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Planting GMOs Kills So Many Bugs That It Helps Non-GMO Crops (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: One of the great purported boons of GMOs is that they allow farmers to use fewer pesticides, some of which are known to be harmful to humans or other species. Bt corn, cotton, and soybeans have been engineered to express insect-killing proteins from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, and they have indeed been successful at controlling the crops' respective pests. They even protect the non-Bt versions of the same crop that must be planted in adjacent fields to help limit the evolution of Bt resistance. But new work shows that Bt corn also controls pests in other types of crops planted nearby, specifically vegetables. In doing so, it cuts down on the use of pesticides on these crops, as well.
Entomologists and ecologists compared crop damage and insecticide use in four agricultural mid-Atlantic states: New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. Their data came from the years before Bt corn was widespread (1976-1996) and continued after it was adopted (1996-2016). They also looked at the levels of the pests themselves: two different species of moths, commonly known as the European corn borer and corn earworm. They were named as scourges of corn, but their larvae eat a number of different crops, including peppers and green beans. After Bt corn was planted in 1996, the number of moths captured for analysis every night in vegetable fields dropped by 75 percent. The drop was a function of the percentage of Bt corn planted in the area and occurred even though moth populations usually go up with temperature. So the Bt corn more than counteracted the effect of the rising temperatures we've experienced over the quarter century covered by the study.
Entomologists and ecologists compared crop damage and insecticide use in four agricultural mid-Atlantic states: New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. Their data came from the years before Bt corn was widespread (1976-1996) and continued after it was adopted (1996-2016). They also looked at the levels of the pests themselves: two different species of moths, commonly known as the European corn borer and corn earworm. They were named as scourges of corn, but their larvae eat a number of different crops, including peppers and green beans. After Bt corn was planted in 1996, the number of moths captured for analysis every night in vegetable fields dropped by 75 percent. The drop was a function of the percentage of Bt corn planted in the area and occurred even though moth populations usually go up with temperature. So the Bt corn more than counteracted the effect of the rising temperatures we've experienced over the quarter century covered by the study.
Corn, wheat, and soybeans were some of the first crops to be genetically modified.
Total hogwash. There is no commercially grown GMO wheat, and neither corn nor soybeans contain gluten.
Equate to large tumors in mice
NEWSFLASH: Rats bred specifically to develop tumours tend to develop tumours. This groundbreaking revaluation brought to you by "Dr" Seralini.
I'm against GMO's until the owners of said GMO's stop trying to sue the shit out of farmers for incidental cross pollenization of crops
No one has done that. You're a victim of propaganda. If you're talking about Bowman v Monsanto, it wasn't incidental cross pollenization.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Organic farmers uses tons of pesticides including BT. What organic farmers cannot use is synthetic pesticides.
Bt is an organic pesticide. The organic farmers use pesticides just as much as non-organic farmers. In many cases they use more pesticides because the organic pesticides are not as effective and long lasting.
Some of our most common and effective non-organic pesticides are just synthetic analogues of organic pesticides that have been tweaked to enhance effectiveness and stability, e.g. pyrethrin/permethrin, spinosad/spinetoram, nicotine/neonics.
Bees consume pollen from Bt corn. It seems to not affect them in the slightest, in terms of survival, weight, and colony performance. Study notes there are many fiddly-bits we could look into to determine if Bt-fed bees are identifiably-distinct from non-Bt-fed bees.
They fed these bees using pollen cakes wholly made of Bt corn pollen, so they have maximized the diet. The only bees with a distinct statistical outcome are those fed Imidacloprid (flea killer).
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Plants do have toxins which affect mammals to various degrees.
I've got a plant growing in my yard that can give you a heart attack if consumed in large enough quantity (and it's not very much). If you use a hydrochloric acid bath to extract the alkaloids, wash away the l enantiomer with Chloroform (only the l enantiomer is soluble), extract the d enantiomer in ether (both are soluble), and then remove the single oxygen atom from the molecule using a volatile hydrocarbon as a wash, you get a white powder called d-n-methyl-alpha-methyl-phenyl-ethyl-amine hydrochlorate salt, or d-Methamphetamine HCl for short. Not something you want in your body.
If you nibble on it a bit, it'll clear your sinuses.
the surviving grass was fairly toxic to cows and it put off seed that produced grass that was fatal to cows.
Apparently the toxin in peanuts was evolved through selective breeding. By accident.
