The Green Room
An American company has developed a pill that causes early menopause in rats, and Landcare research is looking into developing this technology to help fight our battle against possum and stoats -
http://www.odt.co.nz/news/farming/58882/early-menopause-could-control-stoats-possums-pest-experts
Looks promising to me - especially considering they are already doing field trials in Indonesia....
Half of me is going "freaky" sounds a bit GE for me. Can us humans really get it right? We've been known to stuff it up before!!
And the other half of me is going YEAH!!! That's what we need and can we make it for humans too?
Yeah from the article it looks like this project doesn't involve genetic modification, and if it did, there would need to be a lot of discussion around it before the project went ahead, either in the lab, or in field trails. Personally, I think that rather than putting money into developing new poisons, we'd be better off spending our money on research like this. That way, we'd have a better chance of knocking these pests off, for once and for all.....
Yeah, your so right!
I don't quite get why this isn't a poison. It still has to be distributed as bait right?
Interested to know how this would work in a population. Would it be more or less effective than current solutions?
The female individual needs to be directly exposed, so similar distribution/coverage issues? Is there any effect of them staying alive in the population rather than just dying off? Would it differ depending on the species?
the link to their homepage is http://www.senestech.com/
See Mandy's put an article about this technology on the blog?
I take Jamie's point about how it's administered and therefore can it be considered a poison too? From what I can interpret from Mandy's article, Jamie, it looks like they might release 'modified' animals (isn't that a pleasant word for it?) into the wild populations to breed with the unsuspecting.....
Sodium Fluoracetate is a nturally occuring compound in many plants. Anne of Auckland mentioned that it had recently been found to naturally occur in sow thistle, puha.
I followed up her direction and here was the abstract that makes interesting reading
Compound 1080 in watercress and puha: uptake and persistence experimentation, and perhaps the first record of 1080 natural occurrence in New Zealand
In New Zealand, 1080 (sodium fluoroacetate) is the most extensively used pesticide for control of vertebrate pests such as possums and rabbits. 1080 is sometimes aerially applied in cereal or carrot bait, using fixed-wing aircraft or helicopter. There is public concern over the fate of 1080 after aerial application. Maori, the indigenous people of New Zealand, have voiced particular concern about uptake in wild-harvested food species, and previous research has shown that 1080 can leach from bait and then be taken up by plants. We undertook field research to determine the uptake and persistence of 1080 in two culturally-important food species; watercress (Nasturtium microphyllum/officinale) and puha (Sonchus spp). Results showed that both watercress and puha took up 1080 from bait. The maximum 1080 concentration measured in watercress was 63 ppb, 7 days after bait was placed near watercress plants. Beyond 7 days 1080 was eliminated from watercress. In puha the maximum concentration seen was 15 ppb, three days after bait placement. By day 38, the 1080 concentration had decreased to below the laboratory method detection limit (MDL) of 3 ppb. On closer scrutiny of the data, 59 of a total of 60 puha samples showed 1080, mostly at trace levels near the MDL. This included samples from plants taken before the bait was laid, and from control plants that had non-toxic baits. It therefore seems that puha naturally contains trace amounts of 1080. This is the first time 1080 has been reported to naturally occur in a New Zealand plant species.
You must log in to post.