Voracious Worm Evolves to Eat Biotech Corn Engineered to Kill It

Credit: Tom Hlavaty

One of agricultural biotechnology’s great success stories may become a cautionary tale of how short-sighted mismanagement can squander the benefits of genetic modification.

After years of predicting it would happen — and after years of having their suggestions largely ignored by companies, farmers and regulators — scientists have documented the rapid evolution of corn rootworms that are resistant to Bt corn.

Until Bt corn was genetically altered to be poisonous to the pests, rootworms used to cause billions of dollars in damage to U.S. crops. Named for the pesticidal toxin-producing Bacillus thuringiensis gene it contains, Bt corn now accounts for three-quarters of the U.S. corn crop. The vulnerability of this corn could be disastrous for farmers and the environment.

“Unless management practices change, it’s only going to get worse,” said Aaron Gassmann, an Iowa State University entomologist and co-author of a March 17 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study describing rootworm resistance. “There needs to be a fundamental change in how the technology is used.”

First planted in 1996, Bt corn quickly became hugely popular among U.S. farmers. Within a few years, populations of rootworms and corn borers, another common corn pest, had plummeted across the midwest. Yields rose and farmers reduced their use of conventional insecticides that cause more ecological damage than the Bt toxin.

By the turn of the millennium, however, scientists who study the evolution of insecticide resistance were warning of imminent problems. Any rootworm that could survive Bt exposures would have a wide-open field in which to reproduce; unless the crop was carefully managed, resistance would quickly emerge.

Key to effective management, said the scientists, were refuges set aside and planted with non-Bt corn. Within these fields, rootworms would remain susceptible to the Bt toxin. By mating with any Bt-resistant worms that chanced to evolve in neighboring fields, they’d prevent resistance from building up in the gene pool.

But the scientists’ own recommendations — an advisory panel convened in 2002 by the EPA suggested that a full 50 percent of each corn farmer’s fields be devoted to these non-Bt refuges — were resisted by seed companies and eventually the EPA itself, which set voluntary refuge guidelines at between 5 and 20 percent. Many farmers didn’t even follow those recommendations.

Fast forward to 2009, when Gassmann responded to reports of extensive rootworm damage in Bt cornfields in northeast Iowa. Populations there had become resistant to one of the three Bt corn varieties. (Each variety produces a different type of Bt toxin.) He described that resistance in a 2011 study; around the same time, reports of rootworm-damaged Bt corn came in from parts of Illinois, Minnesota, Nebraska and South Dakota. These didn’t represent a single outbreak, but rather the emergence, again and again, of resistance.

In the new paper, Gassmann describes further incidents of Bt resistance in other parts of Iowa. He also found rootworms resistant to a second variety of Bt corn. Moreover, being resistant to one variety heightened the chances of resistance to another. That means corn engineered to produce multiple Bt toxins — so-called stacked varieties — won’t do much to slow the evolution of rootworm resistance, as was originally hoped.

Farmers likely won’t stop using Bt corn, as it’s still effective against other pests — but as rootworms become more resistant, said Gassmann, farmers will turn to insecticides, thus increasing their costs and losing the ecological benefits originally gained by using Bt corn. As entomologists concerned by rootworm resistance wrote to the EPA in 2012, “When insecticides overlay transgenic technology, the economic and environmental advantages of rootworm-­protected corn quickly disappear.”

Entomologist Bruce Tabashnik of the University of Arizona called Bt resistance “an increasingly serious problem,” and said that refuge sizes need to be increased dramatically and immediately. He and other scientists have pushed the EPA to double current refuge requirements, but so far without success.

“Biotech companies have successfully lobbied EPA for major reductions in refuge requirements,” said Tabashnik.

Entomologist Elson Shields of Cornell University agrees. “Resistance was caused because the farmers did not plant the required refuges and the companies did not enforce the planting of refuges,” said Shields, who has written that “a widespread increase in trait failure may be just around the corner.”

In addition to increasing refuge sizes, farmers also need to vary the crops planted on their fields, rather than planting corn season after season, said Gassmann. Breaks in the corn cycle naturally disrupt rootworm populations, but the approach fell from favor as the high price of corn made continuous planting appealing. “Continuous corn is the perfect habitat for rootworm,” said Gassmann.

