Slashdot Mirror
Cockroaches Evolving To Avoid Roach Motels
sciencehabit writes "Only a few years after roach motels were introduced in the 1980s, they lost their allure for an increasing number of German cockroaches. Researchers soon realized that some roaches had developed an aversion to glucose—the sugary bait disguising the poison—and that the insects were passing that trait on to their young. Now, scientists have figured out how this behavior evolved."
Maybe soon they will learn an aversion to everything in my house. Then they can live outside and we will all be happy.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
That Intelligent Designer is a crafty one! You'll never best his cockroaches!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Use high fructose corn syrup in the roach motels instead of glucose. I'm surprised they don't do this already, since they use it in everything else.
I noticed the roaches weren't going for it, so I added a sign to it: "Free Continental Breakfast, Free Wifi".
Well it's simple enough to just redesign the roach motel so it baits them with wheat or something, i'd imagine. But part of me wonders if we would be better off just building a mega roach hotel chocked full of actual food in a neighborhood and instead of killing the roaches with glue, just relocating them into the forest when the roach hotel reaches capacity, or using them as feed for fish or something.
blend a mix of starches and sugars. if they avoid all simple and complex carbs, they reduce pop. if they do not, they go in and eat poison.
Who's going to go to a hotel full of roaches?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Seriously, did the roaches actually evolve and pass it to their young, or did the specific roaches which HAD the sugar aversion trait simply avoid being poisoned and passed along said aversion to their offspring?
I'm kinda thinking it's the latter.
$ man woman *
-bash:
Zese scientists are not correct! I shtill love ein bisschen of zis gluclose, especially mit a teensy drop of der schnaps after vork.
Ze real trut is zat my vife und I yust vant to lose a little veight.
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
:)
Researchers soon realized that some roaches had developed an aversion to glucose
How does a roach develop an aversion to glucose? Did they eat just a little - not enough for the poison to kill them - and thus learn from the resulting sickness that they shouldn't eat it again? If so how did they pass this knowledge onto their offspring?
Or did strains of cockroaches that already had an aversion to glucose become more prolific since they weren't killed by the roach traps?
Better known as 318230.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/cockroaches-quickly-lose-sweet-tooth-survive
I for one welcome our new creepy crawly overlords.
to avert my shoe! ;-)
...just to stay in the same place. Natural selection follows from basic principles of logic. It's so close to first principles that it always amazes me that we had to wait so long for Darwin to show up and slap humanity on the face with the simple truth of it. Living things exist because they inherited what it takes to exist from their ancestors. The ones that didn't have what it took to stay in existence...didn't. The world is full of things that exist. Protons, stars, iron, roaches, people. Natural selection acts on everything. The universe itself may even have been "selected" through some process of cosmogenesis where universes that don't have what it takes, physical laws and constant appropriate to produce stars, black holes, daughter universes, see their lineage die off. Hard to prove, probably impossible, but it is not even a new idea to think natural selection is too powerful and too basic to reality to be confined to biology.
Unless you can eradicate an entire species quickly and completely, all you do is set up a selection pressure which favors mutant individuals who have what it takes to beat your attempts to eradicate them. The ones that don't have what it takes to counter your attack, roach motel or whatever it is, don't survive, and don't pass on their genes which failed to adequately equip them for survival and reproduction.
Arthropod life cycles are very fast so it's not even surprising to see evolution like this happening in just a few decades. I'm surprised it hasn't happened sooner.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
I just can't believe how many such comments I'm seeing here. Where are the nerds?!
Selective breeding is based on positive feedback, where a human being selects the specimens with a desired trait and breeds them to get more of the same trait in the next generation. That's how you get house pets that do not stand a chance of survival in the wild.
What happened with the cockroaches is the same process conducted by mother nature; only the surviving ones can breed.
Now, here's the kicker for all of you high school dropouts. Both cases are essentially evolution according to the definition in wikipedia.
...except in Germany, where it's known as the "French Cockroach".
Really? omfg...
If they've upped their standards and don't like motels, we'll have to increase our efforts, and create roach B&Bs.
There are many copies.
And what do you think constitutes evolution?
If I were designing them, they'd thrive on the poison in the traps. Of course, if I were designing them, the cockroaches would be the focus of the experiment. I'd throw increasingly difficult challenges at them, culminating in some moderately clever primates. Once the cockroach Alpha arises, it would be saved for future study, and the rest of the experiment would be reset. That's the problem with an intelligent designer, isn't it? One tends to believe that they're the focus of the experiment. One tends to think that they will somehow qualify for special treatment. When, in fact, all that awaits you is euthanasia and a brain dissection. And that's if you're one of the lucky ones.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
http://www.nfb.ca/film/juke_bar_en
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
They've just figured out how this evolved? The roaches with a sweet tooth died more often than the roaches without. Where's the mystery?
So, if the cockroaches who have are attracted to the roach motels continue to die generation after generation, then the cockroaches who have an aversion to the roach motels would naturally be a much higher percentage of the population. This isn't evolution (macro or micro), simply natural selection being played out with information already existing in the cockroach population.
So, basically they killed off all the ones that like sugar enough to die for it and they're calling it evolution?
For anyone else wondering, you want the second link on the Wikipedia disambiguation page.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
The roaches are probably trying to get a better deal through Priceline! :)
I have noticed over the past few years that ants in my area have "learned" to avoid consuming Raid borax laced syrup. I remember early on in my house that ants would feast on the stuff, sucking large drops dry in a matter of minutes. Now, the new ants crawl up to the syrup I have left, seem to probe it, and then run away quickly. Even if I applied the syrup to an established ant pathway, they go around the drops without consuming any of it. I don't know whether they are averse to eating the sugar, or whether they can somehow sense the borax in the syrup. There seems to be some evolution going on here.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
"here's the kicker for all of you high school dropouts."
