Chasing the Red Queen: The Evolutionary Race Between Agricultural Pests and Poisons - Softcover

Dyer, Andy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1610915194 ISBN 13: 9781610915199

Verlag: Island Press, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

In the race to feed the world’s seven billion people, we are at a standstill. Over the past century, we have developed increasingly potent and sophisticated pesticides, yet in 2014, the average percentage of U.S. crops lost to agricultural pests was no less than in 1944. To use a metaphor the field of evolutionary biology borrowed from Alice in Wonderland, farmers must run ever faster to stay in the same place—i.e., produce the same yields.

With Chasing the Red Queen, Andy Dyer offers the first book to apply the Red Queen Hypothesis to agriculture. He illustrates that when selection pressure increases, species evolve in response, creating a never-ending, perpetually-escalating competition between predator (us) and prey (bugs and weeds). The result is farmers are caught in a vicious cycle of chemical dependence, stuck using increasingly dangerous and expensive toxics to beat back progressively resistant pests.

To break the cycle, we must learn the science behind it. Dyer examines one of the world’s most pressing problems as a biological case study. He presents key concepts, from Darwin’s principles of natural selection to genetic variation and adaptive phenotypes. Understanding the fundamentals of ecology and biology is the first step to “playing the Red Queen,” and escaping her unwinnable race. The book’s novel frame will help students, researchers, and policy-makers alike apply that knowledge to the critical task of achieving food security.

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Andy Dyer

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Chasing the Red Queen

The Evolutionary Race Between Agricultural Pests and Poisons

By Andy Dyer

ISLAND PRESS

Copyright © 2014 Andy Dyer
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-61091-519-9

Contents

Preface, 
PART I: INTRODUCING THE RED QUEEN, 
Chapter 1 The Never-Ending Race: Adaptation and Environmental Stress, 
Chapter 2 The Evolution of Farming: Scaling Up Productivity, 
Chapter 3 Survival of the Fittest: Darwin's Principles, 
PART II: IGNORING THE RED QUEEN, 
Chapter 4 Reductionist Farming: Losing Ecosystem Services, 
Chapter 5 A Weed by Any Other Name: Monocultures and Wild Species, 
Chapter 6 Running Faster: Insecticide and Herbicide Resistance, 
PART III: TRYING TO BEAT THE RED QUEEN, 
Chapter 7 Exercises in Futility: Cases of Resistance, 
Chapter 8 King Cotton vs. the Red Queen, 
Chapter 9 The Cornucopia of Maize vs. the Red Queen, 
Chapter 10 The Red Queen Trumps Technology: The Failures of Biotech, 
PART IV: PLAYING THE RED QUEEN, 
Chapter 11 Understanding the Chase to Escape the Cycle, 
Chapter 12 Slowing the Race by Slowing the Attack, 
Chapter 13 Ecosystem Farming: Letting Nature do the Work, 
Chapter 14 Integrated Systems and Long-Term Stability, 
Chapter 15 Epilogue: Putting All of Our Eggs in a Diversity of Baskets, 
Notes, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

The Never-Ending Race: Adaptation and Environmental Stress

In the natural world as well as the business world, staying one step ahead is the key to success. However, it isn't possible for everyone to stay one step ahead of everyone else. One is reminded of Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon, where "all of the children are above average." Clearly, it isn't possible for everyone to win the race for success—and it is a race. In nature, regardless of the particular situation, those that fall behind become food for others. The Red Queen's advice to Alice suggests to us that adapting to an ever-changing world is a continuous requirement for survival; being good isn't enough, and we must work constantly to stay ahead of the pursuers ... and the competitors ... and the predators.

