From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Aug 29 2002 - 17:13:43 MDT
--- Harvey Newstrom <mail@HarveyNewstrom.com> wrote:
>
> On Thursday, August 29, 2002, at 10:30 am, Charles Hixson wrote:
> > The problem is... butterflies were picked as the species to worry
> about
> > because they were photogenic, not because they were the one most
> > endangered.
>
> Do you have any evidence to support this conspiracy theory? I
> thought
> that the butterflies were picked because their habitat was closest to
> the fields where the BT pesticide plants would be deployed. It makes
> sense that the closest insects (besides the pests in the fields that
> we want to kill) would be the ones to study.
Why is anything you don't want to believe a conspiracy theory?
THe fact is that monarch butterflies are not year round residents of
the areas where bt corn is grown. They merely migrate through the
region on their way to and from their breeding grounds in Mexico.
As they migrate, it is assumed that they eat milkweed, which tends to
grow in the margins between fields. Anti-GMO activists have detected
amounts of bt pollen in milkweed (which acts like a sieve to catch the
pollen in the wind). What they cannot demonstrate is that a) the
monarch actually eats the pollen along with the milkweed, b) that if it
does eat it that the amount it ingests is at toxic levels. Remember,
these are the same people who put a scare up about the mere presence of
parts per billion of substances that you would need to ingest hundreds
of pounds of to reach a level of 50% toxicity.
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance - Get real-time stock quotes
http://finance.yahoo.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:16:32 MST