Cockroaches Evolving To Avoid Roach Motels 315
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."
Re:Ah, yes! (Score:5, Interesting)
That Intelligent Designer is a crafty one! You'll never best his cockroaches!
IDers accept microevolution.
Using cockroaches (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Ah, yes! (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [io9.com].
Re:Roach Motel - Free Wifi (Score:5, Interesting)
Is it evolution, or survival of the fittest? (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm kinda thinking it's the latter.
Re:solution possibly (Score:4, Interesting)
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)
It takes all the running you can do... (Score:5, Interesting)
...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.
Re: Is it evolution, or survival of the fittest? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Similar observation with ants (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Ah, yes! (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Ah, yes! (Score:5, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)