New Zealand wants to eradicate predators with GMO rats

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New Zealand wants to eradicate predators with GMO rats

Postby cmsellers » Fri Nov 17, 2017 2:24 am

When I first heard about the Predator-Free 2050 I rolled my eyes, because it was proposed by the prime minister who tried to change the country's awful flag when polls showed Kiwis inexplicably liked it, and because he didn't actually increase funding for controlling invasive species.

However this article is interesting, because it suggests that it might be possible to eradicate rats, stoats, and possums from New Zealand with CRISPR. He basically says:

With Crispr, you can implant gene-drives which will drive damaging drives throughout a population.
BUT it would be really hard to keep some asshole from smuggling rats out and eradicating rats across the world.
BUT you could engineer rats which have severe peanut allergies and then feed them peanut butter.
BUT someone who wanted to eradicate rats locally could still smuggle them out, and then the world would have GMO rats which people wouldn't like.

Honestly, I think that the anti-CRISPR objections are far weaker than than the arguments for it. The "Oh noes countries will be upset at the existence of GMO rats" argument is just ridiculous. It's true, but it doesn't mean we have to accommodate left-wing anti-science hysteria.

However even a gene drive that would eradicate all of the rats wouldn't be a problem. Many endangered species reproduce and mature slowly and suffer from population bottlenecks, many of them are expensive to care for. If someone introduced an anti-rat gene, there would be plenty of time to gather up a large and diverse population of un-CRISPRed rats, and it would be easy and cheap to maintain them by captive breeding until the problem passed, then re-released into the wild.

But this assumes that even gene drive rats could compete on a global scale. The article notes that rats have trouble getting established where there are other rats. If there's an area which can't support many rats, it seems not unlikely that the CRISPR-edited rats will die off on one side of it, and unedited rats will reinvade.

I'm cautiously optimistic. I sincerely hope that this works, people freak out about it less, and we then see rabbits and foxes eradicated from Australia, starlings extirpated from North America, and eastern gray squirrels eliminated from California and Europe in my lifetime. (Actually, I'd like to see eastern gray squirrels eradicated in their native range too, but somehow I feel like that will never pass muster.)
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Re: New Zealand wants to eradicate predators with GMO rats

Postby IamNotCreepy » Fri Nov 17, 2017 4:17 am

Can we eradicate Canada geese? I feel like that would be a worthy goal.
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Re: New Zealand wants to eradicate predators with GMO rats

Postby sunglasses » Fri Nov 17, 2017 4:30 am

Geese are protected, hombré
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Re: New Zealand wants to eradicate predators with GMO rats

Postby JamishT » Fri Nov 17, 2017 7:01 am

I think New Zealand is the best place to try something like this, because, you know, island surrounded by yuge ocean. I don't think rats are long distance swimmers, and I don't know what NZ exports beyond hobbits, so I don't think they're gonna hide out on a container ship and run amok in some other country.

I don't know if rats play a crucial role in the ecosystem, so I'm not sure I'd want them all eradicated everywhere. We can GMO Canadian geese (protected schmotected), mosquitoes, and those really venomous spiders right the hell outta existence in my opinion.
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Re: New Zealand wants to eradicate predators with GMO rats

Postby Marcuse » Fri Nov 17, 2017 10:31 pm

I can't think, offhand, of a time where we introduced a species to a place and it didn't go hideously wrong. I generally oppose direct intervention into ecology because we seem incapable of the foresight to be able to manage it properly.
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Re: New Zealand wants to eradicate predators with GMO rats

Postby cmsellers » Fri Nov 17, 2017 10:38 pm

We're not talking about introducing new species into the ecology. We're talking about tweaking the genes of species already introduced into the ecology with devastating effects in a desperate attempt to ctrl+z those introductions.

