US Beekeepers Fear For Livelihoods As Anti-Zika Toxin Kills 2.5M Bees (theguardian.com) 244
A new report suggests that an insecticide sprayed from airplanes to kill mosquitos carrying the Zika virus may in fact be killing bees, since the "fine mist" is "beaded with neurotoxin." Earlier this week, one beekeeper posted a video showing thousands of dead bees heaped around hives. Meanwhile, South Carolina hobbyist Andrew Mache wrote in another Facebook post that he had lost "thousands upon thousands of bees" and that the spraying had devastated his business. The Guardian reports: "The program head, Dr Mike Weyman, said that though South Carolina has strict rules about protecting pollinators, country officials were using the neurotoxin, Naled, under a clause exempting them in a 'clear and public health crisis.' South Carolina's protocol for Zika infections is to alert local officials of a carrier's residence, which they 'consider a ground zero,' Weman said. Local authorities then target the local mosquitos in a 200-yard radius, in this case with spray. Experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and independent universities say Naled is far safer than other chemicals. It breaks down rapidly and, in the very low doses at which it is prescribed, should not pose a risk to humans. 'In Louisiana, we use these products quite frequently to reduce mosquitos, but we don't see many non-target effects, because the doses are really small,' said Dr Kirsten Healy, a public health entomologist at Louisiana State University. 'A lot of people don't realize that we always have the environment in mind. We try to have products that have the lowest possible impact.'" The report adds that bees and other pollinators "contribute an estimated $29 billion to farm income" around the U.S.
Night vs Day (Score:5, Insightful)
Much of this fallout is because they sprayed during the day. If they had sprayed at night, a) they would have hit more mosquitoes since they're active then, and b) they would have affected fewer bees since they don't forage at night. Does anyone know why it was done during the daytime?
Re:Night vs Day (Score:4, Insightful)
Because that's when normal people work? I would assume most pilots wouldn't want to fly that low at night and those that would wouldn't be the lowest bidder.
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I would assume most pilots wouldn't want to fly that low at night.
Targeting a 200 yard radius is usually done by truck when local city government does it. To do it from aircraft you'd need military grade laser guided bug spraying.
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well, the article does mention "aerial spraying".
There's also this quote "It’s aerial bombing without any sense of being able to lay the chemical down on the target,” but that comes from a lwayer and not a scientist.
My guess is they hit the targeted mosquitoes just fine, but they also hit the bees and who knows what else.
Re:Night vs Day (Score:4, Funny)
In their defense, the illegals they hired are only available at Home Depot during the day.
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Answers: a) government in general is determined to explore how much utter incompetence can be accomplished at the expense of the public. b) because when depopulating 90+% of the world population is the goal, that's just how you roll baby...
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As if Northern state governments are more competent?
I am sure you see Detroit and Chicago as beacons of competent government? I am sure they have managed to eradicate all the corruption in those areas.
Vietnam (Score:4, Insightful)
Agent Orange breaks down rapidly and, in the very low doses at which it is prescribed, should not pose a risk to humans. 'In Vietnam, we use these products quite frequently to reduce Crops, but we don't see many non-target effects, because the doses are really small,' said General A. Nonymous, a public health Military at Louisiana War Department. 'A lot of people don't realise that we always have the environment in mind. We try to have products that have the lowest possible impact.'"
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And General John D. Ripper added that Agent Orange does not produce harmful chemicals when combined with nuclear explosions, so all is well!
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If Agent orange had been produced by someone competent instead of Monsanto, it probably would have been relatively safe.
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If Agent orange had been produced by someone competent instead of Monsanto, it probably would have been relatively safe.
Hey what's a little chloracne amongst friends? Now the point is moot, just use Roundup(tm) much safer. Of course that begs the question, did Monsanto know and figure that using an obsolete chemical contaminated with 2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin would make it easier to introduce the safer, more effective and patented Roundup?
Re:Night vs Day (Score:5, Funny)
Dear Mosquitos,
See what we did to those bees? If you don't shape up, you're next.
Love,
South Carolina state government.
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Probably Dunning-Kruger at work, i.e. they had no clue how to do this and they had no clue that they are clueless either and hence did not ask some actual experts. This is how most serious screwups happen: a combination of big ego and small skills.
