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"Severe Abnormalities" Found In Fukushima Butterflies
Dupple writes "The collapse of the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant caused a massive release of radioactive materials to the environment. A prompt and reliable system for evaluating the biological impacts of this accident on animals has not been available. This study suggests the accident caused physiological and genetic damage to the pale grass blue Zizeeria maha, a common lycaenid butterfly in Japan. We collected the first-voltine adults in the Fukushima area in May 2011, some of which showed relatively mild abnormalities. The F1 offspring from the first-voltine females showed more severe abnormalities, which were inherited by the F2 generation. Adult butterflies collected in September 2011 showed more severe abnormalities than those collected in May. Similar abnormalities were experimentally reproduced in individuals from a non-contaminated area by external and internal low-dose exposures. We conclude that artificial radionuclides from the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant caused physiological and genetic damage to this species."
How does this affect the butterfly effect? This could be chaos!
MOTHRA!!!!!!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This is a complex and information-dense article. I'm so glad someone like you posted... with your brilliant and dismissive hand waving, now I don't have to read it or learn anything new. I now look forward to any Fukushima-scale nuclear events in my area as you have shown us that unless something is detrimental, it isn't damage. I bet flipper-babies probably even swim better than normal babies.
It's a substantial change in a population post-incident. Whether the changes are beneficial or not is besides the point.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
This is forever. It's genetically inherited and it can NEVER be cured. There is no way to know how bad the effects will be (i.e. disease, immunity response, deformities, life span, etc) in the offspring for all generations. And all you can do is make jokes and actually excuse it!! Wow... Is something wrong with your brainwashed, apathetic, sorry excuse for minds? They used to say the same things about cigarettes except this can never be quit, and it effects all these victims' children and their children and on and on... Ya, it's real fucking funny. It's people like you that make this world shit.
I love science. But this is barely news. These creatures eat the sweet surface juices and pollen, and develop at a rate so fantastic it make them a source of childhood wonder. Of course they'll be the first to be affected. A reduced fore-wing size will not unravel the entire food chain, and very importantly: evolution will push back. This species has an enormous population that is unaffected by radiation. If the small wings are an advantage going forward: great. If not, their neighbors will out compete them, and the mutants will die out.
Wake me when they have a stable population of 6 legged dogs.
Oh, I see, so this is some sort of semantics pissing match you want to win. Call it what you like, but the odds are far greater that we're going to be dealing with very few beneficial mutations, and more than likely a good many bad ones, but hey, if it somehow makes you feel like you've won a debate, then so be it. In fact, I recommend you go and get some substantial dosage of radiation right now. After all, you can't call it damage until your dick falls off.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
you can't call it damage until your dick falls off.
Forgive him. He works for a tobacco company.
There are no "beneficial" changes. There are only changes, in the form of mutations. The ones that do not produce viable offspring die. The ones that do continue to survive.
To question whether this change is beneficial is like asking whether water is good or evil.
What this is illustrating is the rate of change, which is fairly high. A high rate of change can be beneficial in the long run, but extremely damaging in the short run. And it is both damaging for the species concerned, as well as for the rest of the ecology which is dependent on the health of all its species.
If you extrapolate it to more advanced and sophisticated species, ultimately those with vertebrae, it's a frightening picture. Insects can handle quite a bit of mutation, as well as are built to resist radiation. Not to mention the species will survive by sheer reproductive numbers alone. More advanced lifeforms like birds and mammals cannot handle the radiation, cannot handle almost all but the smallest of mutations. Worse, birth rates decrease as complexity increases. A 99.9% chance of stillborn for an insect that lays hundreds of eggs is nothing. A mere nine in ten chance of stillborn for more advanced animals would irrepairably damage the species' survivability.
Not to mention that species survivability is a much lower threshold than maintaining civilization. So if you want to put a Good-Bad qualifier on these findings, it's Bad. Very Bad.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Indeed. "Why, you can't call those malignant growths in your lungs harmful until you actually die. For all you know, they could give you superpowers!"