Incidentally, when stoats were introduced to New Zealand in an attempt to control rats, New Zealand's leading ornithologist basically said "this is a terrible idea that will lead to the stoats joining the rats in hunting the birds, which are much easier prey than the rats." New Zealand's government at the time went "lol, u mad bro?" and introduced them anyways.
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Re: New Zealand wants to eradicate predators with GMO rats

Postby Marcuse » Fri Nov 17, 2017 10:46 pm

We're not talking about introducing new species into the ecology. We're talking about tweaking the genes of species already introduced into the ecology with devastating effects in a desperate attempt to ctrl+z those introductions.


A thing which has even less predictable consequences. Every time, like your stoat example, we try to ctrl+z the problems we caused, we make things worse. As bad as they are, I don't want to introduce potentially damaging genetic modifications into our environment when we have little guarantee that those modifications will remain restricted to one species. We might think they will be, but I'm pretty damn sure that shit has the potential to act in ways we don't predict.
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Re: New Zealand wants to eradicate predators with GMO rats

Postby cmsellers » Sun Nov 19, 2017 2:05 am

Marc, you're sounding exactly like the typical hippie does when talking about GMO plants.

Unlike the nineteenth century, they're testing these things in labs, and this being New Zealand they'll probably test it on smaller islands before trying it on an island even as large as Stewart Island.
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Re: New Zealand wants to eradicate predators with GMO rats

Postby Tesseracts » Sun Nov 19, 2017 3:15 am

Did I miss something here? It’s impossible for the genetic modification to cross species without inter species breeding, which is impossible. It’s only possible with closely related species, which New Zealand has none of. And the argument that we fuck up environmental efforts “every time” is unconvincing and untrue.

I’m extremely disappointed that this is being used on rats and not mosquitoes and ticks.
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Re: New Zealand wants to eradicate predators with GMO rats

Postby SandTea » Sun Nov 19, 2017 3:42 am

Oh but There are efforts to sterilize those mozzy bastards using Crisper as well. It's not a widely used thing yet but I've got my fingers crossed. No idea if there is anything tick related though.

I will add that I don't quite understand the fear people have about things with slightly different gene sequences than they had yesterday. It's a common occurrence that happens to be the reason we...are. It's not like scientists are changing genes at random and hoping it'll be 'can't fuck' instead of 'godzilla'.
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Re: New Zealand wants to eradicate predators with GMO rats

Postby Crimson847 » Sun Nov 19, 2017 5:38 am

SandTea wrote:Oh but There are efforts to sterilize those mozzy bastards using Crisper as well. It's not a widely used thing yet but I've got my fingers crossed. No idea if there is anything tick related though.

I will add that I don't quite understand the fear people have about things with slightly different gene sequences than they had yesterday. It's a common occurrence that happens to be the reason we...are. It's not like scientists are changing genes at random and hoping it'll be 'can't fuck' instead of 'godzilla'.


The issue in this case is that they're changing genes specifically in order to exterminate a species, namely rats. The genetic alteration would be fatal to the animal by design. The goal is only to do that in New Zealand where rats are an invasive species, but the concern is that if any of the altered rats manage to escape the country and breed with rats elsewhere, that could cause rat populations to be annihilated worldwide, with unpredictable and potentially devastating ecological consequences. Given that rats are notoriously good at stowing away on ships (which is how they got to these isolated places to begin with), and given the potential black-market interest in rats that can wipe out local rat populations, the risk of that happening is far from insignificant.

This isn't about general opposition to GMOs. Note that the man arguing against this approach in the article is an MIT biologist who studies the potential of genetic modification and came up with the idea of using gene drives for conservation purposes in the first place. It's not really credible to dismiss him as some anti-science hippie who hates the very idea of genetic modification.
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Re: New Zealand wants to eradicate predators with GMO rats

Postby cmsellers » Sun Nov 19, 2017 5:56 am

I already addressed those concerns in my first post, and my point is that I think they're seriously overblown because A. rats are not good at establishing themselves where other rats already are, and B. even in the worst-case scenario, it would still be extremely easy to preserve a large and genetically diverse population of unaltered Norway rats until the ratpocalypse blows over. We could probably even do it in situ.