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No, it's a combination of the usual public panic over the virus-of-the-moment that's GOING TO KILL US ALL (see also ebola, swine flu, bird flu, SARS, etc., etc.) combined with stupid motherfuckers in government who overreact accordingly and start taking laughably over-drastic measures to protect against a virus that hasn't even affected a statistically significant number of people in the world, much less in the U.S.
It's yet another winning combo of dumb motherfuckers who watch WAY too much CNN combined with
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Oh god, SARS, that was a scary disease. It wasn't that easily transmittable, but if you got infected, you had only a 98% chance of survival. Jesus Christ, that was a frightening time.
Overreaction (Score:2)
Much of this fallout is because they sprayed during the day. If they had sprayed at night, a) they would have hit more mosquitoes since they're active then, and b) they would have affected fewer bees since they don't forage at night. Does anyone know why it was done during the daytime?
Or they could just not spray since zika is in reality a fairly minor problem that gets WAY too much press because it affects fetuses. Many who are infected aren't even aware of it. Scary but compared to something like malaria it's a very minor problem with a mosquito vector. So they've turned a comparatively minor public health issue into a major food chain issue with a stupid overreaction.
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Because that's when the sprayer pilots are ready and willing to fly.
3 years ago, they heli-sprayed for mosquitoes in my neighborhood, zero notice to me. Maybe they informed the commercial scale beekeeper who lives about a mile away, maybe not. Helicopters were flying from about 7 to 10 am, three days in a row. Haven't seen them spray since then.
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Much of this fallout is because they sprayed during the day. If they had sprayed at night, a) they would have hit more mosquitoes since they're active then, and b) they would have affected fewer bees since they don't forage at night. Does anyone know why it was done during the daytime?
Look for a very steep rise in food costs next summer. The spraying has killed the pollinators, and that means, low low crop yields, as many crop seeds or bulbs will not sprout.
This is serious business (Score:5, Insightful)
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> This is serious business
No it's not. It's the usual The Guardian clickbait that makes it sound like the sky is falling.
This isn't some large-scale assault on bees. Those 2,5 million (big scary number) are the bees of a single beekeper who from the sound of other articles either wasn't in some registry or didn't get informed by accident.
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> This is serious business
No it's not. It's the usual The Guardian clickbait that makes it sound like the sky is falling.
This isn't some large-scale assault on bees. Those 2,5 million (big scary number) are the bees of a single beekeper who from the sound of other articles either wasn't in some registry or didn't get informed by accident.
But who notifies the millions of natural bees that don't have friendly beekeeper to register them?
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I've come across enough feral swarms to know they exist. The real problem is the native bees. I have some bee attractive flowers here and there's at least 3 types of native honey bee visiting in large numbers. These aren't European bees, not as highly social and crappy honey producers but more cold tolerant and busy as fuck pollinating as they stock up on pollen.
In the spring there are quite a few bumble bees here as well, busy pollinating the early stuff such as huckleberries. Last year the weather turned
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Yes, there are feral hives. Supposedly all were wiped out due to mites & "Colony Collapse Disorder" back 10 years ago. The theory is the new feral hives spread from commercial/hobbyist hives. Back in 2012 my tomatillo plants were covered in European honey bees & I had a bumper crop of tomatillos. 2013, nearly zero. Yes, pollination still happened but I got half the tomatillos. 2014 there were more bees, likely from a local hobbyist. This year, there are a decent amount, but nothing like 2012.
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At ground zero, all insects will die, not just a beekeeper's domesticated insects. If you plan genocide, target it better. Those infertile male mosquitos are significantly better idea (i'm not convinced of the efficiency, though).
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They targetted fine. Somehow this guy didn't get told so he could move his hives like all the other beekeepers did.
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Bees are gone, we have about 4 years to live I understand Einstein said.
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2... [quoteinvestigator.com]
He didn't say it, it wasn't even a scientist but a writer who made that claim. Also, 1 data point does not make a pattern, there are many bee hives that are thriving while yours are having issues caused by (as you admit!) local circumstances.
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No we're not. First off, the majority of staple crops are not dependent on bees; corn, wheat, rice, beans, and soybeans are either wind or self pollinated, and crops such as potatoes, sweet potatoes, yams, bananas, and cassava are not dependent on pollination of any sort. Even in crops that are not staples, there are still things that do well without bees, like tomatoes, peppers, persimmon, papaya, and crops not dependent on pollination for the edible portion, like onion, lettuce, carrot, spinach, broccol
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America has and had it's own varieties of wild bees and other insects that pollinate, but they're likely as sensitive to pesticides as the European Honeybee.
