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Nuclear Mutant Flies Are Good For Africa?
D\monix writes "According to this article in Reuters, the International Atomic Energy Agency is going to start releasing massive numbers of tsetse flies "sterilized by a burst of radiation" into sub Saharan Africa in order to outnumber and thus eradicate the local fly population. My favorite quote? "The impact of the fly is difficult to exaggerate." You're damn right it is. Anyone else out there think pumping large numbers of mutant insects into the environment might be a bad idea?"
Now .... if one just bites a person....
Cruise TT
this is good, vacines for wild?
Ok...
mainly because its not too much. Its a bit of intromision... I think.
-Woof woof woof!
They might reproduce and produce more sterile insects!
They are more commanly known as 'users'
now someone tell me colionalism died 40 years ago...
i hope one of this flies mutates into a 50 stories tall uber-insect and...
I find this slightly confusing. So the basic idea is that these tsetse flies will overpower the non genetically engineered flies, but being unable to reproduce they will be the last generation. But when the modified flies die out, if there are even 2 original flies left, they will easily repopulate (and have less competition because the rest of the flies will be dead). So basically all this will do is screw up natural selection a bit, maybe increasing resistances of the remaining flies and what not.
The future isn't what it used to be.
Of course these arent /mutant/ flys. theve just been sterilised. No more radioactive than usual, and cetainly not going to pass in theyre sterility to the next generation :).
I for one do NOT A think pumping large numbers of mutant insects into the environment might be a bad idea.
-----
"Almost isn't good enough - but it's almost good enough."
-Me
Anyone else out there think pumping large numbers of mutant insects into the environment might be a bad idea?
Comic books and technophobic hysteria notwithstanding, exposing something to radiation doesn't make it a mutant. If it reproduces and produces weird offspring, that's mutation. If the radiation sterilizes the flies, there's not much to worry about.
-- Sigs are for losers
Anyone else out there think pumping large numbers of mutant insects into the environment might be a bad idea?
I'd have thought that the dangers of pumping a large number of sterile insects into an environment is a lot less scary than simply introducing a non-engineered fertile animal into a foreign environment. I'm sure we can come up with several cases where that's gone wrong, but sterile insects? Doesn't scare me I'm afraid.
New York - USA plans on releases mutant pigeons into the wild. These mutant pigeons are sterle but are equiped with lazer beams. The hope is they will eradicate the pigeon population.
"The hope is that after these birds elimate the other pigeons they will go after vigrant humans." - One offical said.
When asked what would be done if these mutant pigeons got out of hand - "We have a backup plan to release mutant wolverines that will go after the mutant pigeons"
Is anyone else reminded of that Simpson's episode with the lizards?
Why would an Atomic Energy organization care about flies in Africa? They aren't planning on building giant nuclear power plants across all of Africa and then piping the electricity into Europe, are they? I mean, we wouldn't want the thousands of construction workers getting diseases from exotic flies. It's going to be the next Panama canal. There's a lot of Uranium in Africa also. And with those superconducting power lines, boy. This could be quite a moneymaker. Wonder if Enron knows anything about this.
Cheers
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Just imagine millions of Jeff Goldblums running around puking on people!
(Huh?)
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The original poster does not understand the issue.
These are flys that have been sterilized by radiation. They are not genetic mutants. If they will live their little lifetime, and then die. Their genes will not be passed on to another generation.
"Mutants" are offspring which have different characteristics to their parents because genetic mutation has occurred.
I am against releasing genetically modified organisms into the environment. But this is not what they are talking about. These are sterilized files. Not mutants. There is no danger here.
If it reduces the number of disease carrying files, then this is a very good thing.
Well if you think about it Italy and Germany sell radiated milk! They have been doing this for a long time to help preserve it. ;-)
I can buy a carton of milk and keep it un-opened for 1.5 months. This could be a good idea to trim down an unwanted population, just hope so wack-o doesn't try it on humans..
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
Look at the fiasco that caused. Bad idea if you ask me.
Eso si que es.
Here's another paper in PDF format (or you can use Google to view as html).
Here's a very interesting excerpt, for all those who can't figure out why this might actually work:
Tsetse life-cycle.
The tsetse is a unique insect. It gives birth every 910 days to a full-grown larva, which immediately burrows into the soil andforms a pupa. Thus the egg and larval stages of tsetse are notsubject to the usual hazards and losses experienced by otherinsects.Female tsetse produce at most nine larvae. Tsetse fliesunquestionably have the lowest reproduction potential of anyinsect, and this fact makes them a good target for SIT. A single mating provides sufficient sperm for fertilizationthrough the female's 90100-day lifespan. Since females usuallymate only once, if they are mated by a sterile male they will notproduce any offspring.
Releasing those radiated flies fits nicely in the 'Bad Things(TM)' category.
I can't imagine rendering them sterile will be the only effect of the radiation.
Haven't these guys seen Jurrasic Park ?
"nature WILL find a way" - Dr. Ian Malcolm
The article referenced does NOT say "The impact ON the fly is difficult to exaggerate." it actually says, ""The impact OF the fly is difficult to exaggerate." Not a quick commentary on how bad the radiation is for the fly, but on how bad the fly is for Africa.
:)
...just saying.
If you don't know the difference, then don't post articles about such topics.
A burst of radiation might cause genetic abberation but a) these flies are sterilized therefore cannot breed and b) the genetic changes are either minor or kill the individuals.
And you can construct strang chains of events that the mutation causes a gene which provides immunity to antibiotica which is transfered to bacteria by viruses but such events are so unlikely that the propability of bacteria developing such immunities on their own is much higher.
This article is the perfect example of these ecoheads who babble about "protecting the nature" and argue by vague ideas and wrong data.
Personally I doubt that the sterilized flies will eradicate the natural population - the lifespan of y fly is rather short and theses individual cannot breed. This seems to be a crackhead idea from the atomic energy agency.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
The tsetse fly is a very important element in the preservation of wildlife in Africa - wherever there are large concentrations of the tsetse, farmers will not bring in their herds of cattle. If the tsetse was eliminated a major impediment to African farmers overrunning the natural habitat of indigenous African wildlife would be removed, and biodiversity of the region put at further risk. Anyone willing to accept for five seconds that the environment is not a simple system???
Here's another paper in PDF format.
Here's a very interesting excerpt, for all those who can't figure out why this might actually work:
Tsetse life-cycle. The tsetse is a unique insect. It gives birth every 9-10 days to a full-grown larva, which immediately burrows into the soil andforms a pupa. Thus the egg and larval stages of tsetse are notsubject to the usual hazards and losses experienced by otherinsects.Female tsetse produce at most nine larvae. Tsetse fliesunquestionably have the lowest reproduction potential of anyinsect, and this fact makes them a good target for SIT. A single mating provides sufficient sperm for fertilizationthrough the female's 90-100-day lifespan. Since females usuallymate only once, if they are mated by a sterile male they will notproduce any offspring.
Sorry, but the over the top claim that these are mutant flies begs a response.
The idea is that after the attempt to eradicate with pesticide is used these sterile flies are released to compete with non-sterile flies for mating privledges. Since the mating window is short the time occupied by these sterile flies should help reduce the reproductive capability of the swarms.
Too many people die from the disease they carry, and ignorant ranting about it does these people a big disservice.
Unfortunately it is a very common tactic of the eco-terrorist groups to portray something in the harhest possible light even when they know they are lieing. Seems that sometimes they think their view is more important than the lives of the people who could be saved.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
International Atomic Energy Agency fscked up the disposal of european radioactive waste in Africa, as a result mutant tsetse fly begun to multiplicate, and now they are trying to hide it by saing they are doing it intentionally.
When i lived in Winnipeg, Manitoba (somewhere in Canada, for all you Americans) they did the same thing to mosquitoes. Sterilize millions (males, mostly), send 'em out to mate (they mate only once) and then watch the population plummet. It's a trillion times safer than DDT and the other killer poisons they like to fill the air with during skeeter season.
Oh humor impaired moderator. It is weakly worded, but obviously funny. The post did not really mean to reply to the topic that in another story mutant pigeons are being released, it's satire.
$ exec laugh(2)_
Didn't we learn anything from this movie? :)
ok so injecting more flies into the problem does what?
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WTF is up with people these days? Am I the only one left with any foresight? The article claims the fly is costing 4.5 billion a year. So is that what the future of the world is worth - 4.5 billion a year? What happens when we get weird-ass mutant flies take over? Bring out the weird-ass mutant spiders? ... stuck in the middle with the WHO!
Idiots to the left of me, idiots to the right of me, I'm fucking
Not to be a pedant, but the actual quote is "The impact of the fly is difficult to exaggerate". 'of', not 'on'. Slightly different emphasis!
Jon
Until the population reaches 0...
So basically they've decided to erradicate an entire species because they 'got in our way'. Noone else have a problem with this? I just hope we don't meet any aliens who decide that we are getting in the way of their population of earth and steralize my ass.
Let's start taking some god damn responsibility and stop fucking with nature like this. There must be some natural predators for these flys that will also be dying down, at least until their population can survive on other prey. Those other prey will in turn increase because of the decrease in predators....
This is what we call a good idea gone bad. Fine, trim down their populations, but don't god damn kill off the entire race. It will likely have consequences that we haven' thought of.
Oh, and these aren't mutants. The DNA probably isn't being modified at all. If it were, they would be mutants, kinda. Chances are that not all of their DNA would be mutated, like not in every cell and definately not mutated the same in every cell. If they could reproduce and pass on sperm with mutated DNA then yes, you would have mutant offspring. But they're infertile so that isn't going to be happening either.
We've been over this before, with cotton moths. It's a very cynical perpertual income scam, and the farcical nature of it can be summed up as: "Breed them into extinction".
To have an appreciable effect on fly numbers in the next generation, you have to pretty much double the number of flies in this generation, ensuring that half of them are sterile.
So first you've got to breed up your lab flies from fertile flies. Then you've got to keep back a proportion of them to use to breed up more lab flies. Then you nuke your flies to sterilise them, hopefully successfully, and hopefully without creating too many SuperFlies.
You release them into the wild, blithely ignoring the impossiblity of achieving a uniform distribution. Congratulations, you've just doubled the number of flies in the wild!
But it's all worth it, because in the next generation you only get 50% as many flies, right?
Wrong. Flies breed like, well, flies. The check on their numbers isn't the number of fertile breeding pairs, but the number of predators and (mostly) the available resources for them to feed on.
So while you perhaps see a small drop, you still have an assload of flies out there, and you've got one generation to address it. No problem, you just need to breed up even more flies in the lab, and do it again. And again. And again. And each time, you charge a fat fee for doing it. And you'll never wipe them out, or even have an appreciable effect on their numbers, because you'll always have fertile flies out there, breeding like crazy and spreading back into any local pockets that you've actually managed to have an impact on. And you always have to keep breeding your own flies in the lab (all this is just great for the overall fly population, you might notice) and then releasing them into the wild, where they're just as big a problem during their lifetime as wild flies. Even assuming that you could wipe out the wild flies, if you then released another million nuked flies "just to be sure", it's odds on that a fertile pair would slip through and start the whole problem all over again. Pop quiz: would this be a bad thing or a good thing for the fly sellers?
I'm not suggesting that this method is worse than using pesticides, just that it's equally as token and futile. The intentions are noble: these little bastards are a disease vector, and can literally eat cattle alive. But this "solution" is really just another way for high tech companies to obtain a perpetual revenue stream from the third world by offering a magic wand to deal with a very real, but very endemic problem. The real problem is that the flies will expand to match the available resources, and we just keep giving them more resources to nibble on.
It'll probably be a real cheap solution at first though. Remember, the first one is always free.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
BUT!!! When combined with ATOMIC RADIATION
Man and ant become....
.
MANT!!!!
(loud horns play disonate chord!)
Someone you trust is one of us.
Eradicating tsetse from the Southern Rift Valley of Ethiopia from the International Atomic Energy Agency is more informative than the stories links. It also gives you a few photos of the areas they will be released in.
Now, next time I go to Africa, there will be fewer flies!
:)
Oh wait... I'm not going to Africa. Statistically speaking: odds are, neither are you.
