  |
|
 |
The Banana Apocalypse |
 |
|
| Author |
Message |
PO Info |
 |
ScrumYummy
bunnyhunches of scrums
Gender: 
Joined: 29 Jun 2005 |
 Posted: Sun Oct 02, 2005 2:19 pm Post subject: The Banana Apocalypse |
Yay, we're driving yet another living thing into extinction due to the fact that we think we're geniouses x_x Humans suck. I want my bananas.
At least there are people trying to save them.
| Popular Science wrote: | For nearly everyone in the U.S., Canada and Europe, a banana is a banana: yellow and sweet, uniformly sized, firmly textured, always seedless. Our banana, called the Cavendish, is one variety Aguilar doesn’t grow here. “And for you,” says the chief banana breeder for the Honduran Foundation for Agricultural Investigation (FHIA), “the Cavendish is the banana.”
The Cavendish—as the slogan of Chiquita, the globe’s largest banana producer, declares—is “quite possibly the world’s perfect food.” Bananas are nutritious and convenient; they’re cheap and consistently available. Americans eat more bananas than any other kind of fresh fruit, averaging about 26.2 pounds of them per year, per person (apples are a distant second, at 16.7 pounds). It also turns out that the 100 billion Cavendish bananas consumed annually worldwide are perfect from a genetic standpoint, every single one a duplicate of every other. It doesn’t matter if it comes from Honduras or Thailand, Jamaica or the Canary Islands—each Cavendish is an identical twin to one first found in Southeast Asia, brought to a Caribbean botanic garden in the early part of the 20th century, and put into commercial production about 50 years ago.
That sameness is the banana’s paradox. After 15,000 years of human cultivation, the banana is too perfect, lacking the genetic diversity that is key to species health. What can ail one banana can ail all. A fungus or bacterial disease that infects one plantation could march around the globe and destroy millions of bunches, leaving supermarket shelves empty.
A wild scenario? Not when you consider that there’s already been one banana apocalypse. Until the early 1960s, American cereal bowls and ice cream dishes were filled with the Gros Michel, a banana that was larger and, by all accounts, tastier than the fruit we now eat. Like the Cavendish, the Gros Michel, or “Big Mike,” accounted for nearly all the sales of sweet bananas in the Americas and Europe. But starting in the early part of the last century, a fungus called Panama disease began infecting the Big Mike harvest. The malady, which attacks the leaves, is in the same category as Dutch Elm disease. It appeared first in Suriname, then plowed through the Car- ibbean, finally reaching Honduras in the 1920s. (The country was then the world’s largest banana producer; today it ranks third, behind Ecuador and Costa Rica.)
Growers adopted a frenzied strategy of shifting crops to unused land, maintaining the supply of bananas to the public but at great financial and environmental expense—the tactic destroyed millions of acres of rainforest. By 1960, the major importers were nearly bankrupt, and the future of the fruit was in jeopardy. (Some of the shortages during that time entered the fabric of popular culture; the 1923 musical hit “Yes! We Have No Bananas” is said to have been written after songwriters Frank Silver and Irving Cohn were denied in an attempt to purchase their favorite fruit by a syntactically colorful, out-of-stock neighborhood grocer.) U.S. banana executives were hesitant to recognize the crisis facing the Gros Michel, according to John Soluri, a history professor at Carnegie Mellon University and author of Banana Cultures, an upcoming book on the fruit. “Many of them waited until the last minute.”
Once a little-known species, the Cavendish was eventually accepted as Big Mike’s replacement after billions of dollars in infrastructure changes were made to accommodate different growing and ripening needs. Its advantage was its resistance to Panama disease. But in 1992, a new strain of the fungus—one that can affect the Cavendish—was discovered in Asia. Since then, Panama disease Race 4 has wiped out plantations in Indonesia, Malaysia, Australia and Taiwan, and it is now spreading through much of Southeast Asia. It has yet to hit Africa or Latin America, but most experts agree that it is coming. “Given today’s modes of travel, there’s almost no doubt that it will hit the major Cavendish crops,” says Randy Ploetz, the University of Florida plant pathologist who identified the first Sumatran samples of the fungus.