Let's not get into the whole capsicum annum species.
Many foods humans eat require fermentation, cooking, aging, grinding, washing, deskinning and other preparation methods.
Taro root, along with anything else containing oxalic acid or calcium oxalate.
Raw vegetables can be bad for you
Soy beans.
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"Vaccines are beneficial, GMO has yet to offer any significant benefit."
Except the removal of various pests from destroying our crops? Avoiding famine is a fairly significant benefit.
"Vaccines are peer-reviewed, GMO is not."
Yes, and no. If you are speaking in a strictly academic sense, then yes, I concede that vaccines may be more closely reviewed than GMO crops. However, GMO crops are still closely watched, by the producer of that seed, the farmers who grow it, and the government.
"Vaccines are not made with the sort of GMO that is of concern."
Oh, I think it is of some concern. Fear of GMO leads to fear of Vaccines -> I imagine there is a wonderful diagram that shows a beautiful convergence between people who fear GMO, and Anti-Vaxxers.
"Only a moron links unassociated issues. Don't be a moron."
Ad hominem.
"Oh, and get off my lawn."
You seem to be associating my high uid with age; this is not the first account I've made on /. (lost the password to the original).
Vaccines are beneficial, GMO has yet to offer any significant benefit.
Total utter bullshit. GMO has proven to be incredibly effective at its goals, primarily among them is increasing crop yields. The number one reason behind destruction of forests and other habitats is to make way for more farmland. GMO has already gone a long ways in reducing the landmass AND water required for farming. The reason you don't know this is because you're willfully ignorant about it and you're only willing to look for something bad to say about it.
Why do you think farmers have adopted it en masse, in spite of patent royalties often attached? Because it still reduces their cost. (Once Monsanto's glyphosate resistance patent expired, many university and other sources began giving the seeds away for free because they recognize its environmental benefits.)
I don't know your motivations, but presumably they include one or all of:
- Generally thinking natural is either usually or always better (false)
- GMO is a corporate conspiracy (false)
- GMO causes cancer (this is a whopper: the scientist who tried to prove GMO causes cancer committed scientific fraud, just like the one who tried to prove vaccination causes autism)
- GMO is deleterious to human health (false)
- GMO is bad for the environment (another whopper, people who talk about bad agricultural practices and tie them to GMO conveniently ignore that all of those apply to traditional crops as well.)
- GMO contaminates wild plants (In the past this was feasible, but not anymore.)
- We don't know what all genetic modification does, therefore it's better to ban it (false and false; unlike other methods of getting plants to have desired traits, we know EXACTLY what the modification did because it is very precise and targeted, whereas other methods we have no idea what all changed.)
- OH MY GOD FRANKENFOOD! They put a salmon gene in the tomatoes they sell! Scary! (This was actually an experiment to better understand how certain genes work. They've done similar things like put eye genes from a rabbit into a fruit fly, replacing its own eye genes. This was an experiment to prove that genes are modular between species. I somehow doubt they intend to put fruit flies on store shelves.)
- GMO is bad because Monsanto (This is easily the most senseless argument. Yes, Monsanto has a history of unethical behavior, and yes, they hold a number of gene patents. But this is as senseless as saying that we should stop using computers because of Microsoft and Google.)
Tese arguments are all very similar (if not the same) as the arguments anti-vaxxers use. They also, like you, believe that their hated subject provides no benefit. This is why those of us who take a more objective approach to this can't tell the difference between you and anti-vaxxers: You're the same thing, only with the sole exception that you're against GMO instead. Much like vaccination, nearly every scientist that has gone against GMO has credibility problems.
I'm not surprised that there are more anti GMO people than anti-vaxxers though, namely because of the billions of dollars spent to lobby against it, as well as paying lots of money to commission studies to try to find anything that they possibly can to use against it. The organic industry (which has huge profits and deep pockets, and many big name brands you see at every grocery store, gives them lobbying money) is trying its hardest to gain regulatory capture by having its biggest competitor banned.
Greenpeace is also lobbying against this, and in a really bad way: Organic food, which they promote, is BAD BAD BAD for the environment. Really, it is, and the fact is that it doesn't actually provide any proven benefit at all. Organic is incredibly wasteful on both landmass and water usage. Essentially, organic is what you get when you revert agricultural technology to what we had in the 1950s. If the whole world suddenly went on an organic diet, you would see mass famines overnight -- including