Shields also lamented the difficulty he and other academic scientists long experienced when trying to study Bt corn. Until 2010, after organized objections by entomologists at major agricultural universities forced seed companies to allow outside researchers to study Bt corn, the crop was largely off-limits. Had that not been the case, said Shields, resistance could have been detected even earlier, and perhaps stalled before it threatened to become such a problem.

“Once we had legal access, resistance was documented in a year,” Shields said. “We were seeing failures earlier but were not allowed to test for resistance.”

There’s a lesson to be learned for future crop traits, Shields said. Rootworm resistance was expected from the outset, but the Bt seed industry, seeking to maximize short-term profits, ignored outside scientists. The next pest-fighting trait “will fall under the same pressure,” said Shields, “and the insect will win. Always bet on the insect if there is not a smart deployment of the trait.”

ORIGINAL: Cornucopia Institute

by Brandon Keim Wired

March 20th, 2014

Absurd Creature of the Week: Foot-Long, Sex-Crazed Snails That Pierce Tires and Devour Houses

Giant African land snails carry quarters with them everywhere they go in case they need to, like, use payphones and stuff. Image: Roberta Zimmerman, USDA APHIS

Ah, the innocence of children. So free of corruption and cynicism, so sweet and sincere. Laughing and playing and introducing supremely destructive monster snails to Florida, where the beasts eat almost anything that’s green and then crap all over houses — quite literally laying waste to whole neighborhoods.

This actually happened in the 1960s, when a boy vacationing with his family in Hawaii had pocketed a few giant African land snails (Lissachatina fulica), a mollusk that grows to a foot long and a full pound. Hawaii had been battling the pest, and so too would Florida, where the boy returned with his new friends. Once home, he quickly grew bored of the snails and handed them over to his grandmother, who set them free in her backyard.

What ensued was an invasion by rapidly reproducing critters that have over the last century spread out of their native East Africa into tropical climes all over the world, from Asia to South America, as stowaways on ships or as pets brought home by people with a thing for snails. In Florida, eradication took seven years. Other places, like Brazil, have not been so lucky in their efforts.

You see, the giant African land snail is a hermaphroditic love machine. “Snails have female bits and male bits,” explained biologist Robert Cowie of the University of Hawaii, “a single pore, through which if you’re acting as a male, a penis extrudes, or if you’re acting as a female, through which the other snail puts its penis in. And in some cases they can do it reciprocally.”

Thus the giant snail never meets another snail it can’t get busy with. Once fertilized, the snail will bury several hundred eggs a few inches below ground, and because of the incredible size of the species, the young will emerge far larger than native varieties, making them that much more resistant to predation.

As these eggs demonstrate, cash rules everything around the giant snails from a very early age. Image: Wikimedia

Alas, four decades after evicting this enormous, fecund snail, Florida finds itself overrun once again. The creature was reintroduced here in 2011, and this time, according to Cowie, it may well be “bizarre, voodoo-like religious proceedings” to blame. The snail’s slime, he says, is coveted in certain South American rituals, and practitioners may have released the giant snails into their Miami-area backyards, hoping they’d breed freely.

The USDA and U.S. District Attorney’s Office are investigating this. It probably doesn’t help the ritualists’ case, though, that the year before the current outbreak, authorities questioned a Florida man said to have convinced his followers to drink the fluid from live giant African land snails, which he sliced open before squeezing the slime into their mouths. If you can believe it, the victims fell violently ill — ironic, what with this being a healing ritual.

Anyway, if it was indeed the practitioners who released the snails so they (the snails, not the practitioners) could multiply rapidly, it worked. Big time. Florida agriculture officials have collected 137,000 giant snails in just over two years. Compare that to the relatively few 17,000 collected in the first eradication in the 1960s, and you soon see the magnitude of this problem.

Today, Miami is simply overrun with the things. Not only do the giant snails chow on some 500 economically important plants in the area, they’re devouring houses. It seems they have a taste for stucco, which contains precious calcium. Without a ready supply of the stuff to fuel their amazing growth, they’ll simply turn on each other — at least in captivity.

