We already have many, many, many pesticides that do this, but neonicotinoid pesticides are really useful for a couple of reasons:
1. Very low toxicity to mammals. Neonics are used in flea collars, and to kill lice in farm animal bedding materials for this reason. Neonoics are also very safe to apply by human applicators.
2. Neonics are systemic pesticides in plants. They are absorbed into the plant and provide long term protection against insects pests. Less pesticide drift, less danger to applicators, BUT it also gets into floral nectar, causing problems for bees and possibly other insect pollinators.
3. Neonics are cheap. I can buy 5lbs of Marathon 1G, a neonic pesiticde for about $80. Something more targeted, such as Rycar is more than $500 for a similar quantity, and Rycar is not systemic, it has to be applied several times.
There is a move towards more targeted pesticides such as Rycar, Floramite, Kontos, etc. but they are expensive, and in many cases more difficult to use. That's the darn problem. Neonics are terrible for bees, but for agriculture, they are really useful and there is no clear replacement.
Impossible! Outside of gene drives (which sound a little dangerous...), I really want to do some simple CRISPR projects (I have a specific idea in mind; although not for hacker news ;). Too bad you need a lab, even if it's probably a good idea to limit hobbyists.
the non-native bees shipped around the country (US) and that are the primary pollinators in agriculture appear to already be fairly resistant to neonics.
* Most of the food crops we depend on both directly and indirectly are grasses and are wind pollinated (corn, wheat, etc.).
* There is no evidence of neonics disrupting food webs or destroying ecosystems. How do you even "destroy" an ecosystem? that doesn't make any sense, at least with an ecologist's definition of "ecosystem."
There has also been a coevolutonary arms race between plants and insect pests going back millions of years and many plants contains chemicals many times worse than any pesticide used on crops.
Easy. Wiping the key groups, like top predators or pollinators
In any case, destroying is not the right verb here, "changing" the ecosystem would be a better fit. Often for worse.
> There is no evidence of neonics disrupting food webs
There's plenty of evidence. This article is just one more. No wild bees and other pollinators -> no apples, plums, peaches, pears, onions, lattice, pumpkins, carrots, peas, peanuts, caffe, honey... I think that this qualifies as a case of "food web in trouble".
> Most of the food crops we depend on both directly and indirectly are grasses and are wind pollinated (corn, wheat, etc.)
Yes human diet is mostly based in cereals. The problem is that a lot of areas in N of Europe, Russia USA or South America aren't suitable to temperate or tropical cereals like corn or rice, because weather. Thus they need either spend gas for bringing cereals to the population, or rely on potatoes, apples, cabbages and other crops that stand frost and short summers. The 'big' cereals can be also difficult in desertic or high mountain areas, because they need a lot of water and soil is too poor. Legumes and other desertic crops (fruit tree cacti for example) are awesome in this cases. If you use all the water in culturing lattice, the wild organisms suffer obviously.
Can you present any evidence that neonics are destroying the food web? The difference might be "toxicity of legacy pesticides is a real concern, and destruction of the food web from neonics is fictitious."
This response is precisely what has made insecticides so incredibly dangerous for world agriculture. Documentaries like "The Vanishing of the Bees" and "More than Honey" do a great job highlighting just how criminally negligent the agriculture industry as a whole has been to bees. What I haven't seen is an analysis of how devastating the large-scale destruction of insect populations is to the world's ecosystem. We are essentially decimating the most productive food-producing species in the world and expecting not to have to pay for it in spades down the road.
Could you be more specific as to how pesticides have been criminally negligent to bees? This specific article is about neonicotinoids, which were introduced to replace pesticides with far worse impacts on the environment. Is there a source you can find that shows neonicotinoids as used in the wild being calamitous for bees?
I can find sources for you with commercial beekeepers pollinating canola crops seed-treated with neonicotinoids seeing no change in their colony survival at all.
No, I cited canola because it's the crop most widely treated with clothianidin --- virtually all North American canola is treated with neonicotinoids of some sort.
Also, your argument would be a bit stronger if canola wasn't the crop referred to in the study the BBC post is talking about.
Bees need some diversity in their diets. They consume nectar and pollen true, but that doesn't go far enough. If I offered you a diet of only Sugar cubes, Soya protein extract and Olive Oil you'd quickly die. Why? That diet has Carbs, Protein and Fat. That's everything a person needs!
It's a known issue that colonies cannot survive long term on substitutes. Why this is isn't clearly known yet but the assumption is that they are missing some dietary analogue to vitamin C.
