive organic cropping, but the only time in human history when organic farming was the norm rather than a novelty, at least in terms of primary staple crop production, was the bad old days that I've just described-- and those lasted for ten thousand years or so.

[DCKit]

6. We're all entitled to an opinion.

My only garden predators last summer were animals. I had zero issues with insects. Next time around, nobody gets into the garden but me.

[Remember Me]

12. The proposal wasn't to go back in time --

it was to jettison unsustainable chemical poisons in favor of (I think he means) basically organic farming, which isn't the same thing as the way we farmed prior to 1940. Organic farming now encompasses a great deal more knowledge than old time farmers, though it also includes those of their practices that worked well.

We know so much more these days about how to organize things so that harmony and balance are achieved. I'm not at all sure, for example, that old time farmers utilized composting and mulching. Not on a large scale. But those are essential part of the PROCESS of organic farming.

Too, soil health is critically important for plant health and plant immunity and you can't have that without care and attention and for the most part the old time farmers only knew to add soil amendments to acidify or alkalinize the soil to bring it closer to the best pH for growing plants. (But I doubt they had their soil tested or COULD have their soil tested for pH and other nutrients.) Other than earthworms, they didn't know anything about all the soil creatures -- microbes and larger -- which do a lot for soil health. So season after season they would plow, disrupting all those wonderful soil ecosystems instead of helping them thrive.

So you see, there's a lot that goes into it that previous generations of non-chemical farmers simply didn't know or understand, in fact didn't have the wherewithal to know.

Organic measures will likely NEVER completely eradicate the potential for plagues of locusts (literally and figuratively speaking), but they are IMO far superior to chemical farming. Organic farming and gardening take Nature's processes and put them to use intentionally. I mentioned compost -- that's what Nature does (decomposes things and turns them into soil), but in organic farming and gardening, you compost intentionally and in a way that speeds up the process rather than by chance and happenstance.

Plus I'm personally SICK of worrying about the food we bring into the house, how loaded with pesticides and herbicides it is and if we can possibly get it off -- if so how, make it safe by washing it well? And then there's GMOs. I simply refuse to eat corn or products containing corn any more, unless it's organic because GMO corn is ubiquitous. Soy too. Bt Potatoes as well.

[DCKit]

13. Thank you so much. nt

[Marnie]

9. Amen to that.

Somehow, without our help, plant have managed to survive and thrive in the face of millions of years of predation and diseases.

[mike_c]

11. and agriculture was mean, brutish, and uncertain....

I'm amazed by the romantic notions people have about that bucolic pastoral life. Famine, disease, and war were the norm, not the exception, with insect caused famine happening somewhere pretty much 100 percent of the time. And that doesn't even begin to account for insect vectored disease. Whole swaths of interior Africa alone were closed to agriculture by the tsetse. To this day, mosquito vectored malaria is one of the worst and most widespread human diseases. It's easy to forget that we solved that problem in this country-- with DDT. The solution was NOT worse than the problem, believe me. Remember, one grasshopper species almost prevented permanent settlement of the great plains, and since we didn't have chemical insecticides in those days, people fought it with DYNAMITE and with great, destructive fires. Whole regions were settled and abandoned-- the settlers made starving refuges-- because insects ate every scrap of crops in an afternoon.

Yes, plants and insects have coevolved in an ever intensifying arms race for hundreds of millions of years, but natural plant communities are not agriculture which, by it's very nature, selects for pest species whose populations can decimate whole fields. Humans depend upon agriculture, not natural plant communities.

[DCKit]

14. Thank you so much. nt

[DCKit]

15. Thanks Marnie.

By the way, my mix was 25% compost, 25% charcoal and ash and 50% dirt... on top of five layers of newspaper, on top of clay and gravel.

Y'all need to stop telling us what we can't do, and what we can't make work. I'm really getting sick of that shit.

[Nihil]

16. At the end of the day, ...

> Somehow, without our help, plant have managed to survive and thrive
> in the face of millions of years of predation and diseases.

... agriculture is simply organised predation by humans on plants
and yes, they've managed to survive & thrive ... right up to the
point where the ignorant predators have poisoned the very earth and
decimated the pollinators ...

:shrug:

[Viva_La_Revolution]

10. +100

[OKIsItJustMe]

4. Re: Failure to try just isn't really an option

Back in 2002, the authors of http://www.amazon.com/Against-Grain-Biotechnology-Corporate-Takeover/dp/1567511503/">Against the Grain: Biotechnology and the Corporate Takeover of Your Food, suggested that this apparent idiocy might be an intentional strategy on the part of the “life sciences” companies.

