9/10: Mountain Pine Beetle

[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.

This is often the basic argument against GE. However, monoculture is not only the result of man's intervention nor of genetic engineering, but also of nature. Some plants are just better than others at getting copies of their DNA out there, and the forests of pine susceptible to this bug are one such example.