I'm a High School dropout. I knew about the intricacies of evolution already. Thanks for making me feel inferior, you insensitive clod.
In order for sick people to understand apology they first must understand their mental sickness. There is no point to apologize before someone who won't understand their mental condition first.
Part of the roach's success stems from its omnivorous diet. Removing glucose from its diet is likely a considerable hit on its caloric intake. If the aversion to glucose can be maintained while developing aversions to other abundant and nutritious food stuffs, like meat protein, we could bio-engineer cockroaches to become specialized eaters.
Specialized eaters are easier to control and eradicate. Furthermore, if they over specialize to the degree of Pandas and Koalas they may be bio-engineered out of existence. Personally, I wouldn't mind never seeing another cockroach again.
I was pretty sure they were around in the 1970s and Wiki confirms that.
I have fond memories of another boy (I swear) picking up a packed "motel" and showing it to the girls to freak them out. That was definitely in the 1970s when I was still in elementary school.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Great, now if they could just also evolve to taste like chicken, 'cause now they taste like bugs!
Welcome them. Our new overlords, let us welcome them.
B&Bs? So the roaches have turned into either WAPSs or Hipsters. Either way, I think we can wipe them out - just set out poisoned Starbucks coffee.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
"Only a few years after roach motels were introduced in the 1980s, they lost their allure for an increasing number of German cockroaches
Don't they know Germans don't stay in motels? They needed a Roach Hostile.
Just another day in Paradise
Internet trolls are also evolving, learning how to hide amongst us. They have learned to use the ALL CAPS key sparingly, making them look like regular posters.
This is basic evolution. A stress gets introduced. The ones with the higher chance of surviving the stress, survive, and make babies. The ones who are more likely to die for the stress, die.
..that kills Cockroaches. Or just a "motel" that you put some food in an that crushes any CR that enter.
Mundus Vult Decipi
Listen to the current episode of The Naked Scientists: http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/news/news/1000190/
The roaches have a dislike glucose, but they still like other types of sugars, so they suggested they switch to using sucrose.
"... had developed an aversion to glucose—the sugary bait disguising the poison..."
So, either by avoidance, non-exposure, or genetic disposition (or whatever else), the cockroaches (or more specifically, their dependents) that have survived are less apt to be attracted to glucose because a significant number of the others have been taken out of the gene pool, presumably by non-avoidance, exposure, and genetic disposition and whatever else.
The idea that a cockroach or groups of cockroaches by type or by locale have developed an aversion to something seems to be an incorrect declaration. Their dependents can be nothing else but the products of their gene pool, which, in this case, has been slightly weaned of those attracted to glucose.
The opportunity for genetic mutation is primarily in the process of reproduction. Humans take roughly 20 years to reproduce. Bacteria reproduce millions of times faster. This is why we it's an uphill battle to keep producing new antibiotics, but the police have nothing to fear from criminals who might evolve to be born with bullet-proof exoskeletons.
Medical science can keep people alive that would otherwise be killed by various weaknesses, thus negating the evolutionary process in humans. The concept of letting the weakest people die is socially unacceptable, so we don't do it. I'm not in favor of doing that, but the human evolutionary process is pretty much limited to physical characteristics that attract the opposite sex. Even then, ugly people can always get plastic surgery.
But more importantly, not all ants are cannibals. Cockroaches generally are.
Because of that, borax has different effects on non-cannibalistic ants than on cannibalistic ants or cockroaches.
See, borax does not kill ants or cockroaches instantly.
Instead, they munch on it happily and later their chitinous carapace starts to break apart because of the effect of boric acid on the chitin.
Then, when they die back in the nest, literally crushed by other roaches, their cannibalistic comrades eat them and the boric acid in the chitin starts its work on them.
BUT, while it takes a tad longer for cockroaches to die from cracks in their carapaces, so they die inside the nest and become food, ants will die much sooner and outside the nest, never becoming food.
AND they will still have whiff of both "Danger! Death!" pheromones AND borax on them when their comrades find them.
Your ants didn't evolve - you trained them to fear the smell of borax.
What you need to do is try using less borax.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
or you could just powder your place with some Diatomaceous earth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatomaceous_earth#Pest_control
The new, improved Roach Brothel.
They mere do no like the sugar high or other people having the sugar high as living humans. Products containing sugar were not sold during of the 1990's almost every where on Earth, they were a bunch of retarded niggers who did like "going to the roach motel" and that is their supremely suppressive incorrect attempt at nigger rigging. A consolation to those with cock roach infestations is that a new bait will be sold that is more to their taste, FAT. If it is not roaches or pigs the problem is some other animal so cut them all some slack as necessary.
since when do roach motels use glucose? they use scent attractants, either food scents or pheromones. using taste as an attractant in a roach motel makes no sense at all. once the roach has his tongue or feet or whatever he tastes with stuck to the glue it hardly matters whether he's attracted or not. it's gotta be scent. I don't think any critters can smell glucose (or sucrose or fructose). similarly, how would a mutation to make glucose aversive help at all? the regular roach is standing there with his tongue or feet or whatever stuck thinking "yum, glucose, i'm happy", while his mutant buddy is stuck there going "not me, i'm never going to do this again"?
and finally, why would anyone use glucose for this kind of thing, rather than cheaper sucrose?
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.