Slashdot Mirror
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.
Are you a bug?
We already have roundup-resitant amaranth. I can't wait for BT resistant insects.
Just in case anyone thought that a bug-free world would be a wonderful thing.
What a massive load of fear mongering bullshit... The pesticides you're celebrating killed bees and other animals, seeped into drinking water, caused a worldwide spike in cancer, thyroid disease, and sterility. The GMO "pesticide" you're decrying is entirely natural and non-toxic to anything except for a few specific species of insects.
The whole "gluten free" diet craze and celiac disease may be more of an allergy to genetically modified wheat than gluten
In Europe we basically have no GMO corn/wheat. Nevertheless quite a few people have problems with gluten.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
explain how it is that corn that kills bugs isn't poisonous?
Oxygen is poisonous to many living things.
Back in the pre-GMO days, sprayed pesticides could be washed off. Sprayed pesticides are primarily concentrated on the OUTSIDE of vegetables. Husks and pod shells are typically discarded and protect our food from being contaminated by pesticides. It was more labor intensive for the farmers, sure, but the food was likely healthier for consumers.
Healthier except for the people ingesting the pesticides that had contaminated their drinking water?
Silly person. You’re using these pesky things called “facts” where as the GP’s fact-free opinion is clearly superior and more correct.
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.
Hm, missed biology classes often?
Like to recall what the lethal dose is to kill a kg of bugs and what it is for humans?
Ah, ha? Does it ring s bell?
No? Then shut your mouth.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
All other aspects are secondary or non-existent wiped under the table.
It cannot be what may not be is the policy.
The minds of the actors in this game are convoluted and corrupt.
Good luck!
Perhaps it doesn't kill us right off the bat, but I suspect it still does some damage to our guts.
I don't. The Cry toxin produced by Bt crops works by binding to a receptor that mammals simply don't have.
I am very leery of eating popcorn nowadays because it seems to irritate my guts quite a bit.
Popcorn is a specific variety of corn. People don't seem to realize it, but field corn, sweet corn, and popcorn do not come from the same types of corn. A lot of field corn is GE, some sweet corn is GE, but there are no genetically engineered popcorn varieties on the market.
Reducing pesticide sprays SOUNDS like a good thing, until you realize that the GMO plants and produce are pesticides themselves, inside and out.
What do you think is happening when non-transgenic crops are conventionally bred to more pest resistant? Chemical defenses, otherwise known as pesticides, are a key method of defense for a kingdom of organisms that can't swat at the things eating them. All plants produce pesticides, every last one of them. Every species you eat brings you more and more pesticides. With genetic engineering, they're just doing one more. I don't see that as alarming in the slightest.
Perhaps ironically, in most cases this would be more healthy than either GMO or non-GMO corn.
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.
explain how it is that corn that kills bugs isn't poisonous?
Explain how chocolate which kills dogs isn't poisonous?
GMOs might have looked like a good idea in the 1970s.
Now everyone with a clue about agriculture knows we don't need them.
Right. Except for the teeny tiny fact that anyone who knows anything about agriculture actually says the exact opposite of that. Otherwise you're 100% correct!
Killing bugs isn't a good thing.
You're right, mass starvation is a good thing. We need a good famine or two to kill off the idiots who don't understand the value of pest control.
The things that kill bugs don't affect humans most the time.
Plants do have toxins which affect mammals to various degrees. For example, after a drought in Texas the surviving grass was fairly toxic to cows and it put off seed that produced grass that was fatal to cows.
Many foods humans eat require fermentation, cooking, aging, grinding, washing, deskinning and other preparation methods.
And it's a problem when humans eat these food "raw". Raw vegetables can be bad for you. Juicing uncooked Kale, Broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables are known to enlarge your thyroid when eaten raw in larger quantities.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
In other words, we expect you to pay up even if you don't use them.
At the bottom of the
Why does everything need to have a negative trade off?
Sure it is great for stories but in real life things are not fair or balanced.
They are usually trade off of some sort, they are not usually a measurable 50/50 split. Often they are 80 good and 20 bad. In many was it is less of a trade off but an opportunity cost.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
What facts? The Séralini study have been severely debunked and have since been retracted.
Not only that but Seralini also doesn't understand statistics: "A 2015 reanalysis of multiple animal studies found that Seralini chose to forgo statistical tests in the main conclusions of the study. Using Seralini's published numerical data, the review found no significant effects on animal health after analysis with statistical tests."
BT is produced by i.e caterpillars in nature, it's not an invented chemical. It's also used as a pesticide by non-GMO farmers including organic farmers. And the method by which BT affects insects is well known and understood, the things it attacks in the insects does not even exist in mammals.
Well when you considering that "Flying Insects Have Been Disappearing Over the Past Few Decades, Study Shows" and that "Even Common Species Are Becoming Rare", this may not such good news after all.
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."
So cells and DNA are not natural now?
Please show one lawsuit of that. Just one.
We poisoned the food instead. But don't worry, they say this poison is friendly. Friendly to us, our bodies, our guys, our microbiome, our unborn children, to plants and insects we need to survive, to our ecology.
Like Casper, the friendly ghost.
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).
Support my political activism on Patreon.
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.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
> Why would producers genetically modify crops to tear up your guts from the inside? That does not sound like a viable business strategy (nor legal).
Based on that we would have no cigarettes, booze, opiods, lead paint, asbestos, or exploding cars.
Do you have such naieve blind faith in government too?
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
That article profiles Gary Rinehart. The suit against him was dropped, once it was determined his nephew was the one planting seed on Gary's property (with permission). The seed was patented seed (despite non-patented varieties being available, including saving seed if they liked).
Because Gary refused to talk to the lawyers to settle this before going to court (he kicked them out in ~ 2 minutes) they had no choice but to take it to court. Again, they dropped the case, and identified someone who was in violation of patents (which have existed before GMOs, and plant patents can apply to non-GMO varieties).
The whole "gluten free" diet craze and celiac disease may be more of an allergy to genetically modified wheat than gluten
In Europe we basically have no GMO corn/wheat. Nevertheless quite a few people have problems with gluten.
For the most part "problems" with gluten in Europe are imagined... Same goes for anywhere else. Very few people actually have Celiac or a gluten intolerance and most people pretending gluten is a problem for them are just following a fad diet.
It's got nothing to do with whether wheat is GMO or not.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Thank you for your insightful and well thought out post. I particularly enjoy the part where you back up your assertion with anything at all.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Did we know those pesticides were going to do all that before we started using them? I guess we knew they were harmful to humans, but never thought it would do all the things you describe.
I wonder what history will tell us about these "natural" solutions in GMO food. I'm no expert, but gut bacteria (for example) is just getting some attention, and isn't well understood. Do we know (for example) that eating GMO food doesn't harm gut bacteria? What about the bajillion other things we need to keep us alive and healthy?
GMO is a bit like nuclear power. There's a need for some of it, but no where near as much as the initial hype indicates, and history will show us that humans can pretty much f-up even the most noble, well designed and well intentioned things, given enough time and enough money to corrupt a few people in charge.
Just because that particular thing is natural in one organism, doesn't mean that it's OK to put it into a different one.
Welp, there goes our stem-cell research, then. /sad-trombone
> Are you a bug?
I'm a feature.
"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).
I see that you don't recognize that you've just made an argument and refuted it, all in one run-on sentence.
The rest of your post if chock full of false limiting assumptions, hyperbole, and silly panic.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
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