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Insects Develop Pesticide Resistance Through Symbiosis With Gut Flora

Posted by samzenpus on from the with-a-little-help-from-my-little-friends dept.

First time accepted submitter blinkin247 writes "The indiscriminate spraying of pesticides has probably caused as many problems as it has solved, but here's one that was not expected: some bacteria have decided that insecticide is a very tasty meal. Unfortunately for us, one of the strains of bacteria that has evolved the ability to digest the toxin happens to be able to find a home in an insect's gut. When it does so, it provides the insect with resistance."

12 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. Curses! by masternerdguy · · Score: 5, Funny

    Darwin strikes again!

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    1. Re:Curses! by multicoregeneral · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yes. The creationists will have a hard time explaining this one. My guess is that they'll choose to ignore it, just like they do with all the other proofs of evolution in action. What I find interesting about all this is how quickly these bacteria actually evolve into totally new organisms. I mean, it makes sense with their short lives and fast reproductive cycles, but it's just amazing to watch.

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    2. Re:Curses! by LordLucless · · Score: 4, Insightful

      My guess is they'll just say "meh", and shrug their shoulders.

      Most creationists don't have a problem with "evolution" as an adaptive mechanism, just the particular application of evolution that posits that trillions of iterations of evolution moved life from primordial sludge to sentient life.

      The idea that the species existed in a "perfect" unchanged state from the point of creation until the present time was rejected as religious dogma even before Darwin.

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    3. Re:Curses! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That's not what the second law of thermodynamics means. That paper equivocates the meaning of order and disorder several times, dipping into the formal definitions to make the math work. Order and disorder are metaphors for thermodynamic entropy, but dS is not the change in chaos, it's the change in entropy. He defines order as the opposite of entropy, which is misleading to begin with and downright false when he starts using the word order to mean things other than the opposite of entropy (or X-entropy) in his paper.

      It doesn't make any sense to ask whether the increase in solar engery makes spaceships not extremely improbable. No matter what happened, it was extremely improbable because there's a huge timescale and the chances of everything happening the same way twice in a huge timescale are nil (if they did happen the same way twice, that would pretty much imply that there was little to no entropy from start to finish).

      He has this line:

      "If an increase in order is extremely improbable when a system is closed, it is still extremely improbable when the system is
      open, unless something is entering which makes it not extremely improbable."

      He's removed all precision from this. Undoing his re-definitions, this de-sugars to "if a decrease in entropy is a decrease in entropy when the system is closed, it is still a decrease in energy when the system is open, unless something is entering that has high entropy".

      As a counterexample: spaceships do happen. Unless you claim that God made cars, or something, it follows that this localized order did in fact come from an external source, for surely the spaceship did not assemble itself. And I guarantee that humans are inputting far, far, far, far less energy into their spaceship creations that the sun is inputting into the Earth. Life does happen. Following this rationale, unless you insist on a continually-active creator god which is continually inputting order to supplement the sun which is apparently insufficient, there's no way there can be population growth, since that's an "increase in order". Plants grow. They're creating "order" very specifically from the input of the sun.

      Not to mention he completely skips his proof that the "order" coming from the sun is strictly less than the "order" appearing on Earth.

      But aside from that. Genetic mutations plus natural selection = evolution. Or more precisely, inheritance with mutations, where the mutations are not always a net negative in every possible respect, plus some form of selection = evolution. Even if that did violate the second law you'd have to come up with a way to reconcile it, for it isn't enough to say "these things contradict", you have to figure out which is wrong and why, instead assuming thermodynamics always wins and that somehow like magic the other thing must be wrong even if you can't point out what's wrong about it (we know it doesn't actually win at the microscopic level, as indicated in that paper).

    4. Re:Curses! by Chris+Burke · · Score: 4, Informative

      If I have a billion self replicating programs, and randomly change the object code in all of them every second, they all won't suddenly die, but I will see the entire population gradully LOSE information and thus FUNCTION.

      You should actually try this. I have. So have many others. What we've learned by doing it is that if you just randomly modify your billion programs with an external program and use this same program to do the copying (so none of the population of programs you're "evolving" can ever fail to reproduce), and nothing else then yeah you'll just get a big mess of programs that mostly don't work.

      However if you constrain those that are allowed to be copied in some way, for example by running them through some tests to see if they have the desired functionality and only copying the best-working programs then randomly modify them, you prevent regression and select for enhancement. Iterating on this process, you'll find that you can achieve order and you can increase function. Dramatically so, and faster than you would think, too.

