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I've seen this story about the Cavendish banana for close to 20 years now. I think the first time was on Slashdot in the late nineties or early aughts. Every ti
by abtinf 9y ago
I've seen this story about the Cavendish banana for close to 20 years now. I think the first time was on Slashdot in the late nineties or early aughts. Every time, the article predicts the imminent death of the varietal.
The articles always make a persuasive case. So, why hasn't it happened yet? What is the crucial detail that these articles always leave out?
- marcosdumay 9y agoPeople have gone to great lengths to stop the propagation of the disease. Up to the point that entire fields are destroyed, and lands abandoned (for bananas) for years.
- ethbro 9y ago> So, why hasn't it happened yet? What is the crucial detail that these articles always leave out? This article makes the point. The fungus has no quick propogation methods, as it's only spread by moving infected earth: it's simply very resilient once established. So the last X years have been a slow motion "We know this is a problem. It's becoming a bigger and bigger problem. Eventually it will be an insurmountable problem." The article also notes that there were a substantial number of "flex years" the last time this happened, as deforestation was used to open up new, un-infected land for banana cultivation. In summary: it's like the IPv6 problem. We knew it was coming, but resource exhaustion takes time.
- jeron 9y agoI love how a parallel can be drawn between bananas and IPV6
- rev_null 9y agoInedible Plantains Version 6?
- wildflowero 9y agoInnocuous Plantains Version 6.
- QAPereo 9y agoThank you so much, this is the first time I’ve seen this explained in terms I fully grasp. I was getting to the point of wondering whether or not these articles were submarines, but your explanation is far more cogent.
- ethbro 9y agoGlad it helped. I think it's easy to lose switches of change time magnitude when we're mostly looking at silicon / software. Biology, ecology, geology, and cosmology all work on their own timescales. :)
- thriftwy 9y agoBy then, can't we just CRISPR the fix into banana?
- wbillingsley 9y agoSomeone's already done that... https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-01670-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-01670-6 Still has to go through all the usual trials, etc, before it can be grown commercially, and then there'd be questions over GM regulation, market-acceptance, and whether the crop is productive and easy to manage for commercial growers to sort. (Usual productisation questions for a new crop variety to have to jump through.)
- ethbro 9y agoAlso, concerns about the long term (decades+) results of fixing similar issue by only splicing new genes in. Nature exploits opportunities. If we're still planting monocultures of cloned plants (plus whatever genes), that's still going to be enticing prey. See: Roundup resistant weeds. And life, as they say, finds a way.
- thriftwy 9y agoI'm not sure that fungus gains anything evolutionarily meaningful from learning to infect this particular banana. The only thing you get from this is annoying humans, which doesn't sound a very good evolutionary strategy (second only to being used in Chinese traditional medicine)
- Dylan16807 9y agoKnowing it's a real problem actually comforts me to an extent. If we can slow these kinds of things down, then we can win the race of making new varieties.
- acjohnson55 9y agoProbably because there's still plenty of virgin rainforest to clear for new banana fields.
- sliverstorm 9y agoWhat a relief, all we have to do is chop down the rest of the rainforests? Here I thought you were going to say something hard.
- lagadu 9y agoWell it's something we're already doing anyway, might as well get a few more years worth of bananas out of it!
- pfarnsworth 9y agoI've also heard the same thing about killer bees in California and IPv4. Basically don't trust "experts". Experts typically misunderstand actual risk, and they generally forget about how innovative humans are when we need to be.
- jacquesm 9y agoIf we should not trust experts then who should we trust?
- albertgoeswoof 9y agoWhoever says want we want to hear
- outsidetheparty 9y agoIndeed. Here's us discussing basically the same story almost exactly 90 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15425918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15425918 I honestly think this story recurs so often not because it's comparatively important, but because it's a grabby hook of a story and because James Dale of the Queensland University of Technology (who is quoted in every instance of the story I've seen) has an incredibly tenacious publicist.