The purpose of the release of sterilized flies (while radiation may and probably did cause mutations, as long as they're sterile, those mutations will not be propogated in future generations... understand most mutation is not like mutation as seen in most movies, i.e., X-Men or The Fly,) is that they will mate with other flies.
Think of a mutation being like a random change to the source code of a program. Depending on where the change was, and how it changed, the program may not compile at all. If it doesn't compile, the analogy continues, the animal will not reproduce.
Anyway, to understand the effect of this, imagine if during WW II, the food our troops were fed rendered them sterile. When they returned, they would marry, and most of the women they married would never conceive, since when they attempted to do so they were using men who were shooting blanks.
There would have been no baby-boom, and women who might have reproduced otherwise would not have, baring divorce or cheating.
The purpose here is clear: preventing some of the next generation of flies being born in the first place, and do so without having to hunt down and kill the fertilized female flies before they lay eggs, which is extremely difficult since flies are very small and it's really hard to see which ones are fertile and which are not unless you have very very good vision!
The ethics of the thing are a bit complicated, but it seems more humane to stop them this way than by spraying huge quantities of maletheyon or DDT or pyrethrin or any one of over a dozen other pesticides that could end up doing IMMENSE collateral damage by killing other less harmful or even beneficial insects, as well as potentially poisoning larger animals, such as birds or people.
And the individual flies aren't really harmed, that is, their wings aren't pulled off and no-one has stuck any pins through them into a cork-board. Now you could argue that sterilizing them is very harmful, denying them their right to reproduce, and committing what could be construed as attempted genocide.
If you did, I'd remind you we're talking about INSECTS here, not a group of unpopular people. I don't think any would-be Mengela's (or whatever) are seeing this and thinking "hmmm..." anyway, since that really did already happen to some people, even in (gasp!) the U.S., (during the early 20th century, which is where the Nazi's got the idea in the first place, BTW) I doubt something like that would happen again, and if it did, I further doubt it would be the result of someone being inspired to do it by seeing it done with flies.
~ Dawroc Soumyonna
:)
So basically they've decided to erradicate an entire species because they 'got in our way'
Well, I doubt it'd be able to erradicate the species but there's nothing wrong with trying. We did it with smallpox, would you like to have that back? Is there anybody who doesn't think erradicating HIV would be a good idea if we had the means? The diseases spread by the tsetse fly are just as nasty.
the selection process !
Lab Chief - " Ok, now you know it all. Mostly it will be a visual selection !"
Lab Tech - "Ok, but how do I discern in the microscope it's a female if she forgot her lipstick ?"
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
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what happens if some of them arnt completely sterilised, then these flys have mutant offspring
In fact, a similar approach was used to erradicate screwflies in Lybia (the maggots of which infest wounds and feed on the living flesh, not dead tissue as is the case with many other species of flies). I only vaguely remember this from an old TV documentary but apparently that approach was a great success. Now remember, these flies do not actually glow with radiation! Be a bit more open-minded, this may actually not be a bad idea. The impact on the ecology may be another matter.
What a great idea! Nuke the fucking flies. That will teach them.
What will it take for the world to realise that the US is in control here, and you can't fuck with our profits? ARE YOU LISTENING IRAQ??? You're fucking next!
We'll bomb this. We'll buy that. We'll use other countries for slave labor and steal the goods back off them, while charging them interest on loans we forced them to take out. And if some fucking fly starts costing us 4.5 billion a year, well fuck me if we won't nuke them as well.
Clear? Stupid little piece of nature!
When are they going to do something to stop the africans from breeding? So Salley can stop asking for money to feed the starving children. If you can't feed em don't breed em.
I believe that they did something like this in Australia. They brought over some kind of frogs from some other country to get rid of some parasite flies they had over there. However, the frogs figured that a normal living fly was better to eat than the parasite flies.
In the end, the frogs "took over" big areas, almost extiguishing the normal fly it started to eat, without affecting the parasite flies at all.
It's NEVER a good idea to release any kind of animals in places they do not belong. No matter what we think we know, we have no clue what's gonna happen ones they get there.
I can add that I only have a vague recollection of this incident. Maybe someone else can explain exactly what they did over there...
...that a few naturally mutant flies, which as a result are resistant to the radiation sterilisation process, go out into the wild and produce a new generation of sterilisation-resistant flies?
Then they'd be really screwed.
Mind you; you do get really small scalpels, don't you?
My favorite quote? "The impact on the fly is difficult to exaggerate." You're damn right it is.
You put this out there as if they were talking about the IAEA's flies and not the tsetse flies that are killing some astronomical number of livestock and causing 4.5 billion in losses.
tsk tsk...spinning news is for 'regular people' media, you know, the one that gives news to the idiots who wont research to find out the actual truth?
A mutant fly would be a fly that has inherited changed DNA from it's parent. The parent is perhaps best refered to as a "fly with radiation sickness".
Seeing as these parent flies are dosed high enough to render them STERILE, there won't be any mutant offspring. Duh.
And considering that most all mutations caused by radiation are mistakes like cancer and deformity not frickin silly x-fly superpowers, is the African environment at risk from sick and crippled tsetse flies?
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
I am pretty sure the scientists who thought it would be a good idea to inter-breed the American honey bee with the African bees viewed the experiment with the same amount of confidence that these scientists are displaying regarding the notion of irradiating the tsete fly with radiation. How do we know this will sterilize the flies?
SealBeater
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
and for a problem much less acute.
I've been to a visit in an agriculture institute where they showed us an example of this method for biological pesticide which was exactly that.
I don't remember all the details but it was based on the mail flies being sterilized by radiation. A kEY POINT to the success of the method was that with those flies each female fly only mate once at the beginning of their mating season and therefore if the unlucky female mate with one of the sterilized males it ends up with one less flies family. When the sterilized males out number the normal ones, the population reduces dramatically and the fruits in the field have a better season.
Picture if you will: You are peacefully trekking through Africa with your tour group of twentysomething Eurotrash and middle-aged Americans (and their porters!) when somehow you are seperated from the group. You walk hither: green swale and trees which you swore you'd be able to identify before you went on the goddamned trip. But no trekkers. You walk fro: More of the same, and still no trekkers. By this point, you are pretty worried - the guides issued stern warnings about not getting lost. So you walk yon. As you round a corner, you find youself in a small clearing in a grove of those trees. You hear a strange buzzing sound, and then you are startled to see...
a fly. Not any fly, mind you, but a tsetse fly. And this isn't just any tsetse fly - this one is at least fifteen feet tall. His probiscus is the size of your leg! (there does seem to be something missing, but you never quite figure out what) The fly is wearing a thrashed denim jacket with Greenpeace and anarchy patches dotted among black marker pen with various incomprehensible rants.
"You have no chance to survive make your time!"
Oh.... my...... god!!!!!
You are ready to scream, run away, anything but deal with this deranged mutant eunich tsetse fly. But you can't run. Your legs are like jello. You can't stop staring at that probiscus that's the size of your leg...
"All your bug are belong to us!!!"
Oh, god, you think - he's definately one of those. You finally remember how to use your legs and turn to run away, but a beclawed leg bats you to the ground. You scream in irony as the probiscus gets closer. You should never have worked for that WTO organization. Not to mention that consulting work...
The probiscus drills slowly into your belly as you squirm like a cricket on a fish hook. There is nothing to do....
Suddenly, you find yourself getting sleepy, sleepy... You never imagined it would end like this... so peaceful... so calm, relaxed.... the beauty of the trees as the tsetse fly pumps its saliva into your bowel, predigesting it before, as you sanquinely observe, he sips up your small and large intestines, your kidneys, liver, pancreas... things are getting dark now. Just before everything is quiet...
"For great justice"
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
Although the original submission was meant to be lighthearted, (you'll note the link to audio clips of inane Seth Green quotes from the movie "Ticks!" under "mutant insects") I apologize for the misquote - drat. Next time...
Israel
One of the cosmetic industries most revolutionary discoveries was the enzyme excreted by flies...Allantoin. It was discovered in Africa that cuts and abrasions actually healed faster although covered with flies. No flies = increase infection rates on the African population. (Human, not the flies)
Is this an efficient population control measure???
...Anyone thinking of radioactive man? Seriously, and environmental impedement introduced to a sample population of basically anything will yield a small but significant number of them resistant.
Therefore, basically, we're introducing a population of flies into Africa that are resistant to this strange nuclear form of sterilization
Is it just me or is that not a good thing?
The article says:
/. article.
/.)
"The impact of the fly is difficult to exaggerate,"
of, not on, as it was in the
Do you people ever read the articles? (Like I haven't heard this before on
The "nuclear mutant flies" may sound dangerous, but are really not in any way, as the "mutat" in this case basicly just means that they are so radically mutant that they are sterile. In real world, radical mutants don't get superpowers or anything.
All natural individuals of any species (including humans) are more or less mutant anyhow, so there's nothing inherently dangerous about that (unless you consinder life as dangerous).
'Life, I mean, will find a way. Oooh and aah, that's how it starts, and then comes the running and the screaming.'
From the article:
Half a million people in sub-Saharan Africa are estimated to have been infected with sleeping sickness by the tsetse fly and 80 percent of them will likely die, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
Hmm. I precict that about 100% will likely die. So far the human race has proven not to be immortal.
Roger.
The scariest issue here is that someone is getting their news from *AOL*.
There is unfortunate precedent for things that could go horribly wrong with this particular experiment.. Not to say that it will, but...
First, "a short sharp burst of radiation" is supposed to make these males sterile. What are the consequences of releasing males that have released a radiation dose below that required for sterilization ? (I mean, how can you make anything except a sample check to be sure ??, seriously). In one fell swoop, that will just increase the population of the flies in the area. (and might even lead to beneficial mutations in subsequent generations :o)
Next, a layman's application of Darwins' theory. Since flies have mating cycles once every few weeks (if I remember premed biology), won't the introduction of sterile flies be negated ? do the numbers, you'd need a release of sterile males that is sufficiently large enough to reach at least 30%-40% of the population of flies in the area).. can't those resources be spent better elsewhere ? (for alternative means of eradication, that is ?)
This has been tried out on mosquitos and so on, IIRC, and it hasn't really made much of an impact... why would this time be different ?
If the sun dies we all die, if your god dies - so what? Worship the sun.
Short term (potential) gains often result in long-term knock-on effects that become increasingly difficult to remedy, with the remedies themselves getting out of hand in a similar way. We never learn...
[professor] Behold,.. my mutant atomic superflies! Well, they're still young... mere atomic super-maggots really... [/professor]
"Just tell him ya did it! That's what he wants to hear anyway..."
I worked a summer in Mackinac, MI. They have HUGE flies that I was told were genetically altered and introduced to "deal" with the mosquito problem. They basically looked like really big house flies but they liked to bite! They were attracted to bright colors which was kind of fun because Mackinac is a tourist town (tourists are called fudgies) and as tourists are known to do, they wore really bright colors and well... you've seen Hitchcock's ""The Birds""... Guess science learns it's lessons like the rest of us...
The thing that concerns me is what will take the place of these fiels when their population decreases. Nature usually doesn't permit a kind of vacuum, and it might well be that there are unforseen side-effects to this kind of action.
... they can and do keep many pests down to manageable levels, saving many lives from diseases and many more from starvation.
For both the current proposal and pesticides, the purpose is not extinction of a species. It is to improve the living conditions of people in the area, not by a "once and for all" operation, but by continuesly working to keep the pest population down.
If there is anything naive it is the search for "permanent" solutions. Little in life is permanent, life itself is not permanent. Most of what we do offer only temporary improvements in our living conditions. In the long run, there is only entropy.
Do you stop eating, because it only offers a temporary relief from hunger?
A project is wortwhile if the benefits outweight the costs.
Yeesh.
OK, to start with the radiation is used to sterilize the flys as others have pointed out. The flys are NOT genetically-engineered! The whole plan works on releasing massive numbers of sterilized flys into the environment such that they out-compete the non-sterile flys for mates and thus reduce the number of offspring which reduces the fly population, etc. etc.
This is not the first time that this has been done. The first such project I remember was the screwworm in the Southern US about 40 or so years ago where the exact same plan was used (release hordes of radiation-sterilized screwworms) with
great success.