      There's a whole field of computer science on the subject: genetic algorithms. They're only like biological evolution in principle, but it's the principle of random changes resulting in increased order that you have an issue with. Well, genetic algorithms provide a mathematical description of how that is not only perfectly possible, but a common, expected outcome.

      We call the criterion we use to decide what solutions will be allowed to propagate the "fitness function", and it is the main thing that guides what the solution looks like, so defining it well is the major issue when you're a human trying to solve a specific problem. Even if you do a good job, you can still get solutions that are wildly outside what you assumed the solution should look like -- which is one of the strengths of genetic algorithms.

      In nature, the "fitness function" is the same as the problem to be solved: Survive to reproduce. And what we see is the incredible number of ways that problem can be solved.

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  2. Re:Evelution in action. by Theovon · · Score: 4, Informative

    I didn't RTFM, but on the surface, although this looks like evolution and symbiosis, it doesn't look like symbiotic evolution. The insect didn't change. The bacteria did, and the bacteria is living in the insect. The bacteria didn't cause the insect to develop a resistance. The bacteria is PROVIDING the resistance. If you were to remove the bacteria from the insect, the insect would be vulnerable again.

  3. Simple Solution by theshowmecanuck · · Score: 4, Funny

    There is a simple cause and solution to this. They aren't spraying enough pesticides and they need to spray more. Just ask the chemical companies and their congressional and parliamentary stooges. They'll back me up on this.

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  4. Re:Evelution in action. by datsa · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's not that simple. Being able to harbor the new bacteria is now a measure of fitness in these insects. Insects that reject the bacteria will die off (if they haven't already), and insects that do a better job accommodating the bacteria are more likely to survive to the next generation. We happen to be seeing the end product of that process.

  5. Re:Actually the finding could be a good news ! by c0lo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The discovery that the bacteria inside insects' guts finds human-made (often very toxic) insecticide "tasty" can actually be a good news for all of us ---

    We can tap the ability of those bacteria to "digest" away many of the toxic waste produced by industries

    And allow the said industries to produce other flavors of toxic waste, only cheaper?
    Or would you like Monsanto to provide both the meal and the "enhanced digestion additive" for it?

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  6. Re:Actually the finding could be a good news ! by Taco+Cowboy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The discovery that the bacteria inside insects' guts finds human-made (often very toxic) insecticide "tasty" can actually be a good news for all of us ---

    We can tap the ability of those bacteria to "digest" away many of the toxic waste produced by industries

    And allow the said industries to produce other flavors of toxic waste, only cheaper?

    Whether you like it or not, the industrial complex has been producing, - and is producing - millions and millions of tons of toxic waste every single year. toxic wastes that are very difficult - and very un-economical to un-toxic-fy

    If there are bacteria which can "digest" those toxic waste and break-down the chemicals in such that the resultant by-products lose their toxicity - we should tap into the abilities of those bacteria to clean up the environment

    And your point being ... ?

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  7. Life will find a way by msobkow · · Score: 4, Interesting

    No matter whether you're dealing with antibiotics, pesticides, herbicides, or natural predators, life will always evolve to survive.

    We all know this. The scientists. The chemists. The engineers. The pharmacorps. The pesticide and herbicide companies.

    Hell, Monsanto even gene-engineers such resistance into their tainted products.

    But the public doesn't want to accept the truth: we're all on borrowed time. All we're doing is leveraging short-term odds for short-term gain, at the price of long term dissolution. So the marketing experts and technology pundits tell them what they want to hear: that we can win the fight in the long term.

    We can't, and we won't. Eventually every single antibiotic, pesticide, and herbicide we have will be useless, and the new generations of such products will be so lethal that we won't be able to use them because they're also poisonous to humans.

    And then the shit is really gonna hit the fan, big time.

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    1. Re:Life will find a way by joocemann · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Microbiologists ma disagree about the antibiotic resistance cold war component of your point. They often assert that when resistance is evolved against one mode of action, it is devolved from a previous mode.... this is true in bacteria, whereby removing antibiotics from media can generate a dominant species that is absent of resistance in 30 generations (1 to 2 days). This is because without the pressure, the small functional advantage of lacking a useless resistance gene lets the nonresistant mutant outpace its resistant ancestor in 30 doublings.

      I am a firm believer in working *with* nature than against it. The future looks dreary...