You may be getting the impression that the giant snail’s natural habitat is the human hand. It is. Image: fiddledydee/Flickr

“A long time ago I had some African snails in the lab, in an aquarium-type tank,” said Cowie, “and apparently I wasn’t providing a sufficient source of calcium, and they would just eat each other’s shells. These snails produce big shells, they need a lot of calcium, and a lot of people these days when they keep snails they’ll put a bit of cattle bone in the terrarium for the snails to chew on, just to get the calcium.”

And because I know you were wondering: Yes, you can eat giant African land snails. But cook them well. I mean really well. Just boil them for a month. Grill them with napalm if you have it. Because like many snails and semi-slugs, this species carries the deadly rat lungworm.

As its name suggests, the parasite attacks rats, which pass the larvae in their feces. Snails that eat this waste are infected, as are folks who eat the snails. In humans, the larvae attack the brain, leading to meningitis and often a pretty horrible death. This has been documented as a particular problem in China, where people may not be cooking giant snails sufficiently.

But for all the folks who cook their giant snails properly, still others ingest them accidentally. All manner of critters could very easily end up in your Caesar salad, for instance, since cooks don’t always peel apart the lettuce before chopping it. “And it could just as well be a little baby African snail,” said Cowie. “OK, it’s a bit crunchy, but so is the lettuce a bit crunchy, and you’d never know. So that’s the way people generally get infected in places where they don’t habitually eat raw snails.”

The giant snail’s shell can grow to 8 inches long. To grow such a home, it eats the calcium-rich stucco from our own homes. There’s some sort of symbolism there, but I can’t figure it out. Image: Wikimedia

With such health risks combined with the damage to agriculture and the snails just being a public menace — with shells so big and sharp that they can puncture tires that run them over, for instance — Florida is sinking millions of dollars into its eradication measures. The state has 50 full-time staffers assigned to the project, said Denise Feiber of the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, which is leading the effort.

By deploying common over-the-counter snail poison and advertising a hotline residents can call to report sightings, authorities have so far been able to contain the critter to Miami. And no, pouring salt on them is in no way an acceptable option for homeowners. It’s a horrible death. Osmosis pulls the water out of the snail, killing it of dehydration. Just don’t do it. Ever.

But it’s possible, according to Cowie, that the giant snail could well spread to other Gulf states, though luckily they probably can’t tolerate the cooler weather in Georgia and other states farther north (contrary to popular belief, Hotlanta is not in fact always hot — most of the time it’s just Atlanta).

Cowie knows all too well the explosive population growth these things are capable of when left unchecked. In Hawaii, where he lives, the giant African land snail was introduced in the 1930s by Japanese immigrants who wanted to keep them as pets. They have since essentially assumed ecological control, tearing through agriculture and muscling out native species.

In 1950s Hawaii, “there were stories of on a rainy day, when the snails all came out and crawled all over the road,” Cowie said, “the cars would squish them and cars would end up skidding on the squished snail. Dead, crushed snail and slime, sort of all mish-mashed together by the cars. So that was when Hawaii got serious about trying to control them. And we’ve not been successful at controlling them.”

So come to Hawaii. Come to Florida. There’s plenty of sunshine and escargot. Just bring a fork, some butter, and maybe a French accent, if that’ll get you in the mood.

Browse the full Absurd Creature of the Week archive here. Have an animal you want me to write about? Email matthew_simon@wired.com or ping me on Twitter at @mrMattSimon.

ORIGINAL: Wired

By Matt Simon

Kobe in struggle to fight off invasion of Argentine ants

ORIGINAL: ASAHI
By KOICHI HOTTA/ Staff Writer
August 25, 2013

An Argentine ant (Provided by Japan Wildlife Research Center)

Argentine ants march in procession in Kita Park on Port Island in Kobe’s Chuo Ward on Aug. 9. (Koichi Hotta)

KOBE--At a restaurant along a main road on Port Island in Chuo Ward here, a steady procession of alien Argentine ants could be seen marching near the entrance and parking lot.