Dr. Frank J. Nagy Fermilab Computing Division Authentication and Directory Services Group
Henry Wu: You are saying that a group of animals, entirely composed of females, will breed?
Ian Malcolm: No, I am merely stating that uhh... life finds a way.
Have a search.
They tend to have few offspring. Therefore the technique may well work. However, I've always liked the concept of using a species natural predators to do the dirty work for us.
Create an environment where the predators can flourish.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
However,
If they're really trying to eradicate an insect then there are other factors they should be taking into account. What feeds on the fly? What service to the environment does the fly do (eat something nothing else does?) Where in the food chain does it fit and what impact is this really going to have? Worst part is, these "good" ideas often come about because people have inserted themselves into the insects domain, even if that insect only shows up in big numbers every 70 years, and make the mistake that the insect is the problem, rather than the human being there. Once I see a phrase like this:
Annual economic losses are put at $4.5 billion.
I've got a pretty good idea it's another attempt to fsck with nature. Next thing you know they'll be cloning some extinct tsetse fly eating bird...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The flies have taken off due to the excessive use of pesticides aimed at curbing the fly problem ending up killing the birds that keep the flies in check!!!
This is a classic unintended consequence issue. I can't think of any unintended consequences of the release of sterile flies but I'll bet there will be some!
90% of the wealth is in 2% of the pockets. Bummer to be in the majority.
They've already tried to get rid of the nasty bugs with DDT, and that wasn't too smart as it tends to enrichen into top of the foodchain.
Sterile bugs seem to be alot smarter choice, as they are same kind as the other harmful bugs.
What comes to lack of food and deserts spreading, it would be smarter to feed current bugs with fertility pills and try to get some really nasty mutated bug in there which not only drinks human blood but also kills humans for fun and sport. This might sound brutal, but human is the one causing all the trouble in there.
All it took was 2 bloody rabbits!
don't we ever learn?
.. but the consequenses could be severe. As someone else stated, the tsetse are very important for preserving wild life in Africa. Why? Because wild life is more resistant to the tsetse than a horde of genetically very uniform cattle.
This makes sure that wild life get some breathing space in areas of africa, where farmers just have to give up.
"They've" been doing this for about 40 years, so apparently the native flies are doing ok...
So basically they've decided to erradicate an entire species because they 'got in our way'.
You betcha. As Daniel Quinn has pointed out at length, the idea of wiping out anything that gets in our way is central to the majority of present-day human culture. Somewhat grim, and definitely not sustainable, but true.
Read Ishmael. Shudder. To mis-quote Ellison, sleep well, my heavy-metal babies.
1. As everyones pointed out the mutants stuff is complete bollocks.
2. Early western explorers brought with them infections which destroyed the almost the entire African cattle population. Later Western explorers arrived to find a fly-ridden wasteland inhabited by millions of people on the verge of starvation and assumed thats how it always was.
3. The Tetse fly is the main transmission vector for sleeping sickness and some even worse stuff. These kill MILLIONS of people a year. And it HASN'T always been this way.
Sorry for the rant. Issues like this get on my goat sometimes. Whilst I'm glad that most of the community showed a mature and reasonable attitude towards this I'm shocked that we sensationalise stuff in such a negative manner in the first place.
Many times in fact. One of the standard techniques for controling invasive pests in agriculture is to release sterile bugs into the population because most of the bugs mate once and begin to die afterwards. I'm not an entomologist, but my understanding is that most bugs hang around for only a season, lay eggs and die, their job done. So if you short circuit the whole thing by releasing an overwhelming number of sterile insects the population will breed itself to death. The only reason that I know about this is that I grew up in CA during the whole Mediterrean fruit fly thing. If I had choice between aerial malathion spraying and swatting the occasional sterile fruit fly, I'd go with the fly each time.
This has been done before with fruit flies and it works well, with no ill effects, they arent MUTANTS, theyre STERILE, big difference you alarmist yahoo
First of all its not even like they are themselves radioactive, they have been exposed to radiation, no different than you getting an X-Ray
Are you of japaneese upbringing from the 60's ?
Sounds like you watched too many godzilla movies.
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
Cows, pigs, chickens, tuna, whatever tuna eat, dogs, cats, horses, mice, elephants, squid (I like calimari) and chimps (for entertainment). Everything else is expendable.
What's all the hubbubb about? I AM a mutant/eunuch fly. I just developed the ability to read and type, and quite frankly, love it. Ooops, just sprouted another leg -- cool. Oh, and I'm not nearly as aggressive as those other able-to-reproduce flys, you know. Just got done watching "Terms of Endearment" and LOVED it. So, hey, leave us poor non-procreating flys alone, we aren't so bad.
Did you know that?
Well, I don't know for sure, but considering the number of Swedes or Britons with 22-inch loveguns versus the number of Zulus with that apparatus, I'd say it's a good bet
Now if only I could get Bill to ram his meat into my orifices again... I may have to start fucking Lou Gerstner... I hear there's a reason they call it Big Blue...
I love Bill...
"Anyone else out there think pumping large numbers of mutant insects into the environment might be a bad idea?"
No.
...they've been doing this for some time. It may be new for tsetse flies, but they've been doing it since at least the 70's.
They're FLIES.
this same thing was done with screw worm flies
(these are flies that can lay eggs in even tiny
scratches, within about a week of hatching the flesh eating maggots can make a hole the size of a fist)
and that worked OK...
So, these flies were just modded down to
(-1: Extinct) ?
Is the Earth somehow sacred?
I consider myself a conservationist primarily because I like having natural wilderness areas around for my own enjoyment: camping, hiking, snowmobiling, etc. are all more interesting with interesting plant and animal life.
But one sentiment I don't understand is this need to make environmentalism some kind of religion. I do not believe that the Earth and its creatures are sacred in any sense: why shouldn't Man have the right to do with the Earth as he pleases?
Rights are a civilized construct (e.g., humans in the wild didn't have a right to diddly-squat). If we choose to give rights to other plant and animal life, that's fine: I may not agree with that, but at least it would be an explicit choice. What irks me is that lots of environmentalists presume that other species have rights, when in fact they do not a priori.
But any choice to give rights to animals or plants will (and should) ultimately be for our own benefit. In this case, if it can be proved (yes, difficult) that annihiliating the tse tse fly will have no appreciable negative effect on human life (and in this case, I include the enjoyment and survival that humans derive from the environment), then it should in fact be annihilated, given the substantial negative effects tse tse flies have on humans.
That, and I think it's really hypocritical whenever people in industrialized nations try to tell third-worlders that they can't modernize because that would be bad for the Earth. =)
[ home ]
As for the argument that the few surviving tsetse flies could replenish the entire population: you're forgetting natural predators, the survivors having to find one another, and other population checks. If that argument were generally true, we would have no need for an 'Endangered Species Act'. :-) ..bruce..
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
More evidence that direct democracy is a bad idea. Perhaps we have a new candidate for the post of Witchfinder General.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
of a beowolf cluster of these flies!
~shine
but I suppose latex doesn't biodegrade very well. Plus they might complain about the sensitivity impact.
This BBC article has a video, which also ran
e ws id_1824000/1824576.stm
on BBC news for a couple of days:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/africa/n
BTW, this project is two years old - you hear
about it only now because the IAEA has hired
a PR consultancy to put a spin on the story.
(This comes from an IAEA insider source)
1) release sterile males
2) lots of females get fooled
3) population drops
4) females who mated with sterile males can't reproduce, and are selected against (duh)
5) females who mated with NON-sterile males are selected FOR
6) NON-sterile male population therefore rises
7) in absence of steady stream of sterile males, population skyrockets again
Do I have this wrong? This just seems like a very temporary solution. The only hope is to perhaps reduce the population so drastically that it is logistically impossible for the remaining non-sterile males to increase the population much. It seems the only way to really "solve" the problem, would be to somehow introduce a defect which has a high probability of killing flies before reproductive age (and that's disregarding the whole issue of whether we should be selectively extincting "pesky" species).
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
First, these aren't "mutant" flies. The only place where being irradiated turns the recipient into a mutant is the pages of Marvel comics. A mutation would exist if a sperm cell or ovum were altered. The offspring that arose from it would be the 'mutant'.
Second, the treated flies are sterile. That's the whole point of the exercise. They will mate with female tse tse flies who won't produce little tse-tse flies.
Third this is not a new technique. It was first (I believe) done with the screw-worm fly in Texas. It worked quite well there. Saved the cattle industry billions of dollars. If the female only mates once and her partner is sterile she won't reproduce. Note that I said "only mates once". This technique does not do any good if the female mates with more than one male. So it works with some species but not with others.
Fourth, someone said that if there are even two fertile flies the whole thing will be for naught. Not so. Biological control is a game of averages and percentages. You don't get absolutes very often. If the number of tse-tse flies can be significantly reduced it will still be a public health boon and a godsend to people with livestock.
The man who never alters his opinion is like the stagnant water and breeds Reptiles of the Mind -- William Blake
It's nice that all these concerned people are worried about the effect of increased agricultural productivity on Africa's ecology. It would surely be a horrible thing for those countries to be able to produce enough food for their people to survive. I guess that the average Slashdot reader would rather have the people on the edge of starvation and the flies fat, dumb and happy like they are now.
If the people living there want to do this, we have no right to say no unless we can solve their problems another way.
Damnit, Hemos, you misquoted, then misinterpreted, then misrepresented the Reuters article. Way to go!
If you'd read the article, it actually said (emphasis added):
See, they sterilized the flies. They didn't mutate fly eggs. Nobody said anything about deleterious effects on the flies themselves, you fool. They said the effect of throwing them out there is difficult to exaggerate.
Idiot.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
-The Professor, Futurama
Those opposed might do the same, before their ill founded fears keep the world from using a 40 year old, tested and verified idea to spare some 400,000 lives and untold livestock a year. Yes, ludites piss me off.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Jurassic Park is a STORY people. Not true. It sure isn't scientific. I mean, I know they threw around scientific terms and all. Maybe a jumbled hypothesis here and there. But IT'S NOT SCIENCE. And this is. It just seems soo very ignorant to me that people keep posting "Well, it didn't work for Jurassic Park."
~AC
"sterilized by a burst of radiation" "Mutant"
The two rules for success are:
1) Never tell them everything you know.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-intro-to-biolo gy.html
I'm out of my tree just now but please feel free to leave a banana.
...and they release it, I mean, hey... They're not exactly obtaining sperm counts from the little guys are they? There is a high likelyhood that they will be releasing flies who are less affected by short bursts of hard gammas... Crazy man, crazy. I thought we had figured out (like Socrates) that we know only that we know nothing when it comes to momma natura...
Loading...
no one has come up with a "imagine a beowulf cluster of these" kind of response :-)
no sig error.
There's no genetic engineering here, they sterilize the flies and release them after killing most of the wild flies with pesticides. The sterile males outnumber the wild ones, not many females successfully breed, population crashes.
I'm envisioning small insects with radioactive symbols painted on their backs, sent against rival tribes, where they explode into tiny mushroom clouds.
Luckily, the Zanbabooboo tribe has researched and developed nuclear frogs to deal with the incoming nuclear fly strikes.
Dictionary.com define Pheromones as:
A chemical secreted by an animal, especially an insect, that influences the behavior or development of others of the same species, often functioning as an attractant of the opposite sex.
Given that pheromones are the primary opposite-sex-attractant, what proof is there that the insects will even have the CHANCE to mate. They most likely won't mate because the sterile insects probably won't produce as many pheromones to attract the opposite sex; and, thus not fill the void that is the container for the sperm in the femail insect. (Sorry, don't know the organs name.)
When you look at the context (you *did* read the article, right), they are talking about the current effects of the tsetse fly in general, not the potential effects of the mutated one.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Introducing those flies is a good thing. These animals will cause stress on the population, but with a lesser/no chance of adaptation to it.
It's just inhibition/competition with a twist to fool nature. Good flies will try to mate with bad ones. Giving nothing as result (to make it clear, the flies don't see the difference between good or bad and if bad mates with good, there are eggs but just no offsping. One reproductive cycle returns nothing...). This makes the population smaller. The twist is the fact that they can't adapt to it, wich flies can and did to several pesticides.