Once again: I am not discussing bee diets. I brought up canola because (a) it's the crop discussed in the study we're commenting on, and (b) it's the worst-case scenario for bee exposure to neonicotinoids (virtually all canola crops are treated).
In fact: the idea that bee colonies would be stressed by a diet solely of oil rape nectar (note: no commercial bee colonies have such a diet, because they're moved around to take advantage of growing seasons elsewhere) favors my argument: it's another way in which bees working canola crops should do far worse, given neonic exposure, than they actually do.
> Is there a source you can find that shows neonicotinoids as used in the wild being calamitous for bees
The Swedish Board of Agriculture recently released a systematic review of scientific literature [0].
Bumblebees are more sensitive to subletal effects of neonicotinoids than honey bees [1][2]. There's a great variation in sociality, seasonality and living for various species of bees, which means the effects of neonicotinoids will vary between species [3][4][5].
A big issue is also that most studies only look for residue of neonicotinoids in plants or in the bee to figure out how calamitous they are. Even though many of the most used neonicotinoids have a high LD50 in bees [6], there are very few studies that look at the effects of the bees of the exposure. Instead of just looking at the individual level, more studies are needed that look at effects on sub-individual, hive and population level.
In rapeseed, there has been negative effects on the growth and reproduction of the bumblebee Bombus Terrestris linked to neonicotinoids [7][8]. And in [8] they also showed that Osmia Bicornis failed to create hives by rapeseed fields where clothianidin were used, but in average created 2.88 hives by non-treated fields.
[1] Cresswell JE, Page CJ, Uygun MB, Holmbergh M, Li Y et al. (2012b) Differential sensitivity of honey bees and bumble bees to a dietary insecticide (imidacloprid). Zoology 115: 365-371.
[2] Cutler GC, Scott-Dupree CD (2014) A field study examining the effects of exposure to neonicotinoid seed-treated corn on commercial bumble bee colonies. Ecotoxicology 23: 1755-1763.
[3] Thompson HM, Hunt LV (1999) Extrapolating from honeybees to bumblebees in pesticide risk assessment. Ecotoxicology 8: 147-166.
[4] Williams NM, Crone EE, Minckley RL, Packer L, Potts SG (2010) Ecological and life-history traits predict bee species responses to environmental disturbances. Biological Conservation 143: 2280-2291.
[5] Brittain C, Potts SG (2011) The potential impacts of insecticides on the life-history traits of bees and the consequences for pollination. Basic and Applied Ecology 12: 321-331.
[6] LD50 for imidacloprid, thiamethoxam and clothianidin for the honey bee Apis Mellifera is 0.02-0.08 μg per bee. For acetamiprid and thiacloprid it's 8.1-39 μg per bee. EFSA 2012.
[7] Goulson D (2015) Neonicotinoids impact bumblebee colony fitness in the field; a reanalysis of the UK’s Food & Environment Research Agency 2012 experiment. PeerJ 3: e854.
[8] Rundlöf M, Andersson GK, Bommarco R, Fries I, Hederström V et al. (2015) Seed coating with a neonicotinoid insecticide negatively affects wild bees. Nature 521: 77-80.
That's probably not practical, but in practice it is also not really needed. Usually when someone has a problem with insects they just need to kill a few particular species. Doing that is actually feasible.
There are three broad approaches to killing insects.
#1. Mechanically disrupt them. E.g., rip their heads off or squish them or similar. This may seem impractical at first, bringing to mind images of immigrant laborers crouching over the crops with magnifying glasses, identifying the bad insects and crushing them between thumb and forefinger.
That would indeed be impractical. The way you implement #1 is to find another insect that preys upon the pest insect, or that is a fatal parasite to the pest insect.
This can be a very safe method for dealing with the pest insect, because predator and parasite species are often very specific when it comes to their prey or hosts, often only going after a single species.
So why don't we use this method more? I'll cover that later.
#2. Disrupt their life processes chemically by using a pesticide that attacks some fundamental aspect of life.
This is risky and hard to get right, because most of the fundamental aspects of life that insects depend on are also the fundamental aspects of life that other life forms depend on. This means those pesticides are almost always harmful to far more species than just the pest you are trying to get rid of.
Insects are small, so you can sometimes work around most of the danger to other species by keeping the doses small enough so that they are huge in insects, but are small in other animals that eat the poisoned insects, or in animals and people that eat the crops that that the residue lingers on.
