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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
They might reproduce and produce more sterile insects!
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
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?
Just imagine millions of Jeff Goldblums running around puking on people!
(Huh?)
How to Download YouTube Videos
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.
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.
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.
Well if you think about it Italy and Germany sell radiated milk!
I'm much rather drink irradiated milk (which just sterilizes it) that eat GM foodstuffs, which are genetically modified organisms. Those poor Americans aren't even told which of your food products are GM! So in America I can put fly genes into a cow and sell it as burgers, and I don't even have to say so on the packaging! Now that's scary.
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.
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.
But I can't imagine that you know what you are talking about either. And the word is 'irradiated'.
"The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
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.
I can buy a carton of milk and keep it un-opened for 1.5 months
So can I, and I live in the US.
Of course, after 2 or 3 days the smell might start getting to me...
ok so injecting more flies into the problem does what?
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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.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
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.
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!!!
It what we do in the US to chicken half time as well.
Mod point free since 2001
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
Introducing sterilized Tse-Tse flies isn't introducing an animal in a place it doesn't belong, it is introducing "handicapped" insects of a type that already exists and cause signficant problems.
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.'
The scariest issue here is that someone is getting their news from *AOL*.
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
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.
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.
.. 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.
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........
OK, and so assuming that they are succcessful in impacting Tsetse populations by handicapping them... do you want to guess what other animal or insect populations (humans included) are related (in size, health, movement, or by way of being competitors or symbiants or whatever) to Tsetse?
I'll bet that the scientists planning this have rather less than a clue about what the side effects are going to be...
There is a tremendous difference between a single gene and a fly.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
Using precisely this method. See
This U.S. Department of Agriculture web page
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.
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)
It does not compete much with other insects for resources, and in the areas affected it is one of the worst disease spreaders possible. Of course there could be unintended effect, but in worst case, reintroducing the Tse-Tse should take care of that.
Also keep in mind that the this is not a first - the Tse-Tse has already been exterminated on Zansibar - so there is some experience in the effects.
Regardless, unless the Tse-Tse somehow is keeping down populations of some major undiscovered killer insect, the effects of exterminating it are unlikely to be worse than the hundreds of thousands of human deaths due to the Tse-Tse, and the poverty caused by millions of cattle dying on a regular basis.
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
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
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
"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.
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
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 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
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.
science is a religion
It is, of course, a temporary solution. The big problem is that the total eradication of urban rat populations just isn't feasible right now, so they eventually come back. DDT can do a real number on the fleas, but it has other problems and isn't used anymore. The fleas do not seem to breed on humans to the extent that they do on rats (there are other species of fleas that thrive on humans, but they aren't plague vectors.) Of course as soon as one case of Bubonic move to Pneumonic, you've got an entirely different problem since it is directly contagious. This is what apparently happened in Surat, India in 1994. Pnemonic plague is just plain nasty, although modern antibiotics have a chance, if diagnosed early enough.
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
I believe you think erradicating the smallpox and polio viri is bad as well. After all, they do feed and live and reproduce...
Hugo
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
If someone wanted to really make a difference in world healthcare, they'd refocus half of the current HIV money on prevention and throw the rest into malaria research. If I recall correctly, more people die of malaria every month than die of AIDS every year. But malaria doesn't really affect rich people in the West and is therefore ignored.
On second thought, scratch that. Take the money and devote it to getting potable water to 100% of the population. Goodbye cholera, typhus, tapeworms, and river blindness, not too mention childhood diarhea. It boggles the mind that we can't accomplish this seemingly simple task. Then I realize that it ain't all that simple.
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
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.
OK, I misread that as unrefrigerated I guess. So mine doesn't make much sense. But some generous person still gave it a +1 funny mod...
Effectively, this may actually be possible. They don't have to directly kill off all of they flies themselves, only to reduce the population density below the point where the flies can sustain and/or rebuild their population. If they can get the population of flies below that point, they'll finish dying off naturally.
While it's not CERTAIN that they'll be able to accomplish this, it's not as difficult as one might think...
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
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
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.
In California, I'd say releasing the sterile (by irradiation) Med Fly was preferable to spraying the entire human populations with Malathion. And apparently much more successful.
cat
Are you sure they weren't just horseflies? Match the description you gave perfectly, and no genetic engineering involved at all.
Those bastards fucking HURT when they bite, too.
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
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
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
Reference for that?
Sure, genetic diversity *within* a species is good. But we're talking about a different order of land-based life!
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
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.
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
Well, 5-10% of the people ever born are still alive today. In other words humans have only demonstrated about a 92% death rate, not the 100% you imply. That means I've got a 1 in 12 chance of being immortal.
There's no sense in arguing with me, I'm clearly a master of statistics!
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
i find it difficult to envision the "partner finding factor" playing a significant role in the process.
How about "let's mate under the bush with the orange berries.
Anyway, it's complex. Very complex. Things can swing both ways.
The problem is that if you try to eradicate the population where "mate under the orange berries" is the only survival trick, then you will acutally cause "mother nature" to invent the gene for that "trick". It takes millions to billions of random mutations to "invent" such a trait.
Afterwards, however, it's just a gene, which can easily be turned on or off. Then it takes only a couple of thousand of mutations to repopulate the population with that specific trait which was benefitial to survival under attack from the humans.
Roger.