| Bollworm Catching Up with Monsanto's Bt Crops |
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| Written by Heather McKee | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Tuesday, 19 February 2008 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Well, what do you know? A little worm is catching up with two of Monsanto’s transgenic crops. In a new article in Nature Biotechnology, a researcher from the University of Arizona reports that the cotton bollworm is showing increased resistance to Bacillus thuringiensus (Bt), the poisonous bacterium whose genome is blasted into Monsanto’s transgenic seed corn and cotton.
In the science world, the ongoing evolutionary battle between the eaters and the eaten is known as the “Red Queen” hypothesis, because of the Queen’s remark to Alice in Alice in Wonderland: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do just to stay in one place.”
Transgenic corn and cotton may temporarily be able to poison some pests - but the pest populations will always veer toward individuals that have any sort of tolerance to the poison. In the meantime, other pests unaffected by Bt may simply take their place on the cotton boll or the corn, as happened with massive mealy bug infestations in Punjab, India.
So Monsanto will have to keep fiddling with the corn and cotton genes to stay ahead of the pests. And they are – they’ve already released a new corn with a slightly modified Bt blast.
Farmers in the southern U.S. say that they have not noticed the cotton bollworm’s resistance yet. This could be due to the new generation of transgenic vegetables, additional pesticide sprays used in the fields, or the fact that farmers are required to use a technique known as “refuging,” where patches of wild corn are planted among the transgenic, ensuring that some “weak bugs” can still survive, and therefore dilute the genes of any possible new “super-bugs.”
And so the race goes on, with Monsanto holding the reins for transgenic corn and cotton, while Mother Nature cracks the whip for the bollworm.
Via NPR
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