You can also try to design the pesticide so that it breaks down quickly. Insect lives are often on regular and predictable schedules, so for many species there will only be a short, predictable time when they are attacking crops. In that case, a pesticide only needs to stay effective for that time frame.
#3. Disrupt their life cycles chemically by using something that only affects the particular species that you wish to get rid of.
This is actually feasible! Insect behavior is essentially controlled by biological state machines, and state transitions are triggered and controlled by hormones. Suppose you've got a pest insect that hatches at a certain time of year, then spends a couple months living in the ground eating grubs, then on the first warm evening of summer emerges, finds a pond, and then swarms 2 to 3 meters above the north side of the pond, swarming until it finds a mate in the swarm, mates, and then lays eggs on your crop plants and then dies, and when the eggs hatch the larva eat the crops.
Each of those events will be controlled by a hormone. There will be a hormone that triggers the "leave the ground and fly to find a pond" behavior. Another will trigger the "find the north side of the pond" behavior. Yet another will invoke the "swarm at 2 to 3 meters" action, and the "find a mate action" after that. After the mating, another hormone will trigger the "lost in time, like tears...in...rain. Time to die" behavior in the males, and the "lay eggs and die" behavior in the females.
If you can make a synthetic version of that hormone that triggers the the start of the sequence, and expose the insects to it a few weeks before that first warm evening of summer, you can make them do everything early. If that is early enough that they have not yet become sexually matured, they will go through the motions, but nothing useful (from the insect point of view) will happen. You'll have effectively wiped out that whole generation in that area.
But what happens to other insects that get exposed to that hormone? Won't we also be triggering bees and other useful insects into doing things out of sequence? Nope! It turns out that hormones from one species generally don't affect other species, nor do they affect non-insects that might eat the insects.
So why do we do #2 instead of #3? The same reason we rarely do #1.
We rarely do #1 and #3 because to do them requires actually understanding the pest insect. If you want to bring in a predator or parasite for a pest insect, you need to know enough about the natural ecosystem of the pest to identify its predators and parasites, and understand their effects on it.
Similar for #3. Someone has to study the life cycle of the pest sufficiently to reverse engineer its behavior state machine to identify the behaviors that we'd like to fiddle with, and study the pest sufficiently to identify which hormone controls that behavior.
From what I understand, these studies aren't particularly easy. Someone may have to spend many years studying a particular insect to understand it enough to start hacking it's biological programming. The big pesticide companies aren't particularly interested, because #2 is a lot easier...that just takes formulating new chemicals that are generally hostile to life, and then figuring out what restrictions have to be placed on their use to kill insects without doing too much collateral damage.
Academic researchers don't do much for #1 or #3 either, because there just isn't the funding.
There is a good illustration of this in the book "Life on a Little Known Planet: A Biologist's View of Insects and Their World" by Howard Ensign Evans. He was one of the world's leading experts on parasitic wasps. Before reading his book, I did not even know that there were parasitic wasps, but in fact there are many species of them, most very tiny (head of a pin size).
He tells of an incident where there was an invasive pest, from Florida if I recall correctly, that was attacking California citrus crops. In Florida there was another insect that was either a predator of or a parasite of (I forget which) the pest. This was imported in an attempt to control the pest.
This attempt failed, and California's citrus crop suffered large losses. Many years later, researchers figured out why the imported predator/parasite did not work. It turned out that the predator/parasite species turned out to actually be two species. According to everything that scientists had observed and measured at the time, they appeared to be one species, but it turned out to be two closely related species. There were only a couple of observable differences, both subtle. One was something like one species mated slightly earlier than the other. That was easy to miss, because unless you've watched a lot of them mating, you won't be able to tell the difference between two populations whose mating windows overlap, and one population with a wider mating window. Unfortunately the other difference was that only one of the two was a predator/parasite to the California pest. All of the ones they collected to send to California were from the wrong population.
I believe (but don't recall for certain) that this predator/parasite species was a parasitic wasp. The reason no one had studied it enough to realize that it was two species was that in the US there were only two parasitic wasp experts, and they were busy with the thousands of other parasitic wasp species.
(There are a lot of species science has not gotten around to studying, or even cataloging. Evans mentions early in the book that every summer he'd set out an insect trap on his property in New England, and would routinely catch insects that were unknown in the scientific literature. He would even occasionally catch parasitic wasp species that he did not recognize).
Why were there only two parasitic wasp experts? Evans mentions that he had a promising graduate student who was interested in specializing in parasitic wasps, and Evans advised the student to find another specialty. Industry was not interested in hiring parasitic wasp experts, and universities entomology departments weren't growing so the only way he'd get an academic position as a parasitic wasp expert was to replace an existing retiring expert, and neither Evans nor the other US parasitic wasp expert were anywhere near retiring.