A global effort is now under way to save the fruit—an effort defined by two opposing visions of how best to address the looming crisis. On one side are traditional banana growers, like Aguilar, who raise experimental breeds in the fields, trying to create a replacement plant that looks and tastes so similar to the Cavendish that consumers won’t notice the difference. On the other side are bioengineers like Rony Swennen, who, armed with a largely decoded banana genome, are manipulating the plant’s chromosomes, sometimes crossing them with DNA from other species, with the goal of inventing a tougher Cavendish that will resist Panama disease and other ailments.
Banana experts disagree on when the Latin American and African crops will be hit by the Panama fungus. Ploetz won’t venture a guess, but he notes that the Malaysian plantations went from full-scale commercial operations to “total wipeout” in less than five years. Currently, there is no way to effectively combat Panama disease and no Cavendish replacement in sight. And so traditional scientists and geneticists are in a race—against one another, for certain, but mostly against time. |
Read full article Here |
_________________
-Scrum-
..it borked. :D |
|
|
 |
 |
Wins 23 - Losses 22
Level 7 |
EXP: 2313
HP: 2241
 |
STR: 779
END: 731
ACC: 795
AGI: 795
|
Totem Doll (Sword)
(320 - 360) |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Chrysia
Venusta Opifex
Gender:
Joined: 29 Sep 2004 |
| Posted: Sun Oct 02, 2005 7:16 pm Post subject: |
|
|
|
|
 |
Wins 10 - Losses 5
Level 5 |
EXP: 2375
HP: 2160
|
STR: 780
END: 690
ACC: 735
AGI: 695
|
Silver Falcon (Sword)
(285 - 335) |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Ming
DOOM!
Gender: 
Joined: 13 Jan 2003 |
| Posted: Mon Oct 03, 2005 5:54 pm Post subject: |
Dammit it's freakin' fruit! Not technology!!!
Why the hell can't everyone just leave things the way they are without trying to use technology to "improve" them?? |
_________________
Spinning around and being graceful looks cool, but then someone comes along and cuts something off, and the fight is over.
Official UP lover!
 |
|
|
|
 |
Wins 41 - Losses 44
Level 10 |
EXP: 5223
HP: 2300
|
STR: 900
END: 700
ACC: 1000
AGI: 800
|
Equitas (Sword)
(385 - 385) |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
|
ScrumYummy
bunnyhunches of scrums
Gender:
Joined: 29 Jun 2005 |
| Posted: Mon Oct 03, 2005 7:44 pm Post subject: |
| Ming wrote: | Dammit it's freakin' fruit! Not technology!!!
Why the hell can't everyone just leave things the way they are without trying to use technology to "improve" them?? |
This is something that humans have actually been doing for thousands of years (cultivating bananas). By our cultivation methods, we happened to make the perfect banana, but because of this the banana has no natural protection--if a virus or a fungus evolves that attacks bananas, then they're all going to be wiped out because they're all the same.
"That sameness is the banana’s paradox. After 15,000 years of human cultivation, the banana is too perfect, lacking the genetic diversity that is key to species health. What can ail one banana can ail all. A fungus or bacterial disease that infects one plantation could march around the globe and destroy millions of bunches, leaving supermarket shelves empty. A wild scenario? Not when you consider that there’s already been one banana apocalypse. Until the early 1960s, American cereal bowls and ice cream dishes were filled with the Gros Michel, a banana that was larger and, by all accounts, tastier than the fruit we now eat."