“Those ants enter my restaurant three or four times a year. Though I spray a chemical agent, I cannot prevent them from coming into my outlet,” the manager of the restaurant, who noticed the ants in his kitchen for the first time in 2008, said in mid-August.

Argentine ants, an alien species that destroys the natural ecosystem by expelling indigenous ants, have invaded various parts of Kobe and are infesting other prefectures.

They were confirmed for the first time in 1999 in Port Island, an artificial island in Kobe Port. Recently, however, they have also been confirmed in commercial areas in the central part of Kobe and residential areas in the suburbs.

“If Argentine ants take root, it will be almost impossible to eradicate them," said Mamiko Ozaki, professor of biology at Kobe University’s Graduate School of Science. "If you take measures sooner, it is better.”

Argentine ants, which are native to South America, are 2.5 to 3 centimeters long and brown colored. Though they are not poisonous, they have strong reproductive powers as several queen ants are living in one nest.

According to the Environment Ministry, Argentine ants were discovered in Japan for the first time in 1993 in Hatsukaichi, Hiroshima Prefecture. At present, they are confirmed in 12 prefectures, including Tokyo, Kanagawa, Osaka and Kyoto.

Argentine ants move more quickly than indigenous ants. They have been reported to be entering homes and collecting around food, and even infesting sleeping areas, preventing occupants from sleeping soundly. In one case, the procession of ants reached the eighth floor of an apartment building.

Local governments in various parts of Japan have started programs to eradicate them. Unlike indigenous ants, however, Argentine ants form a super colony, which means that ants of different nests live together and, as a result, many nests are connected. Therefore, eradication is extremely difficult.

Since 2009, the city government of Tahara in Aichi Prefecture has been engaged in eradicating Argentine ants in areas totaling about 90 hectares, including their habitats, in cooperation with local residents.

However, an official of the city government said, “We have no prospect (of eradicating them completely).”

Meanwhile, the Kobe city government has yet to embark on eradication efforts.

“We have not received concrete complaints from our citizens (against Argentine ants),” said an official of the city government’s living and sanitation section.

However, the ants' habitat is gradually expanding. According to a survey conducted by the Environment Ministry in November 2012, they were confirmed not only on Port Island but also in commercial areas and the Meriken Park, near the bustling Motomachi area. They were even found in a wharf near Suma Kaihin Park in Suma Ward, about seven kilometers west of the central area, and some residential districts in the ward.

In the spring, the Environment Ministry started eradication work in areas around Suma Kaihin Park on an experimental basis, saying, “There is a possibility that the habitats will spread.”

The Kobe city government has also said that it recognizes that Argentine ants are troublesome, because an eradication method for them has yet to be established.

“First of all, we want to ask our citizens to give us information on their habitats by showing the characteristics of Argentine ants in leaflets and on our city government website,” said the city government official.
By KOICHI HOTTA/ Staff Writer

Plague of Locusts Hits Egypt, Israel on High Alert

ORIGINAL: ScienceSpaceRobots

Egypt has been hit by a huge plague of locusts. The Week reports that there are estimated to be about 30 million locusts in the massive swarm. Crop damage has been reported in the region. Cairo residents set tires on fire to help keep the flying insects out of the city. Israel is also on high alert for the locust plague.

Locusts belong to the Acrididae class of insects. When the environmental conditions are right the insects can breed rapidly and form nomadic swarms that reach incredible numbers. The locust swarms can devour large fields of crops, which has lead to outbreaks of famine among humans in the past. A locust entry on National Geographic says the insects range in size from 0.5 to 3 inches (1.2 to 7.5 cm). The entry also says swarms of desert locusts can reach 460 square miles in size. 

Here is a video of the swarm: 

Posted on March 4, 2013

Plaga Cochinilla amenaza el 90 por ciento de las plantas de San Andrés

ORIGINAL: El Tiempo
REDACCIÓN VIDA DE HOY
3 de Abril del 2012

Las plantas de la isla de San Andrés están siendo agredidas por un insecto parásito.
Foto: Javier Silva Herrera/EL TIEMPO

Está acabando con árboles frutales, jardines urbanos y hasta palmeras que crecen en las playas.