If you introduce a certain stress factor onto a population, like pesticides, the most fit animal (the one that is capable of reproducing) will survive and make offspring that will also have a advantage to the "old" design. Making it better in reproducing...
But in this case you induce stress on an other level, you create stress that actually isn't there. Bad flies can mate but with nothing as result. But they don't feel stress, no good fly has an advantage to a bad one. All the flies are the same, are as capable as mating as others. But the bad ones give no offspring limiting the population. Short: animals don't react with evolution on population size, as long as it doesn't cause stress (whatever it may be). That's the trick...
So you see it is safe and friendly for the environment. But you will have to keep introducing bad flies for a considerable amount of time to get some results.
ps. Mutation by radiation will never be capable of surviving. The DNA is so damaged that even if one breeds the bad fly's offspring won't be able to reproduce. Unless the effect of the mutation sets in after reproduction, but then you're talking about chances that are smaller then natural mutations in a population I think.
"Anyone else out there think pumping large numbers of mutant insects into the environment might be a bad idea?"
Have you not even considered the human misery than could be prevented by eradication of the tsetse (sp?) fly?
bc
I forsee sightings of the Mothmen or Chupacrabra... Oh hysteria and absinthe how i love thee.... They may want to spread those flies around Noble, GA as well.
I can calculate the mean value of perennial moth velocities though....
lets get to the real issue of radiation oncologists releasing cancer patients back into the wild after they've been treated with radiation! Damn nuclear mutant cancer patients.
I heard the director of this project on NPR about a week ago. They are not producing "mutants" (flies that are genetically modified). Instead, they are using radiation to destroy the reproductive organ, thus eliminating the ability to reproduce. This reduces the population because every female that mates with a sterile male is NOT mating with a fertile male, effectively practicing a "form of birth control," per the director of the project. Nothing major here...
And as for "tactics" by groups who present options in the "harshest possible light even when they know they are lying"... that could be almost anyone, couldn't it? The NRA, Greenpeace, Microsoft, George Dubya. Anybody who wants to spin their message to the public. Not that I approve of such shenanigans, but then I'm clued in enough not to believe everything people tell me.
To me, ecological fear-mongering is wrong; right up there with ranting about an "axis of evil" or starting new wars "just cuz". Or pretending you care about Africans in order to make your attack against your "terrorists" seem like it's based in compassion... when it's really just an expression of paranoia that somehow a few hipies pleading for restraint will make any difference to the glorious and efficient progress of short-sighted technocrats.
Fear not! The world is being destroyed according to schedule. Your grandchildren will enjoy their domed lives immensely, I'm sure. I (like the poor flies) will not be adding my genes to the pool, so I don't care how much the rest of you screw it up.
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
Let see, you steralize a Bull and he becomes an OX. Much stronger and persistent.
These are Super flies
Any by the way, who gave them permission? I am positive they are not Africans. Just a big ass experiment on Africans. This shit has got to stop.
Worse, by far, than pumping the environment full of mutants is spreading existing, organisms already adapted to their local ecosystems willy-nilly around the globe into other ecosystems in the name of "global diversity" and then allowing the verbal ones to grab control of the most advanced military in the world screaming "genes don't matter" over the din of bombing raids "to prevent ethnic cleansing".
Seastead this.
This has worked in the past. The OMNR and probably some of the DNR's have been releasing sterile lamprey eels into the great lakes for a while now. What happens is a sterile male claims part of the breeding area, usually in the st. mary's river this leaves a small amount of breeding area unavailable to fertile males. Multiply that by thousands of times and it becomes a reasonable solution. Of course lamprey eels are an invading species while the tetse fly is endemic to that part of the world.
...hybridizing different bee species in south america. We all know how well that little experiment went.
Life will find a way.
Screw Micro$oft.
Sure it's a good idea.
We can only speculate if it's good for africa,
but it's very good for the scientists and the fly breeders.
In theory, using radiation to sterilize tsetse flies is much safer than hitting them with pesticides (which hit everything else in the ecosystem at the same time). However, one risk exists that needs to be recognized: failed sterilizations. If we assume that 99.9% of all tsetse flies irradiated are successfully sterilized, and if we assume that we irradiate 1,000,000 flies, then we have 1000 flies that are still capable of reproduction, but which have likely sustained genetic damage due to the irradiation. That means you've released 999,000 sterile flies into the environment, but you've also released 1,000 flies that may produce true mutant offspring.
The agricultural industry has done the same type of thing for decades to develop new plant varieties. Sure, a big percentage of irradiated plants may not produce offspring. Then again, those that do may have "interesting" mutations...
That said, I think this is a risk/benefit situation which does come down on the side of the benefits. Pesticides are really a Bad Thing by comparison. Of course, after all is said and done and I'm staring down hyperintelligent mutants I may reverse my stand on that...
Life is short: void the warranty.
I wonder if we can't use this sterilization method on other species? I can think of at least 20 humans who should probably take a quick dose of that jazz...
Chicks dig my good /. karma.
The smallpox virus is a very important element in the preservation of wildlife in the World - wherever there are large concentrations of smallpox virus, there will be much fewer people, since 30% of smallpox cases are fatal. If the smallpox virus was eliminated a major impediment to human overpopulation and people overrunning the natural habitat of World wildlife would be removed, and biodiversity of the region put at further risk. Anyone willing to accept for five seconds that the environment is not a simple system???
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
following taylor's (or just about any other ecological philosopher's) example, humans are once again overstepping their boundaries. this unfortunately, leads to no good.
hell, if you wanted to take a metaphysical standpoint (as i understand 85%+ of the world's population is religios), God meant for humans to be stewards of his Earth. Basically, he wanted us simply to take care of the animals. How is this 'taking care' of them in any moral sense?
But it's obvious that their environment can hold more flies (that's why there's so many in the first place), so within a generation or two, you're right back up there.
Using precisely this method. See
This U.S. Department of Agriculture web page
The blurb that accompanies this post has two BIG errors. One is calling them mutants. The article says they are sterilized, not mutant or genetically engineered. This other error is in the supposed quote from the article: "The impact on the fly is difficult to exaggerate." The article actually said: "The impact OF the fly is difficult to exaggerate." The difference between OF and ON is a rather large difference.
I think a correction is needed in the blurb, and it should point out the difference in the quote.
We have been doing this kind of thing for a long time here in Florida. The following link talks about doing the same thing with the Med. Fruit Fly (http://www.aphis.usda.gov/oa/pubs/fsmedfly.html).
I think total elimination of the species is a little ambitious but it should definitely help.
This is often tried, but fails, because the fleas go to a new host. This new host is Man. So the fleas carry the plague to more humans. Better idea to kill the rats before a plague epidemic, but how do you know?
use Bielefeld.pm
There seem to be a few misconceptions here.
The level of radiation being applied to the flies will leave them STERILE. There will be no wildly successful random mutations breeding in the wild.
The mutation danger would come from longer term but lower level radiation (such as a significantly elevated background radiation) which has a much better chance of causing a mutation without causing setrility.
So, as long as they don't use a breeder reactor for the irradiation...:-)
I would suggest a contingency plan to re-introduce the files in the event that their vacated niche is being taken over by an even more harmful organism (unlikely but possable). I imagine they could use files from the breed and sterilize program as new stock in necessary.
Does anyone know where the flies contract the parasite? I wonder if the flies could be temporarily erradicated long enough to erradicate the parasite, then re-introduce uninfected flies.
Given the nature of alarmist, reactionary postings about "mutant" flies, perhaps the mod system needs a new category: Ill-informed (-1).
*** Quantum Mechanics: The Dreams of Which Stuff is Made ***
Sounds like someone has issues.
Oh wait, it was Jeff Goldblum and Eric Stoltz running away shrieking like little girls. :)
:)
"Drink deep of the plasma springs, or drink not at all." - Seth Brundle (quoting someone else probably)
If we are bombarding these flies with radiation isn't that like playing pool (as in pool with millions of que balls and billions of balls on the table) to make them sterile?
.01% of the target flies winds up mutated and not sterile. (And no, that's not unreasonable). Couldn't we wind up with more problems?
What if just
What if the parasite which these flies carry (and it would be insane to think no parasites get into the batches being zapped) get mutated by the radiation?
I find this frightening as well.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
I believe I can say without fear of contradiction that irradiating these flies will not cause them to give birth to 2-headed fish.
Now that is something I've never seen before; an on-topic statement that can be posted to /. without fear of contradiction! I am astounded.
-- MarkusQ
For all of you out there worried about the reduction in biodiversity, this article should set your hearts at ease.
On a lighter note I wonder how many of you would complain about the reduction of biodiversity if your backyard was infested with parasite toting tsetse death hordes.
What doesn't kill you, only postpones the inevitable.
Not just the USA. They're continuing the eradication all the way down to the Isthmus of Panama.
... to combat screwworm outbreaks by selling sterile flies produced by the U.S.-Mexico facility in southern Mexico."
"With only 25 screwworm cases during 1990--none since July--Mexico is approaching the point where it can be declared free of this pest.
Eradication efforts continue to make progress in Belize and Guatemala."
And, in a very rare episode of international cooperation, in Libya. When these creatures attacked, a bunch of people realized it was time to put politics aside, and very surprisingly they did it.
"In response to an outbreak of screwworms in Libya, APHIS was able to obtain passage of legislation to permit cooperation with foreign
governments [meaning Qaddafi]
Not to the Isthmus of Panama. To the Isthmus of Tehuantepec--but later to Panama:
"The United States-Mexico Joint Commission was formed in 1972 between Mexico and the United States with the goal of eliminating the pest from Mexico and pushing the barrier to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, just north of Guatemala. A new sterile screwworm plant at Tuxtla Gutierrez, Chiapas, Mexico, was dedicated in 1976. With a production capacity of more than 500 million sterile flies per week, it replaced the former production plant in Mission, Texas, which was closed in January 1981. APHIS also is cooperating with Central American countries and Panama in efforts eradicate screwworms from those countries and establish and maintain a barrier of sterile flies at the Darien Gap between Panama and Colombia.
As a result of these cooperative efforts, Mexico was officially declared free of screwworms in 1991, Belize and Guatemala in 1994, and El Salvador in 1995. In addition, Honduras is considered technically free, with no pest detections since January 1995. Currently, screwworm program officials are focusing their efforts on eradicating the pest from Nicaragua and Costa Rica. APHIS hopes to begin eradication activities in Panama, the final frontier of the program, in 1997. Eradication activities include regulation of cattle movement, wound treatment, and the release of sterile flies. To date, the program has been very successful."
This strategy of seeding the tsetse fly population with sterile flies in order to reduce successful reproduction is clever, but it would be much more fun if they released cane toads to eat the flies instead.
A hundred or so shipped in from Australia should do the trick.
The whole situation with the Medfly is that they can only mate once, though dumping a huge number of *supposedly* sterile males really helps out the population in this case.
This doesn't sound plausible. The whole point of the male strategy is that you don't need most males (before anyone goes off on a political tangent here, it's a simple matter of ratios and definitions; "sperm" is what we call the smaller, more plentiful gamites, and "egg" is what we call the larger, rarer ones. By definition there are almost always more sperm than the egg-market needs, and males are thus (genetically) expendable. This has nothing to do with politics.) so adding a bunch more excess males shouldn't change anything. The only case I can see that it would matter is if they had them almost wiped out, so that individuals of either gender were unlikely to find mates.
-- MarkusQ
They brought the mongoose over to help control the rat population.... but rats come out at night and mongoose are day creatures - so the rats are doing just fine and the mongoose ate all the native bird species eggs - and now we have few native birds left.
Same as with the gorst and the cactus... those were brought over to feed the cattle... but the cattle didn't like them... so they started taking over the entire island -- so the government brought in insects to kill the gorst and cactus... but what's going to kill the bugs?
The latest is we have coqoi frogs appearing... they have 100+ decibel chirps for a single frog about the size of a dime. Where did they come from? House plants shipped in and sold at Walmart and other nurserys... the solution? Spray the environment with caffine - which kills the frogs immediatly... but what does it do to the rest of the critters it lands on (other than hopping them up)?