So basically, bananas are either going to be wiped out in one punch, or we will get another banana that is even less tasty and smaller. |
_________________
-Scrum-
..it borked. :D |
|
|
|
|
Wins 23 - Losses 22
Level 7 |
EXP: 2313
HP: 2241
|
STR: 779
END: 731
ACC: 795
AGI: 795
|
Totem Doll (Sword)
(320 - 360) |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Tobias
*explodes*
Age: 38
Gender:
Joined: 17 Jan 2003 |
| Posted: Tue Oct 04, 2005 1:17 pm Post subject: |
as the saying goes: "If it ain't broke...DON'T FIX IT!" |
_________________
I am not afraid to die today
Nor afraid of what Death will bring.
 |
|
|
|
 |
Wins 112 - Losses 110
Level 16 |
EXP: 535
HP: 3000
|
STR: 1000
END: 1000
ACC: 1000
AGI: 1000
|
Eden (Sword)
(475 - 475) |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Blackmage
Intragalactic Acquisitions Agent Mew
Gender:
Joined: 02 Feb 2004 |
| Posted: Tue Oct 04, 2005 3:53 pm Post subject: |
It sounds like Banana AIDS |
_________________
I'm not a pirate I'm an acquisitions agent and salvage specialist. |
|
|
|
 |
Wins 88 - Losses 123
Level 16 |
EXP: 12559
HP: 2320
|
STR: 1320
END: 500
ACC: 1090
AGI: 1090
|
Chain Saw (Saw)
(440 - 510) |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Therin
Gloompf. Iggle!
Gender:
Joined: 24 Sep 2002 |
| Posted: Tue Oct 04, 2005 4:01 pm Post subject: |
|
|
|
|
 |
Wins 45 - Losses 36
Level 10 |
EXP: 6251
HP: 2600
|
STR: 950
END: 825
ACC: 825
AGI: 800
|
Gray Matter (Gun)
(240 - 530) |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Ultrawolf
Mr. Roarke
Gender:
Joined: 04 Jul 2003 |
| Posted: Tue Oct 04, 2005 4:25 pm Post subject: |
I'm not a horticulturist or anything but can't they grow them in a contained Greenhouse? With all our fancy shmancy technology these days could they clone Bananas? |
_________________
Welcome... |
|
|
|
 |
Wins 115 - Losses 130
Level 17 |
EXP: 831
HP: 2800
|
STR: 1000
END: 900
ACC: 1100
AGI: 1000
|
Legacy (Shotgun)
(400 - 550) |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
|
kei
巡る 時 屁と 輝き 進もう
Gender:
Joined: 18 Oct 2004 |
| Posted: Tue Oct 04, 2005 4:41 pm Post subject: |
Most of the american population is full of lowlife siberian sheep craps, otherwise known as ahas, bakas, and amas, now their uncluding friut into their damn experiments becasuse they can't think of anything else to study they used everything up -moves to japan-
 |
_________________
"In this world there are no coincidences, there is only inevitability."
Last edited by kei on Tue Oct 04, 2005 4:48 pm; edited 4 times in total |
|
|
|
 |
Wins 83 - Losses 79
Level 16 |
EXP: 13860
HP: 2580
|
STR: 780
END: 900
ACC: 1100
AGI: 1220
|
Wandabastyle Katana (Sword)
(390 - 560) |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Zzyxx
*bursts into flame*
Gender:
Joined: 30 Sep 2004 |
| Posted: Tue Oct 04, 2005 4:44 pm Post subject: |
| Ultrawolf wrote: | | I'm not a horticulturist or anything but can't they grow them in a contained Greenhouse? With all our fancy shmancy technology these days could they clone Bananas? |
Effectively they already have cloned bananas. The cultivation they use is self-polination, essentially it causes the plant to reproduce with no genetice differance than its parent plant. So it's cloning and incest all rolled into one. Me personally, i consume one banana a year.... if that. I hate the things. |
_________________
We are Geek. You will be assimilated.
 |
|
|
|
 |
Wins 40 - Losses 25
Level 9 |
EXP: 5609
HP: 2160
|
STR: 460
END: 850
ACC: 830
AGI: 1160
|
Frost, Katana of Ice (Sword)
(270 - 470) |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
|
|