Quite apart from the joy of knowing that your food is laced with a pesticide, which cannot be washed off, since it’s in the very cells of the plant; the only pesticide organic farmers would use is Bt bacteria. (http://www.gmwatch.org/latest-listing/1-news-items/1058-bt-in-organic-farming-and-gm-crops-the-difference-">The way organic farmers use(d) BT bacteria is quite different from the way GM crops express Bt toxins.) So, when the “life sciences” companies like Monsanto started “engineering” crops chock full of Bt toxins, which would inevitably lead to resistant pests, they knew that in a matter of only a few years, the one pesticide organic farmers used would be useless, and that the organic farmers would have nothing to fall back on.

[mike_c]

7. well, I don't know about the conspiracy, but the events you describe...

...happened just so. Throughout the various debates about genetic engineering I've participated in, I've tried to undermine the needlessly Luddite panic that many express simply because they don't understand the technology or fear it unreasonably. But I'm nonetheless a strong critic of Monsanto and their ilk for precisely the reasons you spoke of-- everyone knew that expressing Bt all over the landscape in every damned corn and soybean plant was going to hasten the evolution of resistance. That's what insects do. I also don't buy the hype about Bt and the expression products of isolate cry genes being "different" as any more than a distinction without a difference. But fostering resistance through predictable over exposure is just criminally irresponsible. And it's all for greed.

[OKIsItJustMe]

8. You see, that’s the thing

I am fond of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor">Hanlon’s Razor, i.e. “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

The thing is, when stupidity is not an adequate explanation (which it almost always is) one is left to consider malice.

In this case, we may either accept that “life sciences” companies are essentially ignorant of the fundamentals of evolution (which seems like a bit of a stretch, doesn’t it?) Or…

[Nihil]

17. "failure to try just isn't really an option" if your values rate profit higher than sustainability

> We cannot do nothing-- that would doom millions to famine and disease.

By constantly addressing symptoms rather than problems, that is exactly
what this approach IS doing - and in a far more "brutish & short" manner
than the politically incorrect alternative.

The concept of endless growth on a finite planet is a very dangerous lie
that will cost billions of lives before it is finally rejected.

(Note: The subject line isn't getting at mike_c's personal values but those of the
corporations driving the ever more destruction "options" being promoted & adopted.)

[mike_c]

19. I rank YIELD highest....

And I'm not at all averse to reasonable profit for farmers, but remember that most of the world's farmers don't work for profit, they work for sustenance. We tend to lose sight of that in the industrialized world. I'm an entomologist and an ecologist by trade-- if it were possible to abandon insect population management without reducing crop yields globally I'd be the first in line to champion it. My first priority, frankly, is preventing famine. Even with chemical controls, insects consume roughly 30 percent of world agricultural production. People starve.

[Remember Me]

20. Well, you might want to consider this --

Actually, I'd definitely counsel reading the whole article, but this jumped out at me:

For any naysayers out there who are clinging to the Monsanto line that conventional agriculture is the only way to feed the world, while this study doesn’t delve into crop yields itself, a 2009 report put out by the Union of Concerned Scientists may put that claim to rest. Despite the fact that in some instances conventional methods may marginally raise the yield of food crops (while genetically modified crops were shown to produce no increase in yield), this study notes it comes at a high cost to the environment and our health. The chemical inputs used in conventional farming are directly contributing to unpredictable climate changes, which will affect our long-term ability to consistently grow food.

article: http://www.grist.org/article/new-study-weighs-in-on-organicconventional-debate
referenced UCS report: http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/food_and_agriculture/failure-to-yield-brochure.pdf

This should be of interest as well:

The July issue of Bioscience (Vol. 55:7) analyzes the environmental, energy, and economic costs/benefits of growing soybeans and corn organically versus conventionally. The 22-year farming trial study found that organic farming produces the same yields of corn and soybeans as does conventional farming, but uses 30 percent less energy, less water and no pesticides.

David Pimentel, a Cornell University professor of ecology and agriculture and lead author of the study concludes, "Organic farming offers real advantages for such crops as corn and soybeans." He adds, "Organic farming approaches for these crops not only use an average of 30 percent less fossil energy but also conserve more water in the soil, induce less erosion, maintain soil quality, and conserve more biological resources than conventional farming does."

snip

and look at this:

Soil carbon in the organic systems increased by 15 to 28 percent which is the equivalent of taking about 3,500 pounds of carbon dioxide per hectare out of the air.

Because organic agriculture systems also absorb and retain significant amounts of carbon in the soil, organic farming has positive implications for global warming.

http://dfwnetmall.com/earth/organic-farm-yield-equals-conventional.htm

I didn't know that, but I'm all the more convinced of the need for the whole world to start working WITH Nature instead of against it.

[dtexdem]

2. Which one: McCartney or Starr?

Oh, b-e-E-t-l-e. :-)

[xchrom]

18. recommend