This happens over and over again... people *think* they know a solution, but they don't bother testing it and watching it carefully enough to ensure that the solution doesn't in itself become a problem.
We can't just start eradicating all things that can harm us. One thing is trying to control plagues, but to obliterate another species is playing God (or Nature). This plague exists to control population of other species (humans included) and so that life can continue as we know it. Something like this can have a mayor impact on the natural balance of our environment.
C'mon. Sterilizing flies with radiation doesn't produce mutants. D/monix has watched one too many Troma films, and needs to be slapped around till he joins the rest of us in reality.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
Nature has a very good algorithm for maintaining all the life-forms in the environment. It's called natural selection. Any attempt to throw spanner in it's work will be disastrous for entire eco-system. If the nature decides to strike back, we won't recognize our own progeny..
"The sterile flies with compete with the non-sterile flies for resources. So some sterile flies will die. This will leave a lot more than 2 sterile flies left."
That's not how it works. It works like this: The sterile flies compete for MATES, not resources. These boys are sterile, but still have all their natural instincts. Lots of mating takes place, but no fertilization. Satisfied but deceived she-flies lay eggs that will never hatch.
And, the way to tell if it'll never work, is to look at where it's been tried. This technique has worked very well over the last 40 or 50 years in screwworm eradication.
This is not the first time this approach to control populations of a pest has been used. It works. Screw worms were a big problem in US agriculture: they layed eggs in any open wound in livestock, e.g. umbilical cord of new-borns. Ugly way for an animal to die, being eaten from the inside.
Rachel Carson approved, and the following specifically recommends their use with Tetse flies:
http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monke
There will be 'side-effects', of course. Definition of a system is that "you can't do just one thing". --> wisdom of this is a different issue.
Lew Glendenning
"The Constitution, the WHOLE Constitution, and nothing but the CONSTITUTION."
The black plague got it's start due to the witch histeria overrunning Europe at the time. Many people believed that cats were evil animals and witch's familiars etc... and they were killed by the thousands during the 1300s, especially in cities. Farm communities were generally less caught up in the whole witch craze, plus they knew that cats were useful parts of their ecosystems and kept them around.
--- It is not the things we do which we regret the most, but the things which we don't do.
Last time a mutant species was unleashed on the world, it was, and still is, a menace that we would verymuch like to get rid of.
;-). Still, messing with things like this aren't good ideas.
Of course I'm talking about the 'Africanized Killer Bees'. I'm sure that wasn't their nickname in the labratory though
Personally, I'd like to see the Mosquito wiped off the earth, but not by replacing it with something else nearly as bad. It's just never a good idea. Why do you think you get asked by customs agents if you brought any fruit with you? They know the dangers and really want to avoid the whole super-mutant-insect-who-takes-over-the-ecosystem problem.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I know this post is going to be buried but I'll say it anyway:
/. FUD on this one. These flies aren't 'nuclear' or 'radioactive'. They've been steralized (by radiation) the idea being that there will be so many sterile flies that populations of flies will decrease as ones 'in the wild' mate with the sterile ones and don't produce offspring.
As someone who lived in Africa I can tell you first hand how nasty those flies are. Their huge and they hurt when they bite you. Fortunatly I was vaccinated against some of the nasty diseases they carry such as Yellow Fever and African Sleeping Sickness. Unfortunatly most of the population of Africa is too poor to even know what a vaccine is much less afford one. So any idea to get rid of the flies is a good one.
I'm ashamed by the
The Anti-Blog
Couldn't this potentially make the flies that they want to eradicate more resistant, hence stronger?
Nature always seeks balance. It may take a while for changes to occur (actually this sense of balance is quite dynamic), but IMHO I don't believe that it's possible to accelerate such change. There will just be an imbalance somewhere else in the web of life. Whether or not that the change elsewhere affects humans is the interesting question.
Cheers,
Kachbo
Seriously. Almost every evolutionary statement of "progress" is based on mutation. Humans are a product of mutation. We mutated from our predecessors. Our environment itself helped the mutation process in the past (UV, oxygen, radiation).
Furthermore, environmental pressures, which includes but is not all caused by radiation, has just as much a role in the selective process (mutation being the first step, selection of a mutation being the second).
Don't think that just because we consider ourselves the dominant species on this planet that every little thing we do is going to cause catastrophic change. The fact that we drive cars around and cut down trees has a greater effect than any amount of radiation we have released, including this little pidilly release of *sterile* insects.
Well, I suppose I will. The whole point is that if we release a 99 times as many sterile males into the environment as there are fertile males, females are only 1% as likely to find a fertile mate. Thus, after this generation dies, population is down 99%. Very effective.
Second, the huge increase in fly populations causes a huge increase in predator populations, which eat the flies that do get born next generation. Thus, the flies take a double beating.
Third, the ones that remain suffer from inbreeding.
This method was used to great effect agaist the screwworm fly in the US sometime in the middle of the 20th century. But with the screwworm fly, its the maggots that are the problem, while with the tsetse fly, its the flies that spread disease etc. So the downside is that in the short run, more people may get sleeping sickness.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
We will release our mutant bats to combat the over population of bats. And then when all the flies are gone and the bats start taking over the town, we'll then release a pack of killer wolves to take care of the bats...
- grunby
For one thing, they're going to attack with pesticides first, which will already reduce the fly population a great deal. THEN they will release sterile flies. They're not going to release just 50% of the current population. In the article, they say 'heavily outnumbering current males'. So let's say they release 25 times as many sterile flies as there are natural ones. That will drop the reproduction rate to 4% of its current level. If they continue this treatment for two or three generations, the flies will probably drop below a viable number and die out. They reproduce very slowly compared to most insects, so they're particularly vulnerable to this kind of attack. Your statement that 'flies breed like flies' is wrong in this case; tsetse flies are unique in their breeding habits. The number of mating pairs IS the limiting factor here.
Ok, so let's grant your argument that the agency is out to leech money forever instead of completely eradicating the flies. Even so, the Africans are probably STILL better off. Damages of 4.5 billion a year on a small economy like theirs is ENORMOUS. All that wealth is destroyed every year, so it's not available to grow and make more wealth the year following. (cattle die out and don't breed, etc.) If they cut that loss to 10% of what it is now, and pay, say, 100 million dollars a year to some outfit to do this... they're WAY WAY ahead. Given 10 to 15 years of reduced losses, the impact on their standard of living should be enormous. They should then be able to pay for a better solution that gets rid of the fly completely, assuming that one exists. If not, they're still a lot better off losing $550 million a year instead of 4.5 billion. And we're a little better off too, bringing back 100 million a year (just pulling that number out of the air) that otherwise would have been destroyed. It's a great arrangement for both parties.
As an aside, I really have to complain again about the poor journalism on this story. Editors, EVERY WORD in a submission is important. That means to check ALL of them. Make sure they are accurate. The submitter changed a word ('on' replaced 'of'), perhaps deliberately, and you guys passed it through verbatim. Even if your editorial policy prevents you from correcting errors in the actual submission text, you should note the error in your own blurb below.
This is just another example of many where the lead-in to the article implied that it meant something near and dear to geek hearts everywhere, when in fact the actual article said something entirely different. This submission was heavily slanted. Doing just a little basic fact-checking before sending these things through verbatim would go a long way toward enhancing your credibility. I've seen high school newspapers handle this better.
Near where I live they breed steril mosquitos to release in to the area to control the population... ...and you can not underestimate the power of the mosquito... ...they are nasty. Specific techniques to control population may be questionable though
Darthtuttle
Thought Architect
In some parts of the world, background radiation is *significantly* higher than you'll find in a nuclear power plant!
It's natural and affects all of us all the time. It's inescapable. So how come when we have the emotive words "nuclear" and "mutant" in the same sentence, it suddenly becomes a big issue? Get real people. We're *all* affected by it, and arguably the product of it ourselves.
If the proposal was to release genetically engineered flies with say their disease resistance altered, than that may be an issue. But sterilized flies, the product of an accelerated natural process? Forget it!
For those of you who have never lived in or visited sub-Saharan Africa and who didn't bother reading the article, the tsetse fly is not "just" a "fly". A bite from a tsetse fly means that there is a high probability that you WILL contract sleeping sickness. This illness is called sleeping sickness because it KILLS you. As the article says, 80% of people who contract "sleeping" sickness end up dying. While wild animals are generally immune to the bite of a tsetse fly, horses and cattle aren't. This means that vast areas of the continent that might otherwise be used for agriculture to sustain human life are off limits, although humans still live there.
Tsetse flies do not like to fly long distances (maybe > a couple hundred metres) out in the open, in the wind. This means that one of the main ways of preventing their spread right now is to cut wide swaths through the forest at the edge of tsetse fly areas in order to attempt to keep them from the rest of the region. Then they place police/military checkpoints at the roads in these areas to look through your car and spray it. Of course, with the economy of most countries in this area, they're maybe not doing this any more as it's been a few years since I've been there. Anyways, for those of you concerned with the biodiversity of the region and the delicate balance of nature, you can chew on the ramifications of mowing down hundreds/thousands of acres of land for no other reason.
Anyways, these flies aren't just pests. They carry a deadly disease for which, as far as I know, there is no cure. I'm not a biologist (IANAB) and I can't say whether this is a "good" or "bad" idea, but these are just some facts to think about.
www.clarke.ca
Like you have a choice. Have you taken a look at how many "news" sources they own?
-prator
I did high school in Africa. The TseTes fly transmits sleeping sickness (a.k.a Nagana). And now they are irradiated.
.. Aww can't a superman close an eye without somebody falling in trouble .... Zzzz, Zzzz"
What does this mean? A new super hero: Sleeping Super Man?
"Look Sleeping super man! Your sign is in the sky!"
"Zzzzz, Zzzzz. *mumble, mumble*
"But superman, you have been asleep for 3 days!"
Maybe if we allowed countries to produce medicines needed for their citizens at an affordable cost, we wouldn't need to resort to irradiating the carriers of disease. What do tsetse flies carry? Sleeping sickness. Is there a cure? Yes. Does the company that owns the patent produce the cure? No, it is not profitable. Can African countries produce it for themselves? No, it is patented and the risk severe backlash from the US if they want to break that patent (the US protecting the rights of its corporations through oppression? never.).
A cure for the disease exists, it is up to the people of the world to stand up and say that morality is more powerful than economic rationalism and profit. That and governments frittering away aid on corruption and war mongering.... but but does any government not fritter away money on war mongering and corruption?
Cheers,
Maset
Being sterilized by radiation cannot mutate the flies. And furthermore, if they are sterilized, they can't procreate, so they aren't going to hurt much.
Sucks to be them, though.
"After pesticides have sharply reduced the population, the sterilized males are released in large numbers into the breeding population, heavily outnumbering fertile males in the fight to mate. Over time, the tsetse population falls to zero. "
... We'll see
God spoke to me
science is a religion
No, I don't. In entomological circles, this is known as autocidal insect pest control. It is considered very environmentally-sound because it is targeted at only the pest species; there isn't any "collateral damage." It is also more effective and safer than other modern insect pest control methods such as chemicals, which while safe, are ineffective in the long run as insects adapt to resist the pesticide.
What worries me more is not the immediate methodology, but the potential long-term effects on the food chain. Dipteran maggots are players in decomposition processes, and the flies themselves could be a major source of food for certain species of bird. However, considering the human diseases that the tsetse flies vector, and their annoying effect on livestock (yes, this is actually an issue; a goat with flies all over its head won't produce as much milk due to stress), it's a good thing (Martha Stewart might agree).
-------------------------
Stupid people suck.
I believe you think erradicating the smallpox and polio viri is bad as well. After all, they do feed and live and reproduce...
Hugo
Did anyone read the article? They aren't genetically engineered flys, the radiation doesn't genetically alter the flys, it just renders their "sperm" in capable of fertilizing an egg... geez
The government has been doing something similar in Arizona for at least 20 years, in an attempt to control the bot fly population.
This isn't a situation where the sterilized tsetse flies will be dropped once and that'll be the end of it. To be effective the program will have to continue for a significant amount of time.