When you have severely malformed wings and eyes and other developmental abnormalities of a clearly genetic nature in a population, many of which are clearly deleterious from a purely fitness measurement, then it's not going over the top to call it "damage".
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
There are no "beneficial" changes. There are only changes, in the form of mutations. The ones that do not produce viable offspring die. The ones that do continue to survive.
To question whether this change is beneficial is like asking whether water is good or evil.
A thousand times "wrong". In the context of evolutionary theory, a beneficial mutation provides a "benefit"... I know this is a radical logical leap. A beneficial change would be a mutation that allows an organism to better compete and ultimately have more offspring. It is nothing at all like asking about good or evil, it is about being better suited to the environment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation#Beneficial_mutations
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It's a feature!
Yes, folks, we now have real bugs with features.
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Uh . . . Poe's Law. I have a feeling you're trying to be funny, but in the absence of a smiley or similar, I have no way of telling if you're a serious whacko nutcase.
It's the butterflies' fault. If they had not stopped with the development of nuclear power 30 years ago, they would not suffer from these "abnormalities". After all, modern reactor designs are intrinsically safe!
Wait. What?!
Free Manning, jail Obama.
Meh just ignore him. I agree with you and I have a pretty strong biology background (MD). Changes that are not beneficial we call "disease". But there are a whole bunch of other changes we might not even notice. Those are called genetic variability. So long as it's not detrimental to the organism and, per evolutionary rules, interfering with its ability to compete and mate, change is not necessarily "bad". It's just change.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
He probably works as a health insurance claims processor.
Wait till you see the sharks.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Hey, has anybody mentioned Mothra yet?
I'm not angry at all. The fact is that a massive number of genetic mutations in a population within a few generations from something like ionizing radiation or some other agent does not lead to greater fitness, but almost inevitably to lesser fitness; deleterious morphological changes (ie. malformed wings, eyes, internal organs) and increase in various cancers. Insects get an edge, in general, because fast breeding and lots of offspring can counterbalance such effects, and eventually, you will see some population that can return to some level of fitness, but that doesn't mean that dangerous doses of ionizing radiation is somehow potentially healthy, just because you get some potential survivors, any more than firing into a chicken coop with a shotgun and still having some chickens manage to survive means shotguns are potentially good for chicken survival. It's an absurd position.
We're not talking about the generally intermittent nature of natural genetic changes that occur under normal conditions. We're talking about populations being blasted with radiation of sufficient strength to cause massive morphological changes within a generation or two. Evolution isn't some superhero comic book, and there are levels of radiation that make any population much less fit to related populations outside the environment that caused this.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Haha, that's a good one. Could have been:
I have a pretty strong mathematics background (acountant)
and been about as funny.
But just FYI, wether a change is beneficial or not evolutionary is a rather subtle thing. Just consider sickle cell anemia, which sucks, but can protect you from malaria.
That's not Darwinism 101 at all. In fact, plenty of lineages just go extinct when confronted with environmental pressures that they cannot adapt to.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Unless you believe evolution to be massively inefficient in the long run, you cannot seriously believe that many random changes over a very short span in any given organism will not include detrimental ones. Your stance is nonsense.
Evolution IS massively inefficient in the long run. It's random noise that sometimes makes a better picture than the previous picture which was selected for over hundreds of millions of years. The longer it goes on, the more inefficient evolution becomes. If you build up a finely-tuned, massively complex genetic base and then randomly fuck shit up, the odds are astronomically against you. If the environment changes, the larger, older code base means it takes much longer to adapt.
Evolution is the selection against inferior (in the current environment) variations in genetics. Said genetic variations are due to random mutation.
Random mutation is far more likely to have negative effects than positive effects. It takes selection pressure to weed out those negative effects. If evolution were efficient changes would be directed even without said pressure.
I absolutely believe that many random changes over a short time span will likely include detrimental ones.
However, you cannot say that that is the case without evidence, and just as humans weren't evidence of damaged primate genes, mutated butterflies aren't evidence of damaged butterfly genes until they're unable to survive and reproduce as well as the non-mutated butterflies.