However, Marc's argument was that these genes will act in unpredictable ways (which is why we test it) and could jump across species, which is the kind of unsubstantiated anti-GMO-fearmongering liberal hippies like, only even crazier. At least when anti-GMO people say "these genes could get into the general population with unpredictable effects," they're talking about going from GMO corn to regular corn. Marc is describing a horror movie scenario with no plausible means of it happening. Stoats, rats, and possums are all animals without any remotely close relatives native to New Zealand.

I think that part of Marc's concern is that we're trying to eliminate a species. However we've done that already with microrganisms, locally and in two cases globally (if not for Islamist groups fighting polio vaccines with would be three). Australia has also used a virus to control rabbits with success, and though the rabbits will eventually develop an immunity to it that's a clear case where an introduced species has done more good than harm.

The lesson to learn from out past mistakes isn't "we fucked up so we should never do anything ever again." The lesson is "fucking with ecoystems without understanding them is a terrible idea, so we should try to figure out how our proposals will affect the ecosystems in question before implementing them."
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Re: New Zealand wants to eradicate predators with GMO rats

Postby A Combustible Lemon » Sun Nov 19, 2017 10:15 am

rats are not good at establishing themselves where other rats already are

we need genetically modified rats with self-destructive drives to establish themselves in new zealand, which has an invasive rat problem
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Re: New Zealand wants to eradicate predators with GMO rats

Postby Marcuse » Sun Nov 19, 2017 3:04 pm

However, Marc's argument was that these genes will act in unpredictable ways (which is why we test it) and could jump across species, which is the kind of unsubstantiated anti-GMO-fearmongering liberal hippies like, only even crazier


My argument was that they would act in ways which were unpredictable beyond our ability to test. I don't know why you think I'm so stupid as to think that we wouldn't test something as potentially dangerous as a kill-gene before we used it. I'm no ecologist (though, frankly, nor is anyone in this thread) but my understanding of ecological systems is that they're incredibly complicated and often have results which are vastly different to the intended outcome when we have done things to introduce species or eradicate them in the past, and so I think it's reasonable to adopt a cautious approach.

I don't think horizontal gene transfer is either as rare or as scifi as you think it is. Characterising it as left-wing fearmongering (notwithstanding the fact I'm one of the furthest right people on TCS politically) is insulting because it's a wilful dismissal of a scientific position because it doesn't fit your convenient narrative that we can make one simple change and solve a problem with no fuss. I don't think that stoats are going to suddenly get rat genes, but rats are a common vector for all manner of bacteria, and we can't predict what will happen when we start introducing kill genes into species.

So we have a risk, possibly a small one, of horizontal gene transfer, and a far greater potential for unintended consequences beyond our ability to model and plan for, and yeah I think we would do well to be extremely cautious about this. I'm not sure why it's so controversial to say that we should be conservative with our conservation, but maybe that's just too left wing of me?
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Re: New Zealand wants to eradicate predators with GMO rats

Postby cmsellers » Sun Nov 19, 2017 7:23 pm

I know your political position, which is why I found it so surprising you made the sort of argument I'm used to hearing from the anti-science left.

Horizontal gene transfer is common in micro-organisms. It can happen in multicellular species through sexual reproduction. And yes, it can go from micro-organisms to the DNA of multicellular organisms, though that's quite rare. Even if we assume that it can go in the other direction as frequently, the chances that the kill gene specifically will jump from rats to bacteria to some other multicellular organism are vanishingly small.

When it comes to conservation, I think radical shifts are often needed. Things like letting fires burn where they'd burn naturally, giving local people a stake in conservation, letting trophy hunters hunt megafauna, and releasing a virus on the rabbits of Australia have all been controversial, but effective. New Zealand's offshore island strategy I don't think has come in for the same controversy, but it's been effective at halting the decline of critically endangered species.

However these species are still limited to offshore islands and sanctuaries which require ongoing human intervention. The risk of a disease spreading and wiping them out is quite high; it nearly happened with the Tasmanian devil. This risk of genetic drift reducing their diversity and causing problems in the future is also quite high. Give me rigorous testing first, I'll take the hypotheticals about ratpocalypse and species-jumping kill drives over these well-established issues any day.
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