Personally, I find this ridiculous. Pest insects cause a tremendous amount of economic damage. Methods #1 and #3 are effective and environmentally safe ways to control them. I would think it would be well worth our while to fund anyone who is interested and willing to make a career out of studying the ecology of pest insects and of predator/parasite insects that might affect pest insects. Even if most do not lead to controlling pest insects, some would, and that should justify the cost.
As far as I have been able to find, no one keeps track of how many entomologists there are, but the Entomological Society of America has about 7000 members. If every member of the ESA was an expert in a dozen species, they would still not come close to covering all the species that are probably economically relevant in the United States.
When I was growing up in fly-over land, we had small, harmless little ladybug beetles. The most benign of all the flying insects in the territory. Then some how an aphid that attacks soy bean plants got imported from Asia, no one knows how for certain. It attacks the stems of the plants and destroys their ability to transport moisture through the stem. Pretty devastating to the plant.
So Very Wise People imported an Asian ladybug to feed on the aphids. Very large in comparison to the native species. And they bite. And they leave dirt trails when they come into the house. They have helped mitigate the aphid problem, but the native species is pretty much gone now. And the Asian ladybugs move into your house for the winter and invade everywhere and leave their dirt everywhere. And bite.
So, net result: One destructive, invasive species somewhat tamped down, but farmers still spray insecticides for it when it gets out of hand (based on population measurements in growing bean fields). One native species wiped from the ecosystem and replaced with a nastier and more populous non-native species. Net it all out: 2 for the invaders, 0 for the home team.
There aren't really any simplistic answers. Chemicals aren't great for the non-target species (including the farmers that apply them), but imported predators have unanticipated side-effects as well. Not growing soybeans anymore is an option, I suppose, but not so great either.
Using insects to control insects is not without risk, as you note.
I think the key is to understand very well the insects you are trying to control, and the insects you consider using to control them. Sometimes you can find a predator/parasite that only attacks the pest insect and cannot survive without it. That should usually be pretty safe, because as the pest is eradicated the control insect will die off too.
If you use a control insect that attacks multiple species, or that has a way of surviving absent the target insect, then introducing the control insect can be quite risky.
The more resources we put to understanding insects, the more we can get the good outcomes and avoid the bad.
Mechanical disruption can sometimes be done pretty easily with machines. If you blow air on the Colorado potato beetle it will freeze and fall to the ground, so you can pick it up before: https://patents.google.com/patent/EP0348751A1/en
So called biological controll (for example parasitic wasps) is a very powerful way to deal with insect problems, as you point out.
As a side note I am wondering about there only being two parasitic wasp experts in the US, that must have been a long time ago.
My brother in law, who is one of the world's top parasitic wasp experts (based on papers published and scientific awards) has been working with US parasitic wasp experts for decades. He never mentioned this shortage of US scientists in this field.
Evans died in 2002, at age 83. If he retired around age 65, that would have been around 1967, so if he was referring to the state of the field when he was a professor that would have been in nearly 50 years ago.
"Life on a Little Known Planet" was first published in 1968, which fits in with that. The latest edition was revised and updated in 1993, which was still quite a while ago.
I don't recall for sure, but I believe the passage that mentioned only two parasitic wasp experts in the US was talking about the time when his graduate student was interested in specializing in that area, which could have been any time before he retired.
(I can't check because unfortunately I have it as an audio book. Great for listening in the car, but terrible for searching to find and reread a particular passage!)
1. Very low toxicity to mammals. Neonics are used in flea collars, and to kill lice in farm animal bedding materials for this reason. Neonoics are also very safe to apply by human applicators.
2. Neonics are systemic pesticides in plants. They are absorbed into the plant and provide long term protection against insects pests. Less pesticide drift, less danger to applicators, BUT it also gets into floral nectar, causing problems for bees and possibly other insect pollinators.
3. Neonics are cheap. I can buy 5lbs of Marathon 1G, a neonic pesiticde for about $80. Something more targeted, such as Rycar is more than $500 for a similar quantity, and Rycar is not systemic, it has to be applied several times.
There is a move towards more targeted pesticides such as Rycar, Floramite, Kontos, etc. but they are expensive, and in many cases more difficult to use. That's the darn problem. Neonics are terrible for bees, but for agriculture, they are really useful and there is no clear replacement.