I didn't expect this kind of response to an article like this on slashdot. Mutant Insects? C'mon. There is a world of difference between releasing radiation sterilized flies and some 1950's apocalyptic vision of killer mutant ants.
We're finally pulling our collective heads out of our asses and beginning look at nuclear technology in a some what rational manner (eg. Nasa's recent committment to nuclear propulsion, renewed interest in new civilian nuclear power plants)
Let's at least try to keep the discussion of nuclear technologies on slashdot balanced. Don't assume that everyone agrees with the formulation: Nuclear = Bad.
If you have a concern with a specific application then state it clearly and logically. Simply invoking words like "mutant" and "nuclear" won't press any of my buttons. This isn't 1979 anymore.
You mean to tell me you are actually quoting someting from a movie (especially that movie) as fact?? Yeah, and next we will have a dinosaur park and everything... get real man. Besides, even if they "found a way" what threat would that pose, the only danger i could see is a possible shift if the local ecosystem, with tsetse flies replacing whatever the hell else is already down there.
Ok, yet another project designed to help those poor, suffering Africans. Wonderful. A continent full of people with no food, no medical care, no concepts of hygene, and how do we help them? By keeping them alive a little longer so they can have more children, and in the long run, just make things worse.
The rest of the world is never going to really kick in enough money to Africa to seriously fix stuff. So how about trying to just straighten things out the natural way; leave them to die. Without intervention, AIDS, malaria and starvation will ravage the continent, eventually bringing populations in line with what the land can actually support, and they can start over and perhaps get things right this time, assuming the Europeans don't just claim it all as territory again.
You might have a different perspective if it were your people dying in incredible numbers. Sterilization through radiation occurs all the time - probobly to the meat you've eaten and more recently to mail you've handled...I'd prefer we didn't have to do it too, but the any alternative to dying now would probobly appeal to me if I was over there. Hard to argue with the "I want to live now argument."
There seems to be some silly misconceptions floating about. Let's be sure that we understand that these flies are NOT...
1) Mutants. They have been sterilized by radiation. Their genes have NOT been altered, but rather their reproductive organs have been destroyed. Moreover, even if there was a genetic mutation caused by the radiation it could not be passed on because the flies are sterile.
2) Genetically Engineered - They are not changed genetically. The sterilization has been done by irradiating the insect thereby killing the reproductive structures. These are not comic book superflies.
3) Radioactive. The flies are irradiated, not radioactive. Induced radioactivity is a short term effect (days-weeks if I recall). No glow in the dark flies to see here (aside from the natural firefiles).
I do disagree with the article's assertion that they can eliminate 100% of the population.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
Find me ONE human that does
not live such that they imperish the lives of others (be they the
third generation in the future, or the current).
So you want us to show you a dead person???
South Africa has been doing this for many decades, to control Coddling Moths and other flies, by releasing millions of sterilized flies in agricultural areas. I'm sure the same is done in the USA to control other pests. Nothing new here.
The problem is that one has to keep doing it. It is a control measure that doesn't require the use of pesticides, but is expensive and requires a huge logistical support effort.
as long as the selector dot is on the flute you can't be harmed by tsetse flies or snakes.
http://www.o zyr.com/atari/raiderso.html
What are the problems these flies cause us; they prevent the human population from spiraling out of control. The results of the human population explosion is that we get more wars and famines. Also we destroy vast areas of natural environments, and endanger many other species, some of which may be benificial for future human development. It seems to me that the problem is caused by the spiraling human population, not by the flies.
Maybe we should control the human population until we can be trusted to be self sufficient and responsible with our environment as a whole, and leave the rest of the worlds fragile ecology alone.
Sorry if this seems a little radical, however when we look at effecting ecologies we need to look at the effect of raising the human population rather than always considering it an advantage. Is the earth really just there for our plunder, or do we want to keep it as a viable environement for us and other species for the forseeable future?
We've already got to face up to the problems that industialisation has caused and continues to cause especially the large industrial nations -i.e. the US, which should wake up and sort out its disgraceful behaviour in these areas, and of course figure out a way of producing a sustainable industial society, or find a better alternative.
Of course however large energy providers do indeed want to see more heavy industialisation across the globe, as it helps to garuntee a long term future for them.
Enough of my cynicism of human nature, feel free to flame.
Sleeping sickness is an infectious parasitic disease carried by tsetse flies from the Trypanosoma brucei family of parasites and characterized by inflammation of the brain and the covering of the brain (meninges).
Alternative names
African trypanosomiasis
Causes, incidences, and risk factors
Sleeping sickness is caused by two organisms, Trypanosoma bruceri rhodesiense and Trypanosoma bruceri gambiense. Rhodesiense produces the most severe form of the illness.
After a person is bitten by an infected fly, a red painful swelling develops at the site of the fly bite, similar to that seen in Chagas disease. From this site of inoculation, the parasite invades the blood stream causing episodes of fever, headache, sweating, and generalized enlargement of the lymph nodes. Parasites then invade the central nervous system (early with rhodesiense and later with gambiense) where they produce the symptoms typical of sleeping sickness.
Ultimately the parasites invade the brain, causing first behavioral changes such as fear and mood swings followed by headache, fever, and weakness. Simultaneously, the patient may develop myocarditis.
Death may occur within 6 months from cardiac failure or infection if the person is infected with rhodesiense. Gambiense infection may require up to 2 years before symptoms of infection in the central nervous system appear.
Gambiense-infected people develop drowsiness during the day, but insomnia at night. Sleep becomes uncontrollable as the disease progresses until the patient becomes comatose.
Risk factors include living in those parts of Africa where the disease is found and being bit by tsetse flies. The incidence is extremely low in the U.S., and is only found in travelers from those areas.
Prevention
Pentamidine injections protect against gambiense, but have not yet been demonstrated as effective against rhodesiense. Insect control could help prevent the spread of sleeping sickness.
Symptoms
Swollen red painful nodule at site of inoculation
Generalized lymphadenopathy (swollen lymph nodes all over the body)
Headache
Fever
Sweating
Anxiety
Increased sleepiness
Insomnia at night
Mood changes
Drowsiness
Uncontrollable urge to sleep
Signs and tests
Physical examination may show signs of meningoencephalitis (inflammation of the brain and meninges).
Tests
Peripheral blood smear (demonstrates motile trypanosomes in blood)
Lymph node aspiration (demonstrates motile trypanosomes in node material)
CSF (demonstrates motile trypanosomes in CSF)
Low red blood cell count in blood
Elevated globulin levels
Low albumin leverls
Elevated ESR
Antibody and antigen test are not very helpful
Provided that:
1.) the radiation completely eliminates the fly's reproductive capabilities and
2.) the flies do not remain radioactive
then what dangers could be lurking?
The fly no longer can reproduce and it carries no residual ratiation to harm anything that ingests or decomposes the fly. So even if other aspects of the fly's physiology is mutated, its impact is stricly limmited to the fly's short lifespan.
Am I missing something some other dangers?
Did ANY of these folks see Jurassic Park?
Why do we fight to protect pandas from extinction but are hell bent eradicating these flies? Why is one species more elligible for our protection than others? If it's because pandas don't harm people, what about tigers? Maneating tigers have become quite common in various parts in India and Nepal. Yet we still protect them. Is the eligibility for protection-from-extinction based on how pretty they are? Are scientists being too shallow? If it's protecting a species is what we're concerned about, shouldn't flies weigh in just as much as tigers,pandas,rhinos etc..? Seems to me we are trying to touch-up the natural picture by taking out ugly pesky things and hilighting the pretty looking ones. I'd say we're playing 'artist' (as opposed to playing god...) and not being scientific at all about this.
The fact of the matter is that sterelizing flies with radiation is perfectly safe. They're not going to become mutants...the only way for that to happen (a la Heran J. Muller) would be if they were given enough radiation to affect their gametes, but not enough to kill them...the radiation affects the DNA in the sperm and that yields a mutant. These flies are hit with a sterilizing dose, so they can't pass on any mutant DNA. Not to mention that for Muller to get a mutation in his drasophila melanogaster population he had to irradiate a buttload of flies and the result he got was that he eventually found one fly with white eyes (instead of the wild type red eyes). Whoop-tee-doo.
Of course I'd rather that they didn't go through with this at all, since anything that reduces the population of Africans is a good thing.
OK, they give birth to larvae, not lay eggs like ordinary respectable arthropods. Principle is the same, anyway. Here is all you probably want to know about sleeping sickness with large drawings of the brain-eating microbes, from a professor at Tulane.
The World Health Organization's page on trypanosomiasis.
For population control, predators (including parasites) don't work nearly as well as the demographic transition. Learn about this concept, because it controls your future. Definition with nice graph.
lot of people in Africa malnourished. Short sight solution : let us reap further the environnement by destroying nearly a whole specy 8even if those are sinsect) and make more agricultured zone, more livestock, more food. Too bad if it does not solve the problem, only shift it by poverishing the soil, destroying in some case the fertile layer. Long sighted solution : educate the population, help raise the social richness and economy of the region, raise health standard, and educate the population to reproduce less to go back to a number of people which can be supported by the local economy. The long sighted solution give Africa the possibility to takes its destinity in hands by self- supporting itself without destroying its environnement. The short sighted solution only enable a timely self support only to come back to famine later when the environnement is destroyed. Nice article anyway.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
That reminds me of what they did in australia to control the population of rabbits.
They introduced predators to hunt the rabbits and the predators ended up liking kangaroos more then rabbits so they started hunting the kangaroos.
Maybe it's better to just have nature take its course?
Killing biodiveristy is aginst our own interest: the fewer species there are the easier it is for an oportunistic disease to wipe out big amounts of individuals.
Once the wildlife is gone the parasites, virii and bateria in the wild will have to concentrate only in humans and its domesticated animals to make a living.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
They've been doing this for years in CA. Whenever they find a medfly infestation, they release a ton of sterile medflies, made sterile by radiation.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
I am a computational biochemist at Stanford and I shake my head at public responses to these things. "Oh no! Irradiated Meat! It must be dangerous!" Never mind that it's the safest and best way to ensure pathogen/parasite-free meat. Same thing here. They're "mutants" so they must be an environmental disaster waiting to happen. This is a proven technique that will work since they are introducing the exact same species. It doesn't work when you stick in predators or something (the rabbit fiasco in Australia for instance) but sterilized individuals of the same species will work great. And as Darwin would say, "who cares how mutated they are if they can't breed to pass any of that crap on?" Anyway, there's my two-cents.
For those who keep saying "if you have just two flies...."
Refer to basic biology and evolution, which should have been taught in high school. In general, if a population falls below a certain critical number the survivors will eventually die out due to inbreeding. There are exceptions (e.g., the California Condor) and prime examples (e.g., the Florida Panther). Exceptions require rather good luck in that all the surviving members must be genetically diverse and lacking any duplication of damaging defects.
But the likelihood of the species surviving in any local area if just two oppposite-sex members survive is quite low. The multiplication of defects in future generations will almost certainly destroy that population even if they manage to find each other and mate amidst all those sterile males.
The whole 'Adam and Eve' thing makes for a nice fairy tale - but that's all. It's a good bet that the flies are doomed.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Hell, I love the environment, but I realize the need to save human life & livelihood when I see it. Too many of you seem too comfortable with sitting in front of your computers in your cubicle this morning with a coffee & bagel, deciding that Africans should continue to get sick & lose livestock because you don't want them to "harm the ecosystem".
For all of the environmentalists lamenting the horrible, cataclysmic attack upon the Tstetse fly, consider for a second if it were YOU and YOUR family's health & livelihood that took a constant beating because of these little boogers, if it was your kid almost dead with sleeping sickness, or your cattle you've spent the last 2 years raising that're fast becoming worthless. If there was an infestation by an insect that made people sick and destroyed fiber-optic cable in the SF bay area or New York City you would all shut the fsck up so fast it'd make John Muir's corpse spin.
For fsck's sake, if you want to preserve the environment deal with the planks in your own eyes before pointing out the motes in the African's.
The only tool you've got against psychosis is experience.
If a population gets extremely small, it becomes unstable, and is likely to go extinct. When the population density is high, holes get filled in by colonization. When the population is low, clusters tend to dissipate. The tsetse has fast gestation, so it would be tough, but i picture hitting the population with a new batch of sterile males just around maturity time for all those born around the first attack. The few females left would be unlikely to find fertile males.