Of course, the dumbest part of this is that there has been no case of zika transmission in SC. All existing cases are people who contracted it abroad and then returned home with it. Spray them with insect repellent and call it good.
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The native bees are just as sensitive to insecticides, which is much more sensitive then other insects, plus they're equally important as they're everywhere and more cold tolerant.
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We used to quarantine people with certain diseases, seems a better option than NUCing every insect from orbit. A little DEET [wikipedia.org] goes a long way too.
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Yes, many parts of the world did fine without bees for a long time, but that was before those parts of the world were trying to sustain billions of people, and I'm sure those parts of the world will continue just fine without european honeybees after all the people have starved to death.
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I am not sure everyone understands that we totally depend on viable bee populations for our own survival. We're abstracted from it but it's real. Plants --> Animals -->People eating. ^ System cut off at the knees by destabilizing bee population, a process that's already started so more pressued isn't the right input.
Unfortunately, some businesses don't seem to learn from history. Take DDT [wikipedia.org] and Thalidomide [wikipedia.org] as examples.
Is there no end to this neo-Luddite infestation? (Score:1)
Furthermore, I don't think the areas where zika has been detected or is in danger of spreading are especially known for being the breadbasket of America.
Kill them all. If you want a more selective technique, start pushing back against the anti-GMO psychopaths who m
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While you're at it, be sure to kill the kudzu. It is responsible for just as many cases of zika transmission in SC as the mosquitoes (that is, none).
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There have been ZERO transmissions of zika in SC. None at all. Not even once. Are you seeing the trend? That means there is no cycle to break in SC. If it doesn't exist, you can't break it.
SC has also never been a site of outbreaks of dengue or any other diseases carried by the same mosquito.
That being established, a better technique would be to spray people bringing zika back home with them with insect repellent so they don't introduce zika to the local mosquito population in the first place. If they feel
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From TFA:
South Carolina’s protocol for Zika infections is to alert local officials of a carrier’s residence, which they “consider a ground zero”, Weyman said. Local authorities then target the local mosquitos in a 200-yard radius, in this case with spray.
Now, can you explain again how treating the infectees with mosquito repellent would be any less effective than the poorly targeted spraying?
But do read the rest of TFA first so you don't make an ass of yourself again.
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No, I claimed that SCs current actions were unnecessary and useless. When you demanded an actual solution, I suggested repellent and limited spraying. You then went nutz claiming I am against 'teh chemicals' in spite of my statement that repellents and perhaps limited spraying should be used (last I checked, both of those involve chemicals). It seems your mind was made up and you took offense at my confusing you with facts.
Tell me, when a fly lands on your TV, do you blow it away with a shotgun or do you p
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No, but I also don't conflate "shotguns" and "every single insecticide ever made". You do realize that among North American insects with wide distribution, no other insect has a water based larva stage utilizing little temporary pools of stagnant water like mosquitoes do? There's every reason to suspect these small pools can be targeted with chemicals that 1. do not affect other insects and 2. will be diluted to inconsequentially small concentrations in larger bodies of water.
You are incorrect, dragonfly larvae are also water based and like the same conditions mosquitos do. Dragonflies are a significant mosquito predator.
I think that broad spectrum insecticides that are highly effective against adult form mosquitoes are completely appropriate for hotspots around known cases and larvacides not known to be especially toxic to other life forms should be used liberally everywhere there are humans present (I'm not sure on the status on these. They might be somewhat toxic to amphibians, but if there aren't any known endangered species in an area I'd say it's worth it regardless) until the Zika reservoir appears to have burnt itself out (a big question here is whether any non-human animals are going to be effective reservoirs) and/or until a vaccination or major aedes egypti eradication campaign can be started.
Amphibians in North America are in decline for unknown reasons. They tend to be susceptible to insecticides. They are also a significant mosquito predator. Meanwhile, there are no zika reservoirs in SC, so consider those imagined reservoirs burned out.
What's your counterargument? Be conservative even though we know the reservoir still exists and that the pesticides aren't known to be particularly dangerous to humans and risk allowing this thing to go global before we have countermeasures? (Forgive me for being USA-centric but I think there's more international travel here than in Brazil.) I can crunch some back of the envelope numbers on this if you want, but I somehow doubt you're interested in an actual cost/risk/benefit analysis.
