11-21 FB Bugs

 Bugs. We all hate them. They eat us, our pets, they eat our food, they’re dirty, pesky and vile. Furthermore they are so resistant and resilient to our attempts at controlling them.The opinion expressed is not necessarily that of the station you are listening to. It’s mine.

 Insects are adapting to genetically modified crops in unexpected ways,

researchers have discovered. The findings underscore the importance of

closely monitoring and countering pest resistance to biotech crops. I recently called Jodie Ellis who is an entomologist with the Idaho State Department of Agriculture and asked her to talk about this resilience.  “Resistance is a phenomenon of pressure and exposure. If you take a type of insect and you constantly expose it to pesticide, consider how insects reproduce, much faster than mammals do, in the millions in generations so there are going to be a few survivors. They will survive the pesticide application and those survivors will go on to have offspring that have resistance. So that’s how that works. It is not that the insects themselves are becoming omnipotent or anything like that, it’s just that we use a lot of pesticides and we don’t use them judiciously