Worry about mutation: most mutations are deleterious, and beneficial ones are subtle changes that give offspring an advantage in competition for reproduction (food, water, shelter, survival, getting dates, getting their children succeed in the same). It's unlikely that a mutation in a sex cell in a single male, who made it through the radiation fertile but mutated and reproduced, would give his offspring an advantage over the world at large, nor even over other tsetses.
Release 1/10**9 males is fertile, 1/10**9 mutations is beneficial. release 10**9 flies, and you're releasing 1/1**9 beneficial mutations. I like those odds.
To me, the only beneficial mutation would be the mutation in the sub-saharan biome involving the loss of that speces. Maybe we can take out the anopheles mosquito next.
mutant means that there is some kind of mutation. it does not mean exposed to radition. being exposed to radiation does not mean will something mutate. lastly mutant most assuredly does not mean sterile. pick the word that you actually mean, not the one that will get more people to read an article. the first word in /.'s subtitle is "news," not "sensationalism."
lets lay yellow journalism to rest...
I've seen some posts to the effect that "I wouldn't want alien races trying this out on us.." Those who like sci-fi might want to search out the short story 'The Screwfly Solution' by Raccoona Sheldon (a pen name of Alice H.B. Sheldon). Instead of sterile males, however, it's males who have been chemically modified to cross what the author sees as the slim divide between human sexual response and violence. It's truly a horrifying story, told in an interesting way.
Well said.
Didn't we see this movie already?
Now, maybe if we could just release massive numbers of mutant sterilized Mira Sorvinos into the population...
--D
That's what they all say -- they all say "D'oh". -- Chief Wiggum
This solution is slightly more advanced than other African plans for dealing with tsetse flies. I remember back in the early/mid 80's at some southern African borders, while your car was stopped a man would come out with a sort of duster stick (made from the tail of a zebra/horse/donkey) and brush off your car to remove any tsetse flies that may be wanting to get a ride over the border on your vehicle. I'm sure that plan was terribly effective.
Mod my comments down. It'll be fun.
Besides, it was probably the letter that got irradiated . .
hawk
If it works, maybe we can do the same thing with NSYNC before releasing them into the wild.... :)
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
You had better keep your nuclear mutant insects out of Africa, or we will unleash our deadly Bakassi soldiers on you...
---
Billions of bilious blue blistering barnacles...
Am I a hipster-doofus?
Something like this has already been done, and very effectively with screworm .
You computer people for the most part don't understand biology, especially fiddlin' with it...which is funny cause you like to hack everything else?!?!
only infrmatn esentil to understandn mst b tranmitd
Yeah, I wasn't aware they did that in Canada already, but that's the first thing that came to my mind when I read this story.
I wish they'd get going on a similar project to eliminate some of the mosquitoes here in the U.S.
Where I live, in the midwest, we've had a big problem with mosquitoes ever since we had some bad flooding in the early 1990's. I guess they've done a lot of pesticide-spraying in the swampy areas that became prime breeding-grounds - but more could and should be done.
I don't know of a single positive thing that can be said about mosquitoes, really. They don't produce anything we can use (unlike honey from bees, for example), and they don't seem to contribute to the ecosystem in any way I'm aware of. Meanwhile, they carry and spread diseases, and cause discomfort to millions of people every year.
My point is that, if the released males turn out not to be sterile, it shouldn't significantly help (or hurt) the next generation fly population.
-- MarkusQ
I've seen 'em flyin' around here, I tell ya! Horribly mutated, and they got SUPERPOWERS! They got SIX legs instead o' the natural two, and they got 100's of eyes and they can FLY and spit acid to dissolve their food!
Run fer the hills!
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Now, first of all, these flies are not mutated. Their genes should be not be affected (or significantly affect) because they were irradiated to be sterilized - NOT mutated, but damaged. These are damaged flies we are talking about.
Second, this has be done several times in the past. The idea is that if you release a certain number of some critter into the wild that cannot have young, it will be difficult for those that can have young to find a mate that is not sterile. Some (ie. far less than with the sterile flies were not present) will manage to have young, but most will not. These flies, being abundant, probably have an abundance of predators that feed on them as well as other insects. Since their rate of reproduction will drop dramatically, those that do reproduce will eventually end up as food.
This has been done before with moths I think - and probably has been done with a few other insects before as well.
You are suggesting that if some alien overlord race arrives at Earth with the intention to exterminate humankind, they will refrain when we point to how we let the tsetse fly live?
Can't argue with that.
It is enlightening to find that to a US environmentalist, Africans are worth less than insects.
This thread is a wild goose chase..... the fly isn't the problem. The fly is the vector for the Trypanosomiasis disease. The fly is the only vector that is normally dangerous to humans, although wild animals can carry the disease (by contracting the parasite from the same flies that hmans do). Other modes of communication are extremely rare (aside from contaminated water with fly larvae). The fly is indigenous to a distinct swath of latitudes in subsaharan Africa. If the number of vector insects is reduced, then there will be an exponential decline in the infection rate in humans and wild animals. This in turn will reduce the number of infected flies, etc. In short, cutting the number of positive flies in suburban environs by half could effect a reduction in the human infection rates of around 75% or more. There are controlled studies to back these numbers up. The parasite itself requires a dense poulation of flies to sustain itself in any given body of water as well. These levels appear to be significant enough that eradication would effectively occur even if the fly populations could be reduced to something much greater than 0%. In short, a thriving fly population reduced to a third or even half of its previous thriving level could effect either unsustainability in the parasite population or possibly even eradication of the pest.......
Remember smallpox? Very different disease, very different public infectious behavior as an epidemic, yet it too exhibits similar characteristics regarding a sustainable critical human population, as do most infectious diseases.
this has been going on for a while.
They have flesh eating flies in south america that swarm on cattle and people alike, inflicting painfull and diseased flesh wounds. They have been reducing their numbers using this irradiated fly technique for a while. The results have been good it seems.
The flies arent mutants, they're sterile. They still mate with the non-irradiated flies, but they don't produce offsprings, so they reduce the number of flies in the next generation without a whole bunch of pesticides getting in the food chain.
Here is some nuclear propaganda
You can't take the sky from me...
how many asses do they have?
no radiation required, just refidgerate the milk after you open the carton, which should be fine for a few months.
I say pack up all the *nix and Mac dorks and their crappy boxes, nuke the lot of em in the groin, and set them free in middle africa with their precious tetse fly. Then all they can do is try and mate with their hands... the dirty lot of you. Cuts the moron factor in the US by at least 2%, and that's a good thing... my only reservation is the impact that it has on Africa and the African tribe communities where we dump these schleps... those poor people have enough problems without some *nix laptop packing moron begging a cow hearding and starving black guy for the location of the nearest powerplug and router.
If you want an interesting read, of which this idea (ie, sterilized males being inserted into a population ala fruit flies, etc) is a part of the book, read Dust by Charles R. Pellegrino.
The ideas and information brought up in this book are fascinating, to say the least - at the end of the book he explains the reasoning behind the science in the book (he is a scientist - some of the stuff he made up, some is projections from the "now", and some is fact).
One subject he brings up in the book is that of a real study that was done (I wish I could remember what uni did the study, and when) that examined what would happen to a forest if it was irradiated vs removing the insect population entirely - what was found was that in the end, a forest that was irradiated seemed to do fine, but one without its insects (above and below ground) died off rapidly. I am not sure how controlled this experiment was, considering how difficult it is to erradicate all insects from an area (if it is even possible - probably not - considering dust mites and such, which by the way play a large part in the book).
The book revolves around what we are doing to our environment, and how we don't know if one small last thing we do throws the balance off completely, and we plunge headlong into chaos - with the possible end result of our species becoming extinct itself.
What I find most amazing about humans is the fact that we can contemplate all of this, actually coming up with a logical progression, test the hypothesis in lab conditions and come to conclusions, but ignore the eveidence and do nothing long term, chucking the future for short term gains only...
Pathetic...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Damn teste flies, they get you every time!
--JonnyBlog
A virus is a Non-Livin protein sack
And a procaryotic cell is... what? What makes a virus "non-livin"[sic] anyways? It reproduces just like every other DNA/RNA based organism in the world. Just because it doesn't have 2 feet and a bleeding heart...
They have nothing to give back and their eradication will not upset other species.
Huh? Virii provide several important purposes, primarily the culling of populations that have gotten too large. Remove all the virii from the world and things would be very different. Saying that virii contribute nothing to the world is a ridiculous, myopic statement.
So when are we going to see hordes of mutant bimbos released into dive bars and frat parties to help curb overpopulation by one-night-stand?
Me, I'm all in favor of mutant politicians, or ones with expiration dates ala Blade Runner.
Kevin Fox
Most insects shield the next generation from predation using a strategy of sheer numbers. Most of their offspring end up a meal for something else, but a few win the survival lottery and make it to sexual maturity to carry on the next generation.
The Tsetse fly is uses a different strategy: its females produce one progeny at a time, carrying the larva internally through three of its four stages of development, releasing it only to let it pupate and emerge as an adult.
According to this page: , the 'sterile male' technique had been tried before, with little success. The technique described here must be a refinement. In any event, the successful implimentation of the sterile male technique for reduction/eradication of the tsetse fly is especially strong in that it turns one of the fly's strengths (the female's investment in their young) into a weakness.
Extinction is an ugly word, but considering the suffering that the tsetse has brought about since time out of mind, I for one would welcome any reasonable chance to see it go have tea with the passenger pigeon and the dodo.
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
"Yeah. It smells, too..."
Hemos and D\monix should check their posts for ACCURACY before putting them up. This kind of tripe is what makes life tough for those of us with working brains. Note for humans -> simply sterilizing anything by any means is hardly a basis for running up the "mutant" flag. Enough worry surrounds this topic without half-baked "authorities" stating unreasoned fears as truth, or using flash-point vocabulary to inhance their image.
"If...you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning" - Catherine Aird
Reference for that?
Sure, genetic diversity *within* a species is good. But we're talking about a different order of land-based life!
I think releasing sterilized insects into the wild is an excellent way of eradicating pests. I personally plan on releasing several thousand irradiated politicians into the wild shortly.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
The way D\monix uses the quote "the impact of the fly is difficult to exaggerate" makes it sound like Kabayo is referring to the sterilizied flies. But he's not. He's referring to the tsetse fly itself. That and the fact D\monix refers to the sterilizied flies as "nuclear mutants" when they are neither mutant nor radioactive puts this story pretty low on the quality scale.
Magius_AR
Just for your information: if you radiate a fly to sterilize them and thus use a specific type of radiation, they do not become radioactive.
Isn't this where somebody sticks their head up their own lower digestive tract?
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
Have actually studied a bit of Entomology, I can tell you that releasing irradiated insects into the existing population works. Since the female TseTse fly ceases to mate after her first insemination, the high numbers of the infectious flies are sure to drop. There are little or no biological remifications, because these are not "Mutant" flies, they simply have been given what would be the equivilent of a vesectomy. The REAL problem is not the flies. The real problem, as sad as it may seem, it that Africa's population is exploding. The diseases spread by the TseTse are actually doing a part in keeping population levels in check. Reducing the number of flies will ultimatley raise the human population, eventually resulting in widespread famine and overcrowing.
the good point has been raised that these flies are not actually mutants; just sterilized by radiation. but what worries me a bit is that this is somewhat analogous to the same concept of using antibiotics. yes, they will kill many bacteria in an infected patient. but a few always survive. and they may contain a mutation that makes them immune to future doses of antibiotics. it's become a huge concern for infectious disease departments at all hospitals. great effort has been made to warn doctors and patients against the cavalier prescription and usage of antibiotics.
in the case of these flies, i'm deducing they will have to release large amounts of these flies. with the numbers of flies they would have to release to have any effect, there's a very very good chance that there WILL be a few who are not completely sterilized but only suffer some mutations (which may still be compatible with life). after all, are they gonna check each fly's reproductive capability before releasing them? one or two fertile flies wouldn't be a problem. but if they keep doing it, chances are, they just MIGHT end up with a mutant fly population.
