Our friends
Yin and yang. For
every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. No good deed goes unpunished. You can’t win for losing.
Folk sayings and philosophies have forever warned that what
may appear to be unalloyed good inevitably conceals at least a little
evil. The blooming rose shelters the
stinging insect. Gun control fosters unemployment
in the munitions industry. And so it
goes.
Enough of this crap.
The Economist presents an
article it might amuse you to read:
One of the major fast-encroaching problems of modern life is
the proliferation of plastic waste. Huge
swatches of open ocean are littered with floating plastic garbage. On personal observation, there are beaches in
untouristed northern Greek islands so thick with plastic litter that you must
resort to kicking the stuff aside to create space to spread your towel. The desert sands between the pyramids are
mantled by several centimeters of crushed plastic water bottles.
And so it goes. If we
don’t act soon we will find ourselves smothering in the stuff. Well, out of Stanford comes a glimmering of
hope.
It turns out that the gut bacteria of the mealworm – the larval
stage of an ugly black beetle, Tenebrio molitor,
probably the stink bug of your youth – have a thing for various
plastics. They eat the stuff, and at a
not-inconsiderable rate. So maybe the
solution to the plastics problem is to create huge mounds of unwanted plastic,
add tons of stinkbugs, and let nature take its course. Disgusting, maybe, but still rather neat, don’t
you think?
But, inevitable, there is a bee in the blossom.
Consider metabolism in general. When creatures eat stuff they convert part of
it to growth, energy, etc., but there always is some residual material that
must be disposed of. And what does the
mealworm excrete upon digesting plastic?
Why, carbon dioxide, of course.
So, combat the plastic scourge – and contribute to global warming.
You just can’t win for losing.
As an aside, did you know that people actually EAT mealworms? They are said to be best roasted or pan fried but, and I
can hardly believe this, some people actually eat them raw, and alive!
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