Un insecto, tan grande como la cabeza de un alfiler, tiene en alerta máxima a San Andrés. La plaga se conoce popularmente como cochinilla y está arrasando con la vegetación nativa de este territorio, una de las joyas de Colombia en el Caribe y considerado por la Unesco como reserva de la biosfera, es decir, un lugar de importancia mundial por su biodiversidad.

La invasión de la cochinilla, de la especie acanalada, avanza con rapidez ante la mirada preocupada de los isleños, que ven cómo el animal mata sus árboles frutales y de pancoger. También acaba con las plantas ornamentales, con los jardines urbanos e incluso con las palmeras que adornan sus playas. En el 2010, las plantas atacadas estaban en 180 hectáreas del territorio. Hoy, los árboles enfermos se ubican en 1.740 hectáreas, según el Instituto Colombiano Agropecuario(ICA), o sea, en más del 90 por ciento de los 27 kilómetros cuadrados de extensión de la isla.

Para algunos funcionarios de la Corporación para el Desarrollo Sostenible de San Andrés (Coralina), aún es incierta la forma como este insecto parásito llegó a la región. No es claro si fue en un barco o a través de otras especies de flora introducidas desde el continente, como lo explicó a EL TIEMPO la subdirectora de gestión ambiental de la entidad, Opal Bent.

Sobre lo que sí hay certeza es sobre su agresividad. Cuando ataca, la plaga invade las hojas de las plantas, se come su savia y las debilita hasta secarlas. También las recubre con un líquido viscoso que impide la fotosíntesis. Desde ese momento, la planta empieza a reducir la producción de frutos.

Adriana Santos, directora del Jardín Botánico de la Universidad Nacional, en San Andrés, dice que controlar la cochinilla es un trabajo complejo, primero porque es un problema nuevo sobre el que no hay mucha información. Y a eso se suman las características ambientales de la isla, que son especiales por su condición de reserva mundial. Por lo tanto, el uso de pesticidas o de métodos como los que se han aplicado en el continente para atacar al parásito está prohibido. Mucho más delicada podría ser la introducción de algún espécimen 'foráneo' que pueda actuar como depredador natural y controlar las poblaciones de cochinilla, porque eventualmente este también podría salirse de control.

Marcela Sjoogreen, secretaria de Agricultura y Pesca de San Andrés, reconoce que el tema es "bastante preocupante". "De 1 a 10, diríamos que el problema está en un nivel 8 o 9", admite la funcionaria. La plaga ya está en todo San Andrés, en zonas de manglar y en Providencia, donde se ubica una de las últimas porciones de bosque seco del país. Ataca cualquier frutal, incluidos árboles de mamoncillo, mango, guayaba y tamarindo. "Los agricultores de la isla, en su totalidad, se han visto afectados", añade Sjoogreen. La plaga también se come los frutos. Por eso, toneladas de ñame, ahuyama, melón, naranjas y coco, entre otros, están contaminadas, lo cual está afectando la economía local y el autoconsumo.

"Esos productos agrícolas que han sido atacados quedan inservibles", comenta la Secretaria, quien aclara que las parcelas no ocupan grandes extensiones, pero son lo único con lo que cuenta la mayoría de isleños para su sostenimiento. "Los labriegos están angustiados y, en medio de la desesperación, aplican remedios caseros poco efectivos. Solo esperan soluciones definitivas que no hemos encontrado", agrega Sjoogreen. Precisamente, sobre esto hay una sola luz al final de túnel, que analizan estudiantes de la Universidad Nacional.

Ellos identificaron un hongo que serviría como un controlador natural de la plaga. Es denominado científicamente Paecilomyces, pero la investigación, limitada aún a pruebas de laboratorio, no ha dado pistas sobre cómo podría emplearse en campo abierto.

Las respuestas llegarían en unos meses, una hoja de ruta que será el único camino posible para acabar con esta plaga que se ha ensañado en las islas del mar de los siete colores.

REDACCIÓN VIDA DE HOY