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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."
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".
Who's going to go to a hotel full of roaches?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
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.
I'm kinda thinking that's evolution.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/cockroaches-quickly-lose-sweet-tooth-survive
did the specific roaches which HAD the sugar aversion trait simply avoid being poisoned and passed along said aversion to their offspring?
But that *is* evolution. Gen N had a mix of glucose aversion and non. All the non died and were selected out, so Gen N+1 have the glucose aversion.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
...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".
Darwin called it "natural selection". "Evolution", like the OP "developed an aversion", suggests something active happened - these bugs changed - rather than something passive - these bugs are the only ones left (because the other ones ate the poison).
It actually has been demonstrated in nature several times... one particular one has happened within the last 50 years in a moth populations camoflauge colors... every single moth ended up a different color that they never were previously except due to a random mutation that became extremely useful when their habitat changed.
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.
Darwin called it "natural selection". "Evolution", like the OP "developed an aversion", suggests something active happened - these bugs changed - rather than something passive - these bugs are the only ones left (because the other ones ate the poison).
Poor wording, or poor understanding of the wording. The individual bugs didn't develop an aversion; the population as a whole became more glucose averse over time compared to previous generations. Evolution doesn't happen to a single generation, or a single individual. It is the result of passing on genetic traits to offspring. The species evolves, not the individuals. Granted, from time to time a mutation may arise and contribute to the gene pool, but that's only a statistical anomaly in the process of evolution. The big mover is selection - be it natural, or artificial.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
This approach might not work out so well with r-strategy breeders --- you'll fill the house up for sure with happy little roaches, but they won't be leaving the neighbors' homes to get there (just exponentially exploding their population to catch up with the expanded resources). Setting up "guard rows" of tasty pesticide-free crops to lure pests away from agricultural fields works to the extent that said pests are highly mobile and individually "exploring" a wide enough area to "find" the guard rows in preference to the main crops. However, roaches tend to locate and nest in one area (with only "excess population" expanding out into new territory) --- some very lucky bugs will find the new house (and start breeding to fill it), but the roaches behind your kitchen cabinets will stay behind to raise their kids behind your kitchen cabinets.
It'd be a hell of a lot easier to teach evolution if idiot writers stopped using Lamarckian phrases like "developed an aversion ... and passed that trait on to their young" when describing natural selection.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
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?
Darwin actually called it evolution through the mechanism of natural selection. Evolution is the observation; natural selection is the mechanism whereby certain genes get "selected" for over the generations. The origin of the diversity of the genes is not covered by either term.
Those glucose-aversion genes had to come from somewhere. They may have come from mutation, or crossed from another species, or whatever. Whether they lay "dormant" (that is to say, unselected for) in the genome for centuries, or years before the environmental change that caused them to become beneficial is irrelevant.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
The roaches are probably trying to get a better deal through Priceline! :)
That's NOT evolution. Evolution is descent with _modification_, specifically through random mutation. Otherwise it's just population selection of existing genes. Which has never been demonstrated.
How ignorant can you be? Once you admit selection by fitness you've given away the farm, because mutations are a well established fact. IIRC the rate is so high that you probably have several variations that neither of your parents had.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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)
Ever notice how African-American males are often muscular, large boned with large lips, and African-American females tend to have wide hips (thought to be better for childbearing)? This was due to forced mating under American slavery, where (unfortunately) slaves were force-bred to reinforce traits desirable for both hard manual labor and for producing more slaves. Compare an "African-American" to recent immigrants from Africa. Note post-slavery immigrants by and large lack those traits.
You know... most western Africans share those traits too. It's not because of slavery. I'd like to see any study showing significant differences between african americans and the population they came from (which cannot be explained by interbreeding with white & indigenous people).
How does the theory of evolution explain the reverse entropy when everything else we can observe is moving to a more disordered state?
You should learn what the laws of thermodynamics actually say before you invoke them in an argument.
Do you consider a solar system more ordered or less ordered than the cloud it collapsed from?
And when that solar system's sun forms concentric layers of elements sorted by mass, is that more ordered or less ordered?
Does thermodynamics prevent a fertilized egg from growing into an intelligent, sentient being?
Do you ever check up on what you read in creationists tracts?
This is the part where I have never seen a real answer.
What would you consider a "real" answer to factually false claim about what physics says, supported by irrelevant arguments?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.