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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.
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.
...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
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.