We were talking about measures in SC. Perhaps you forgot. There is no reservoir there.There have been no cases o
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I cannot imagine anything less productive than changing or broadening the subject in your oen mind without giving any indication. Otherwise, presume everything I said is in reference to the common cold and see how stupid your comments would look in that light. Why do you think the common cold threatens IQ huh? Ar you crazy?
See? Doesn't really work
As for eradicating A. Aegypti, considering I advocated for doing just that, I'd have to say your motive in this conversation is driven by a need on your part for m
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The WHO does know. I am relying on their information. You have simply reinforced that you have some odd psychological need for me to be wrong no matter what I might say (even when I agree with you). How sad.
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Here. [scdhec.gov]
I will make a small correction, there was ONE case of sexually transmitted Zika. I suppose if the couple had been sprayed with insecticide before they had sex, it might have spoiled the mood...
That was just an acorn. The sky is doing fine.
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Furthermore, a large proportion of our staple crops (rice, wheat, corn, oats, etc.) do not depend on insect pollinators of any sort, and of the ones that do depend on insect pollination there are usually multiple species that are up for the task. Yes, the honeybee has fallen on hard times lately but even if every honeybee in the world was killed, there's definitely not going to be any sort of famine and no plants native to North America would die off as a result.
The mass production of many foods rely almost entirely on beekeepers hauling their hives to the farms. From almonds to apples, some, like watermelon, the honeybee is essential. If we lost all honeybees? Famine is unlikely, but shortages & high prices are. There are alternatives to honeybees, but would not produce the massive amounts of food per acre farmers are currently getting.
That being said, of course we should spray. We just have to be smarter than the average county worker in Florida.
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I advise 100% of people to avoid Florida, and if they must go there, to stay in air-conditioning. Pregnant or not.
So... "I don't want to spray areas of Florida, I just want to depopulate Florida completely."
How many bees is your childs life worth? (Score:4, Interesting)
DDT could save millions of lives. We tossed that to the side because of shaky science. Now we have Zika and that fix is killing bees.
So do we go back to ddt? Or just suffer the effects of Zika?
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... We tossed that to the side because of shaky science. ...
don't you know that in usa ( and under its lead rest of the world), hard sciences (that rely on experiments, scientific method, falsifiability, etc.). do not matter, now it is science "settled" by consensus, popular opinion (guided by 'liberal' media), social construction. etc., that rules.
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Do you think that DDT is not going to kill bees? Then you got it all wrong: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1744-7348.1948.tb07353.x/abstract
Without bees there is no food. That has a much bigger impact than the Zika virus on the human population.
Also, there are other solutions to limit the diffusion of the Zika virus such as Oxitec's "self-limiting" mosquitoes, which pass on a fatal gene to their offspring. Whereas targeted elimination of a mosquito strain (Aedes aegypti, the main carrier of th
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Without bees there is no food.
There are other polinators. And there are plants thriving in areas without large natural bee populations. The result would be bad, but lying about it just weakens your stance.
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Without bees there is no food.
There are other polinators. And there are plants thriving in areas without large natural bee populations. The result would be bad, but lying about it just weakens your stance.
That is actually true but none of them are a really replacement for bees. In China this problem collapsing pollinator populations (read: bees for the most part) and gross overuse of pesticides has gotten so bad that farmers are pollinating their orchards by hand using a brush: https://www.chinadialogue.net/... [chinadialogue.net] In some regions school kids get time off school every year to go into the fields with a brush and pollinate the flowers of domesticated plants. The best way to solve this problem is to create patches
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The best way to solve this problem is to create patches of meadows and forest to act as habitat for pollinators as well as predators like bats and birds who could eliminate the need for a lot of pesticide spraying and save farmers huge amounts of money. Of course that would put some major dents into the bottom lines of large swaths of the chemical industry and we can't have that now can we?
The problem is that the bats and the birds don't really eat the mosquitoes out in the wild. They did eat mosquitoes in lab experiments when they were put in an enclosure filled with mosquitoes and nothing else. Out in the wild, they go for larger, easier to find/see insects.
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"Without bees there is no food"
We have tons of self-pollinating crops, and last I checked, bees didn't live underwater in places like the ocean, where food literally swims around.
Losing bees would be a catastrophe (Score:2)
We have tons of self-pollinating crops, and last I checked, bees didn't live underwater in places like the ocean, where food literally swims around.
