GMO

[Hermes]

The impact of GM crops on the monarch butterfly has drawn attention since a 1999 paper in Nature on the topic.  It is not related to herbicide-resistance as claimed in your article, but rather to insecticide-resistance.  By killing the caterpillars that attack the plant, you would reduce the resulting butterfly population.  The extent to which these butterflies are threatened in consequence, is in dispute.  It may be argued that human agriculture caused an increase in these populations in the first place.

http://geneticliteracyproject.org/2013/03/25/monsanto-v-monarch-butterflies/    

[BoogieMonster]

May we take a side step for a moment and gawk at the human-ness of all of this.

We engineered INSECTicides, and GMO plants protect themselves against INSECTS, and now people are upset that the result is a reduction in INSECTS, the very thing we were trying to reduce in the first place.

[Tweefo]

The impact of GM crops on the monarch butterfly has drawn attention since a 1999 paper in Nature on the topic.  It is not related to herbicide-resistance as claimed in your article, but rather to insecticide-resistance.  By killing the caterpillars that attack the plant, you would reduce the resulting butterfly population.  The extent to which these butterflies are threatened in consequence, is in dispute.  It may be argued that human agriculture caused an increase in these populations in the first place.

http://geneticliteracyproject.org/2013/03/25/monsanto-v-monarch-butterflies/    

Thanks

[Tweefo]

You can't win against the tree huggers. Roundup is not so bad for the environment. Without it (in my farming days) you had to spray a grass herbicide, followed a few weeks later by a broad-leaved poison. Sometimes we had to follow that with 2,4-D. Agent Orange, the Vietnam poison, was based on this I believe. In my travels, I can even smell it nowadays sometimes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange It is not a nice chemical.

[Tweefo]

Ivo Vegter's got a thought-provoking article in Daily Maverick http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2015-03-17-when-environmentalism-becomes-a-crime-against-humanity/#.VQmW5o6Ucpo

[Tweefo]

Are the anti-GMO crowd going to jump on this as well? http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/business/new-weapon-to-fight-zika-the-mosquito.html?_r=0

[brianvds]

Are the anti-GMO crowd going to jump on this as well? http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/business/new-weapon-to-fight-zika-the-mosquito.html?_r=0

I would classify mosquitoes under the heading of "little things that irk us so." I wonder what, if any, the environmental impact would be if we wiped them out completely.

[BoogieMonster]

Humans will sleep better, meaning they'll wake up refreshed and not have to rush to work because they're late. This will result in a drop in CO₂. Why yes a mosquito did keep me up until 2 am, why do you ask?

[Tweefo]

Are the anti-GMO crowd going to jump on this as well? http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/business/new-weapon-to-fight-zika-the-mosquito.html?_r=0

I would classify mosquitoes under the heading of "little things that irk us so." I wonder what, if any, the environmental impact would be if we wiped them out completely.

There is nothing that I am aware of that only eat these pesky things. I am also not aware of anything, apart from a few viruses that we can do without, that rely on them to survive. Like with polio, we can do without them.

[BoogieMonster]

*Ahem*, well... actually.... at a previous place of employ there used to be frequent trips by all of us all around Africa. We soon came to use "mosquito" as an in-term to not only refer to the invertebrates that descend upon you when you exit any building and can usually kill you with some disease or another, but we'd also use it for the "professional company" that would descend upon you, cluster around, and follow you wherever possible/legal, once again infected with who knows what, making irritating noises, there to try to suck your wallet dry, and no matter how many you dispatch there always seem to be more.

Killing them all off may be a going a tad far.

(Everything I say is maybe not PC, but it's frikkin true)

[brianvds]

Humans will sleep better, meaning they'll wake up refreshed and not have to rush to work because they're late. This will result in a drop in CO₂. Why yes a mosquito did keep me up until 2 am, why do you ask?

My cat did the same to me. I recently moved house, so now she has to stay indoors for a week or three. Which means she yowls absolutely non-stop, from around 11 pm to around 3 pm, and her staff gets no sleep. But I wouldn't suggest we wipe out cats. :-)

As far as I know, mosquitoes form part of the diet of bats. But they're so small one has to wonder whether bats really need them.

[Rigil Kent]

There is nothing that I am aware of that only eat these pesky things.

In its larval form, the mosquito is an important staple of many small fishes (the unusual plural has the biological implication of denoting more than one species of fish). The mosquitofish is an excellent but disappointingly obvious example. The single obese goldfish that I've recovered from a virtually enclosed rainwater tank is a more surprising but less typical example.

Rigil

[BoogieMonster]

This just means we need to GM some syrup-sucking mosquitos.

EDIT: That have a natural fear of humans.