Quote:
Originally posted by Undertoad
The caption:
The towering pine trees of British Columbia's rugged Caribou Region are paying with their lives for five consecutive winters that have not been cold enough to kill a tiny predator. Thousands of trees are infested with mountain pine beetles in an exploding infestation that threatens to destroy more than C$4 billion ($2.6 billion) in timber in an area dependent on the forestry industry. The mountain pine beetles is pictured in this undated handout photo.
This relates to dhamsaic's image about genetic engineering. One aspect of GE foods/trees/pets/etc is that it encourages "monoculture" where all of the crops in a field, area, state, country, world, etc are identical species. The above bug is one reason why that's a bad idea. The potato famine, in Ireland, was the result of monoculture. A disease developed in one type of potato and because all the potatoes in Ireland were the same variety, it spread very quickly.
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Well, you don't need a monoculture to have devastation, as the chestnut blight proved. And I think GE used properly can actually reduce the dependence on monoculture which traditional breeding encourages. With genetic engineering, you can identify the specific traits you want and add them to many different species, something traditional breeding can't do. Whether it will actually be used this way is another question.