We do have self pollinating crops including some critically important ones. However there are a ton of crops [wikipedia.org] which ARE pollinated by bees. This includes many very important crops including most fruits, lots of vegetables and lots of feed for livestocks. 35% of food crop production and 60% of food crop species are animal pollinated with bees being a critical part of that.
Bees are hugely important to our food supply and economy. Could our species survive without them? Yes but it is no understatement to s
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It could, but it won't and it wouldn't have. At the time it was stopped, it was already mass sprayed to the point where the mosquitoes were developing immunity.
Even now you can look at post-2000 research in places like Brazil that shows there's a fuck ton of DDT in the environment, which tells us one of two things: the pro-DDT people are lying when they say it breaks down and is harmless, or Brazilians don't give a shit about what some woman in the US says about how loud it gets in the spring and kept spra
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DDT could save millions of lives.
Not in the US, it couldn't. Less than a thousand deaths a year from mosquito related infections. In the world? Yeah, guess what, they can and in some cases do use DDT. It isn't necessarily helping that much.
We tossed that to the side because of shaky science.
Sure, did you tell yourself that about lead in gasoline and smoking cigarettes too? What else do you believe is "shaky science" that really isn't.
Now we have Zika and that fix is killing bees.
So do we go back to ddt? Or just suffer the effects of Zika?
DDT can also kill bees. And Zika, despite the current fear campaign is not that dangerous to healthy adults. In fact, 80% of potential infections are e
Re:How many bees is your childs life worth? (Score:4, Informative)
Sure, did you tell yourself that about lead in gasoline and smoking cigarettes too? What else do you believe is "shaky science" that really isn't.
DDT is shakey science because indoor spraying in smaller concentrations has since been shown to have no ill effects on the environment. The initial science was wrong, overblown by the hippie movement, and poor application of DDT in mass outdoor spraying.
Maybe we should just keep our women indoors.
And wrapped in a burqa.
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So what you're saying is that the science for DDT does indicate that wide-spread application was wrong,
Nope. The "science" at the time said that any use was wrong. That we now know that to be only high-dose outdoor application doesn't change history.
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Blaming Zika for all these recent (all within the last 1 or 2 years) health effects is based on shaky science. And to tell the truth, it sounds more like a cover up to protect some chemical company's fuck up in Brazil (a slow acting Bhopal disaster), where it all began. But for some reason that's all "conspiracy theory" and "tin foil hat" paranoia, while everything the government says is taken at face value. You'd think that with all the lying over the last fifteen years about "war on terrorism" etc, people
Re:How many bees is your childs life worth? (Score:4, Informative)
Nothing shaky about it. The science was well done and replicated all over the world many times.
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G*O*O*G*L*E. There are far too many very well documented studies to list here. You might as well demand a reference for rain comes from clouds.
Re:How many bees is your childs life worth? (Score:4, Informative)
That is thoroughly debunked right wing nonsense. DDT was never banned for vector control, not even in the U.S. It is still used in malaria endemic regions for indoor residual spraying, which, unlike aerial spraying with adulticides, is actually effective for mosquito control. Spraying Naled is theater.
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The reason is that it prevented mosquitos from developing immunity too fast through prolonged exposure, so exterminating them for malaria control kept working much longer. (This is rather like the case of using antibiotics on cattle preemptively, only this time we're doing the wrong thing).
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also patently false.
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To quote from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT):
... ... Because of its lipophilic properties, DDT can bioaccumulate, especially in predatory birds.[53] DDT, DDE and DDD magnify through the food chain...
DDT is a persistent organic pollutant
DDT is an endocrine disruptor....
DDT may not kill vertebrates as swiftly as it kills insects, but it hangs around in the environment, and because it is lipophilic, it accumulates in body fat rather than being excreted with the urine. Those at the top of the food chain like birds of prey and humans tend to accumulate more, because we eat many animals that each have accumulated some. The words "endocrine disruptor" is bad news in that context.
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Lipophobic doesn't mean you build up concentrations and never let them go, it means it's processed in the liver rather than the kidneys. Some small portion may end up stored in your fat but the bulk of the material will be processed and broken down by the liver.
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DDT could save millions of lives. We tossed that to the side because of shaky science. Now we have Zika and that fix is killing bees.
So do we go back to ddt? Or just suffer the effects of Zika?
