>the blind idiot god of moth evolution would find a way to elude my traps by pressing an alternate small button to those specific pheromones, in order to power its reproduction. This type of brute force, which grants a stupid and blind enemy the power of adaptation, can be found in battles with cancer, viruses, or pesticides
Interesting, thanks for posting that! One of the reasons I like this forum is because there are people running around on here who’ve read papers like “Salivary Digestion Extends the Range of Sugar-Aversions in the German Cockroach” and you get to talk to them for free.
So if I understand the abstract and skimmed paper so far, we’re seeing more saliva-based aversion to pure glucose because pure glucose is a superstimulus (the roaches still accept “complex glucose”), and human trap designs are fond of superstimuli, as cheap ways to radically increase the probability your trap works, so the traps are selecting for pure glucose aversion. Given how short insect reproduction cycles are and how many there are anyway, we’ll probably observe this kind of evolution everywhere, as well as every time we switch traps.
>the blind idiot god of moth evolution would find a way to elude my traps by pressing an alternate small button to those specific pheromones, in order to power its reproduction. This type of brute force, which grants a stupid and blind enemy the power of adaptation, can be found in battles with cancer, viruses, or pesticides
Interestingly some cockroaches have evolved to perceive sugar as bitter, due to its use as bait in traps: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8003998/
Interesting, thanks for posting that! One of the reasons I like this forum is because there are people running around on here who’ve read papers like “Salivary Digestion Extends the Range of Sugar-Aversions in the German Cockroach” and you get to talk to them for free.
So if I understand the abstract and skimmed paper so far, we’re seeing more saliva-based aversion to pure glucose because pure glucose is a superstimulus (the roaches still accept “complex glucose”), and human trap designs are fond of superstimuli, as cheap ways to radically increase the probability your trap works, so the traps are selecting for pure glucose aversion. Given how short insect reproduction cycles are and how many there are anyway, we’ll probably observe this kind of evolution everywhere, as well as every time we switch traps.