"The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well."
for decades.
they lay eggs in cattle skin lesions and the maggots ruin the hide and meat under the skin causing losses to the cattle rancher.
but the losses are less now with each year...
"...can you imagine a BEOWULF CLUSTER of these? That'd be some serious power!"
The majority of the flies put through this process will be sterilized, and the remainder most likely will be mutated, however this doesn't necessarily mean that the mutation will be viable. Most people seem to think that if something 'mutates' it automatically lives. This is not true - the majority of mutations are quite deadly, if not to the fly that is being zapped then to it's progeny. DNA is VERY unforgiving to changes, folks - one incorrect Amino Acid in a sequence means a proteinis formed that could be horrendiously different from the original, so much so that the organism cannot continue to function normally.
I don't need to be made to look evil. I can do that on my own. - Christopher Walken
Homer: Only 'cause he tried to reason with him...
Marge: Oh.
Mutant Flies, Please... Do a bit of research before posting topics like this. Even though these flies are Not genetically modified, I never expected Slashdot to feed the anti-GM luddite crowd.
Gregor Mendel started the GM game hundreds of years ago, but it's just recently that GM is scary?
Hey, how about posting a topic showing the all the good genetically modified items have done?
The tsetse fly also happens to protect large parts of africa from invasion by huge herds of cattle since cattle are not immune to sleeping sickness.
Kill the tetse fly, you can say good by to many of the national parks in africa.
Check some population statistics some time. You might be surprised to find that Africa is very sparsely populated compared to most of the planet.
What looks like over population is under production. Due to the abysmal state of the societies there, people hardly produce anything, and thus have very little sonsumption power.
Like Youngblood Priest?
Never fight naked, unless you're in prison...
1) has the effect upon natural predators and the knock on effect top the food chain?
2) Given that the reasoning is that these mutants will outnumber the general population is somewhat lacking in reasoning given that the mutant's cannot reproduce and will only serve as decoy's for the breading general species that will only grow in population the following season as a result.
3) Not enough research. hell were still studing our current enviroment in biospheres so wouldn't it be prodent to create and study this in a more controled enviroment; Like a biospher perhaps!
-- we have a bug with our product - lets relase a patch - have we tested the patch to see if it fix's the bug IRL - heh -thats why we relase the patch!--
i spent a good part of my childhood in lake tahoe, california. there used to be great fishing there.
someone (fish and game dept if i remember correctly) thought it would be a GREAT idea to start up a shrimping industry there, too, and introduced shrimp into the lake.
the fish now eat the shrimp. there's no shrimping because the shrimp are fish food. there's no fishing because the fish don't care about bait --they have helpless shrimp. while hardly a massive disaster (except for the fishing industry there), the idea's the same: when you screw with an ecosystem you may not get what you want.
sometimes great ideas aren't as great as they sound on paper because it's too hard to see the consequences of what you're doing. even if the flies do exactly what scientists want and decimate the population of existing flies, are we sure that won't cause ANOTHER problem?
"Mister Potato-head --MISTER POTATO-HEAD! Backdoors are not secrets!" (War Games, 1983)
The release of sterile or low fertility organisms has been done for some time.
The pest being targetted here is the cause of vast human misery in parts of the world least able to alleviate that misery.
Arguments against the use of sterilised, not mutated or transgenic, flys reminds me of Brian Appleyard's anti-science attitude about pesticides and innoculations. Dozens of people died or suffered from pesticide poisoning or reactions to injections in Africa from the 1950s onwards, according to Appleyard, and thus treatment should stop. Appleyard and alike minded people forget that MILLIONS benefitted from these programmes, thousands of times more people had their health improved than had their health damaged.
Its time that medical assistance to the Third World be judged not on results and not Frankensteinish forebodings or political dogma from countries which can afford an alternative.
Is the preservation of wildlife even more important than the preservation of human lives?
I'll take this question. Yes, the preservation of wildlife is more important than the preservation of human lives
An answer of that form - a member of a social species putting the wellbeing of members of all other species over that of members of his own - is a symptom of mental illness.
You are welcome to put the survival of members of other species over your own PERSONAL survival. But when you make that choice for other humans you're exhibiting a form of psychopathy that can easily lead to multiple murder.
After all, you consider it RIGHT for humans to die to promote the survival of a disease-carrying parisitic fly. Will you therefore consider it right to kill people who are trying to kill the flies?
Will you act on your convictions and kill them yourself? Will you commit sabotage that might kill them? Will you call it "monkeywrenching" rather than "attempted murder"? Will you do the equivalent of spiking trees (defending trees by maiming and killing the workers whose chainsaws hit the spikes)? Will you bomb the sites where the work is done? Will you break into labs and release or kill the lab animals, setting back the work and resulting in more human death?
I would rather take the chance of getting bit and dying, than introduce a potentially disasterous new element into as fragile and infinately complex an equation as an ecosystem.
So many pieces of bullshit, so little time.
If you'd rather take the chance for yourself, that's fine - and I see you claim to have visited the areas infested. But you're trying to make that choice for OTHERS, who must live there for their whole lives.
Stuck-up elitists who don't HAVE to live with the disease-ridden flies always seem to find it easy to put the lives of the flies above those of the starving poor who must live with them.
As for "fragile ecosystems", that's a buzzphrase that's false to fact. Ecosystems in general are about the most robust dynamic systems ever to come into existence. The "balance of nature" isn't something precarious you can tip over, like a rock on a pinpoint. It's something that, when you push, will push back and maybe even crush you, like a rock in a deep hole. (Push hard enough and you MIGHT move it into the next hole over. Beat on it with a sledge long enough and you might crush it. But you're not going to make the rock evaporate.)
As for the "new element", it's sterile. So it only lasts until it dies - days, in the case of flies. The only thing "new" is that, if it works, a disease-ridden pest and its associated disease organism may go missing, leaving an eco-niche open to other organisms that might accomplish the beneficial functions (if any) without simultaneously causing human suffering and death.
But if you find suffering and death among poor dark-skinned humans desirable, then your attitude is easy to understand.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
nothing but misery caused by the eyropeans in africa.
we are asked to believe in a prescription by europeans for the benefit of africans.
yeah, like aids.
they just want to get rid of the africans.
watch out.
meddling with nature usually rebounds.
They are sterile. No mutation from the radiation, if any, can take hold in the general fly population. No B-grade plots please.
How about a threshold for the "bozosity" factor of posters. sheesh I thought this site would attract at least marginally educated viewers.
Africa has not been noted for anything, but raw materials and human suffering in recent memories. I think it would be an interesting test to see if a mutanted species could alter the existing species by design and not by accident.
It really could really help out Africa population and maybe bring them out of the dark ages.
So, in the balance of things, will there be less tsetse flies overall due to the population dip, or more due to to seeding???
Anyone else out there think pumping large numbers of mutant insects into the environment might be a bad idea?
...too many of you worry about the wrong f-ing thing. It blows me away.
This is not some new technique. Its been working without any side effect for some time. They've been doing the same thing in the greater Los Angeles are since I was a kid. When the fruit fly population started taking heavy tolls on crops, they sprayed the whole area with malathion for a few years to kill the majority of them then started dumping irratiated/sterilized fruit flies to finish the job which they still do on ocasion till this day (my bro knows some of the pilots that dump them from Fullerton airport). There haven't been any mutant bugs (the radiation dosage is too little) and our fruit crops are happily competing in our capitalist market.
Of course, this case in Africa is MUCH less important. We're only talking about saving human lives here. I think the fly population is far more important so I'm going to move over there and LIVE with the flies and protect them as you should too.
--Let's hack root on 127.0.0.1 --panZ
I seem to recall an "experiment" in Australia where many Cane Toads were released in order to get rid of insects in the environment... But that didn't work and now there are more of the toads that Australia knows what to do with...
I guess I'm just saying I don't want Africa to come bitching to me when the problems don't get solved
CoyboyNeal is God
It's the mate-once and die attitude of the Tsetse flies that makes them vulnerable.
Suppose aliens began sterilizing millions of human males and released them on earth? We could be wiped out in a few generations. It may have already begun.
But it is not too late! Ladies, prepare for the invasion by copulating with someone different every day. Only through the determined efforts of our women can the species be saved.
Be suspicious of anyone who insists on using "protection", they could be the agents of space aliens.
I don't know of a single positive thing that can be said about mosquitoes, really.
"Mosquito bites are fun to scrath."
- Ned Flanders
I wonder what PETA has to say about this? Likely they will insist that the Tsetse fly population would be irreparably damaged by this, and burn somebodies entomology lab in protest.
-- Defenestrate Microsoft!
This is an honest question. Currently, this sort of thing works great, and it's definitely worth trying against the Tsetse. I have to wonder, though, what the chances are of selecting for preexisting (e.g., in the main population, not in the irradiated batch) mutants inclined to female promiscuity. Has anyone examined the 'barrier to entry' for that mutation?
It seems this sort of artificial manipulation could rapidly (over a 100 year term?) select for such a trait, should it be preexisting somewhere in the population. We could approach these techniques much more assuredly with a few more advancements in genetics, allowing us to know exactly how many genes would need altering to produce the undesired behavior. If it's a single gene, maybe we'd want to hold off- if it's 30 in concert, in a configuration much different than that seen in an 'average' individual, we'd be able to proceed with more confidence.
it's africa... they are all dying from AIDS anyways... who cares.
yep, you're right.
:-p
just a minor point: it is possible that the traits you mention could penalize later generations.
finding food with lots of competition might sharpen your skills in finding rare food, since the most accessible food sources are depleted by the huge amount of infertile flies. this might even induce suboptimal feeding behaviour in next generations of [the fertile] flies.
finding fertile partners will surely not enhance chances of survival. how can flies discriminate between infertilized and fertile partners? the infertiles have been treated just prior to release in nature, so they are bound to be hardly different from "normal" flies with respect to morphology. i find it difficult to envision the "partner finding factor" playing a significant role in the process.
actually, the reason i reacted to the prior post was the incorrect assumption about the functioning of natural selection. darwinian selection is the most misunderstood scientific theory [in biology], i just wanted to add some nuance.
probably the effect of this approach is sheer competition: if you add enough infertiles, the chances are less than zero that a fertile fly will reproduce, although it is more fit to survive in reality. this has hardly anything to do with natural selection IMHO
PS. we could discuss the anemia example further, but would it suffice when i say that 30 is old enough to reproduce?
... so much of Africa's current suffering has been caused by the poorly thought out assistance that has been given to Africa.
Giving them assistance to stop and prevent disease is good, and should be done. But no thought whatsoever has been put into the reality that increased longivity - caused by medical assistance - coupled with their skyhigh birthrate will only overall *increase* their suffering in the longterm.
Medical assistance without the population growth management to go with it, is in short, more harm than good.
Those god damned clean healthy sanitized tropical-disease-free snobs have to rub sanitary public health in our face all the time! Arrogant bastards!
If you want to roll around in sewage and filth and live in a hot zone just to spite western society, more power to you... Arrogant bastard!
If a non-cesspool, high life expectancy way of life is western, then color me western.
Why don't you get off of your big fat black ass and do it yourself, you crack smokin' pudgy lifeless jackass. The only thing black people do is spread AIDS and just about every other disease. Then complain while white people have to clean up the mess, then somehow find a way to call everyone racist.
or something...
it seems to me, reading all the argument on whether or not it is a good idea to fool around with things like this, that we are completely, totally incapable of even simply _knowing_ whether or not it is a good idea. the whole thing should be moot.
as parts, even _functions_ of the ecosystem, we can see the whole no more than we can perceive things outside of the four dimensions we reside in. a chip cannot tell you about the computer it is in.
a human being is a wee little bit of the Earth-system. so are flies. we humans are just as poorly equipped to see the system (that we are a part of) from the sort of outside point of view that would be required to successfully understand, much less modify, that system.
at least the flies haven't the hubris to try it anyway.
let's face it, people. we're all just a bunch of hairless fucking monkeys, and, as a rule, we're not all that bright. just look at the spelling on this site. (and many, many others)
would you trust an entire ecosphere to a people that cannot even master their own language?
i wouldn't.
Don't ask. Go see.