Bees are a key pollinator, just ask any farmer. Farmers actually hire beekeepers to come to their farms and set up their bee colonies to pollinate the crops. That is most bee keeper's main source of income, not honey production which is a side business. I know that there are people in the US who really like massive 'overwhelming firepower' type solutions but if it wasn't obvious before, it should be obvious now, that there are better ways of solving the Zika problem than to carpet bomb an entire state with
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Once upon a time countries like India would put bounties on particular nuisance species of snakes and rats, trying to eradicate or severely limit the species. In every case the offer of the bounty has triggered a golden age for the critter with the bounty. Populations boomed because people started raising the nuisance species for profit.
What you are imagining cannot happen. Even with the declining populations of honey bees,
The U.S. legal system will fix this. (Score:5, Interesting)
The beekeepers are saying they were never given any warning of this, so there will certainly be lawsuits in the pipeline and the spraying will stop.
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The spraying will stop in 8 to 10 years when the suits are settled, which will be 5-7 years after all the bees are dead and 4-6 years after every supermarket produce section becomes permanently half empty. Grains won't be affected much, but fruits and vegetables will be. And bees aren't the only pollinators.
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I'm sure what spraying needed doing has been done, but FTFA:
"Flowertown Bees was listed on local records but not in the state’s voluntary registry of pollinators, according to Weyman. “We know where the big ones are,” he said, “but as you can see this was a fairly large operation and almost right smack dab in the spray path.” "
So I don't know if the sprayers were obligated to check local records as well as state records, but there is a system in place to protect pollinators, a
In counterpoint to story from two days ago (Score:2, Insightful)
And yet some people think we can wipe out, with surgical precision, just the Zika-carrying mosquito species ...
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Actually, we might be able to, just not with pesticides. Using the genetically engineered sterile mosquitoes would not have harmed the bees like this wide spraying would have. Unfortunately, that option is drawing so much controversy that we will likely continue the pesticide route.
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And yet some people think we can wipe out, with surgical precision, just the Zika-carrying mosquito species ...
Uh, yes, we "think" so because there are genetically modified male mosquitoes, that are infertile. By releasing massive amounts of such mosquitoes we indeed can wipe out a certain mosquito specie, if we want to.
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Well, infertile mosquitoes will only reduce the population dramatically. Mosquitoes don't breed the same way screwflys did. But there are other approaches (basically genetic drivers that result in only male mosquitoes maturing) that probably could wipe them out.
No risk to humans so everything's fine. (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh... did they test it on other, you know, non-mosquito insects? Have they had their fingers in their ears for the past decade and didn't hear about declining bee populations?
This insecticide might not have a direct effect on humans. But the secondary effect of not having any damned food just might turn out to be rather important.
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But the secondary effect of not having any damned food just might turn out to be rather important.
Yes, it's such a pity all of our main staple crops like wheat are dependent on honeybee pollinators and that it's all being grown in Miami, the breadbasket of America.
Oh wait a second, absolutely none of that is true.
Toxin != Toxic compound (Score:3)
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I know, this gets my goat every time, but these days the word "toxin" is used so often to mean "something toxic", that I fear it will essentially lose its real meaning very soon.
shouda (Score:1)
mosquitoes CANNOT be controlled with biotoxins (Score:5, Interesting)
they reproduce too damn fast, and with their rapid lifecycle comes the development of resistant strains.
Now, what we do know (I learned this in junior school!) is that mosquitoes breed in stagnant water.
How about a mechanical control method, that's been proven to work? DRAIN THE POOLS, PUDDLES, OPEN SEWERS, AND ANY OTHER BODY OF WATER WHICH DOESN'T FLOW! Problem SOLVED!
(Fuck Monsanto et al whose business depends on shifting ludicrous amounts of the nastiest chemicals known to exist).
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One of the types of mosquito that carries zika only needs as much water as a bottle cap. There is no way to remove water to that level. Even leaves can have enough water on them for that.
Spraying is also a bad idea since it is indiscriminate and as you said they reproduce too fast to be effective.
For this problem we should be using genetic engineering. Infertile male mosquitoes would be the most obvious first step. It would dramatically cut the population and it is highly targeted and does not require remov
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The point of the toxin isn't to kill adult mosquito's, it's to sit in the water at high enough doses to kill the very sensitive larva while being diluted enough to not harm anything else..