An analogy we can use is that of the fox, a predator, and rabbits, the fox's prey. The fox pursues, the rabbits run. If the fox catches the slowest rabbits, then only the fastest rabbits remain in the population and their offspring (the next generation) should be faster than the average rabbit of the present generation. This is the basis for the phrase "survival of the fittest": those individuals that are most "fit" in this environment are most likely to survive to reproduce. However, as the prey population becomes faster and better able to avoid the predators, the predator population will die out unless it adapts to be fast enough to continue to catch the slower prey. Hence, the faster and more successful foxes produce faster fox pups, while the slower foxes fail to survive or reproduce. Logically, this process of adaptation appears to be a positive feedback cycle. If the foxes are continually catching the slowest rabbits, the rabbit population will become faster and faster over time until we witness supersonic rabbits flashing around being chased by equally supersonic foxes. Obviously, this reductio ad absurdum result does not happen, and it is important to understand why.

First, there are limits to how fast a rabbit (or a fox) can run. Even if the genetic potential existed in the population, the energy requirements, the physiological demands, and the physical properties of the body all interact such that there are limits to the range of possible modifications. A supersonic rabbit would be all legs, with an incredibly high metabolism, and bones and sinews made of something unusually strong. Such a rabbit certainly wouldn't eat grass.

Second, and more importantly, running faster isn't the only solution to fox predation for the rabbits. Hiding, camouflage, mimicry, early detection, evasive action, changes in activity times, movement to predator-free habitats, claws and teeth, toxins, and group defense are all examples of adaptations used by animals to avoid or prevent predation. A population lacking adaptive options is a population that will soon run its course.

Regardless of the mechanism, the Red Queen demands that a population adapt or it will fall behind in the race for survival. Adapting isn't optional; it is mandatory: adapt or go extinct. The fittest individuals survive, but the definition of "fittest" can change with every generation as the conditions change. Therefore, for every stress or challenge or demand in the environment, organisms that respond in an appropriate way are more likely to survive than those that do not respond appropriately. The challenges of the environment are many and varied and may not be the same from one year to the next, but the challenge to the individual is the same: meet the demands of the environment or become food for those that do.

Simply put, all adaptations are a response to environmental stress. A "stressor" can be thought of as any influence in the environment that lowers the ability of an individual in a population to survive and reproduce. An adaptation is a trait that reduces the negative effects of that stress. To be clear, adaptations do not eliminate stress; they only reduce the stress experienced by the individuals in that particular generation. Those individuals able to tolerate an environmental stress are more likely to live longer than those less tolerant, and as a result are more likely to produce more offspring. Therefore, the survival of a population or a species is a process of responding to stress, and because there are myriad different potential stressors in the environment, this process is constant and ongoing: it never ends. Nonetheless, however challenging survival may be to each individual in a population, it is only necessary to stay one step ahead of the pack. As the saying goes, when you're being chased by a bear, you don't have to run faster than the bear, just faster than the person next to you.

* * *

The premise of the Red Queen has been adopted by evolutionary biologists to exemplify the concept of continual adaptation to the constancy of environmental stress. Specifically, the Red Queen Hypothesis was originally used to understand the tight relationship that can evolve between a pathogen (or parasite) and its host. In such a situation, the pathogen must be successful at defending itself from the protective measures of the host, but the pathogen cannot be overly successful in a numerical sense or it will kill the host. If the host dies, the pathogen dies unless it can successfully transfer to a new host. Any host that can defend itself from the pathogen will be much more successful than those that can't, but any pathogen that succumbs to the defensive measures of the host will be replaced by those that can resist. Thus, over the long term, a sort of détente evolves wherein pathogens are successful enough to persist and the hosts are successful enough not to die too quickly. In both cases, success can be measured as "lives long enough to reproduce"—or to infect another host, in the case of the pathogen. For both, their adaptations for survival allow the environmental stress to be reduced, but not eliminated, and the race goes on.

One critical component in this process is this: all adaptations are a function of time and this time is measured in generations. Ultimately, the only reason any species has ever become extinct is that the stress the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Island Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1610915194
• ISBN 13: 9781610915199
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 2
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland