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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."
That Intelligent Designer is a crafty one! You'll never best his cockroaches!
IDers accept microevolution.
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.
That Intelligent Designer is a crafty one! You'll never best his cockroaches!
I see your intelligently designed cockroaches, and raise you intelligently designed science.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Once wifi has been around for 30+ years, we may start to see pests like roaches and mosquitoes becoming attracted to it. A wifi signal is a good indicator of delicious things nearby.
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:
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.
Ummm... they may start enjoying cellulose, the way termites do.
Better use their mating pheromones for this (yes, I know: may be also a moving target)
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
...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 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)
A quick search appears to show they haven't folded their cards as yet.
Creationists never fold their cards, no matter how many times their claims are refuted.
I remember reading about a debate where the scientist pointed out that the creationist's argument was based on a long-since refuted claim, the creationist replied that they don't rely on that claim anymore, and the scientist then asked "So why is it in the literature you're selling in the lobby?"
I would think that evolutionary theory would predict, and even practically demand, the presence of ID theorists and Creationists of various flavors as part of the scientific community. Every scientific community, and they are segmented, is its own little ecosystem. It has sources of energy (grants), and consumers (scientists) and various forms of reproduction (ideas and new scientists, etc.). Some members of the ecosystem will consume resources, but give little back, or produce poor quality offspring. The herd only improves if the strongest survive. Think of the role of predators taking the weak in any animal stock. In this case it is weak theories and science. By the two communities engaging in adversarial struggle, the weak science is exposed and made stronger. What is passed over in silence by on community is exposed by the other and account demanded. Intellectual rigor increases. Their ways are strange to you, perhaps even irritating. But directly and indirectly they help real science grow stronger, and more innovative. They probably also bring additional funding into the scientific community that it otherwise wouldn't have. And without them, your droll post would have no meaning.
I suspect it's something like the reason physicists don't feel a need to have Time Cube proponentists and historians don't need holocaust deniers.
As the saying goes, you're entitled to your own opinions, but not to your own facts. If you don't deal in facts, science doesn't need you.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
No, there's a serious misconception here. Neutral traits can become universal in a population, and frequently do. This is especially likely in small populations (which is part of why bottlenecks matter so much).
Dude you might not like them living outside. I don't know about the German ones but here we have what is locally called the "VC cockroach" named because it is as tough as the Viet Cong and those things are happy to live outside in the sewers...until the storm drains flood and then they'll try to climb up through the pipes and get into your house. Since they can live without worrying about poisons they get fricking HUGE, we are talking bigger than a grown man's thumb and tough as hell to kill, you can't use an ordinary fly-swat as it won't even stun 'em, you better have a shoe ready and be putting some arm behind your swing, TOUGH bastards.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.