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Checking Wikipedia, glyphosate (Roundup) is 10% of Monsanto's business, and sale of roundup-ready crops is 50%. That's 60% of Monsanto's business right there dependent on glyphosate.
I would not put glyphosate into the category of the nastiest chemicals known to exist. For that category, I'd suggest something like dioxygen difluoride (O2F2) which is just the thing if you ever had the problem
What is old is new again (Score:2)
Saw an interesting documentary on tv about an ancient ruins that were once one of the largest and more thriving ports in the Roman Empire. It was never really conquered or sacked or anything due to its location but eventually just ceased to exist.
The problem it was postulated was that the river mouth that it was situated on naturally continued to silt up. While the port kept dredging and moving the mouth of the harbor further away, it produced a lot of swampy areas. Those swampy areas became breading ground
2.5 million? (Score:2)
I know 2.5 million seems like a lot, but I visited what seems like a relatively small family-run bee operation on the weekend who claimed they had over 24 million bees. According to numbers I can dig up quickly, 2.5 million bees is about 50 colonies out of 2.5 million colonies in the US.
It's definitely a problem, but it's a bit more reasonable to talk about how many colonies were destroyed rather than number of bees, since that's how other statistics are tracked.
If the bees disappeared... (Score:2)
There's a quote that is often attributed to Albert Einstein (not sure if this is correct or not) but it's entirely relevant to the article:
"If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man."
The idiots responsible for this disaster want their arses kicking. Hard.
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Albert Einsten the famous botanist? There are no stable crops that are pollinated by bees.
Stop killing the mosquitos (Score:3, Informative)
The whole concept of trying to contain Zika in the first place is ludicrous. We're seeing dead bees now and who knows what tomorrow... and stopping Zika? It's simply not going to happen. We can't wipe it out in any of the countries it has now established itself and we're just going to keep getting reinfected. It may be stopped temporarily in one place, but then it will pop up in another. It's not going away. Are we going to spend billions every year doing goodness knows what to our environments to try and stop an inevitable threat.
Here's the deal with Zika. IF you're not a pregnant woman- it's really not that bad. Not only should we let it spread- we should probably introduce it to our children (if we can come up with a vaccine even better, but as mild as Zika is, it may not even be necessary). Let them build up resistance before they get to child-bearing age themselves. In Zika's native range there is no problem with microcephaly because everyone has exposure to the disease before they get pregnant. We need to be working on doing the same rather than spraying pesticide like crazy in a region every time Zika appears.
It's far cheaper and much more common sense to inoculate the populace one time rather than spend billions each year trying to contain it. Yeah, sucks if you're trying to get pregnant now- we need to take special care of our pregnant women, extra education, extra shielding from potential infection- but it makes far more sense to deal with Zika just one time rather than battle it continuously from now until the end of time or it overruns us naturally and perhaps in ways we're not prepared to deal with it.
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Hush now. That's just too plain rational.
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The thing is, I'm pretty sure quite a few people along the chain of command responsible for this decision know all the things you just said. I suspect they did it anyway because allowing Zika to spread is a PR nightmare after the rabid hype that's been devoted to it by various news outlets. Far easier to make a wasteful and inadvertently harmful attempt to control the outbreak and say "but we were trying to help!" than to do nothing and say "but it was right to do nothing and we couldn't have stopped it a
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Here's the deal with Zika. IF you're not a pregnant woman- it's really not that bad.
Guillain-Barre syndrome is no walk in the park. [cdc.gov]
It's like that wonderful climate moment (Score:2)
Just as the Greens are being forced to accept nuclear power if they want to kill off carbon, they will be forced to accept GMO mosquitos as a better alternative to pesticide spraying.
The GMO technique kills off one selected species. That is incredibly difficult to do with an insecticide.
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There are thousands of species of mosquitoes, only a few of which transmit disease among humans. The ecosystem will have no trouble filling in for those few mosquito species that, like Aedes aegypti, are not even native to all the places where they have followed human colonization.
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No this is to reduce the likelihood of encountering a infected mosquitos it does nothing at all to address the underlying problem mosquitos that bite humans and the fact that there are now several diseases carried by those mosquitos a few years ago it was west nile now its zika that everyone is worrying about.
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If you need food, then just uber over to the grocery store. FFS, why steal it from the bees?
Surely you must be joking. (for those clueless cave dwellers, food comes from farms not supermarkets).
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It does kill humans though....