WE HAVE AN ACTIVE PUNNER
LOCKDOWN LOCKDOWN LOCKDOWN
CODE P CODE P I REPEAT CODE P
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What about the chemtrails!!!
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Maybe they can eat the carp, too. (Different lake)
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Didn’t some UK chav release catfish in Spain as to create a fishery for monster-sized catches?
Bio-terrorism… but I’m sure these fine folks in Texas know what they are doing.
Grass carp are tasty, as I understand it. In Korea they make sushi with it. Only issue is the pin bones.
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Roundup is a pretty interesting product.
If it gets into lakes or streams, it causes massive dieoffs of amphibians and aquatic invertebrates, tearing the bottom out of the aquatic food chain, and it’s associated with nasty disease outbreaks in fish.
But Monsanto has always said used to say* that Roundup is perfectly safe and harmless because glyphosates are broken down by water…
* their tune seems to have changed.
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Call me a skeptic, but that doesn’t sound like “really careful” geoengineering.
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The problem isn’t that it might not work.
The problem is that it mightn’t work AND it’ll create a whole new set of problems.
See: cane toad in Queensland, AU.
See: rabbits/stoats, NZ
See: etc.
Dead lakes caused by the weed is a problem. The weevils might eat the weed (great!), but this group sounds like a bunch of chuckleheads, who mightn’t have done their research. So, there’s a pretty good chance they’re going to end up with weed-choked lakes AND weevils eating their corn crops, or some shit like that, AND the weevils won’t have any natural predators in that environment.
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I recall that Rotenone, which I think is another Monsanto pesticide used for insect control, is often used to poison lakes so they can be re-stocked with more desirable fish.
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Rotenone, like neem or pyrethrin, is a naturally occurring poison (and it was discovered before we started allowing ethically challenged corporations to patent things they didn’t invent 
)
Because we’ve been using it for (at least) hundreds of years its dangers are pretty well understood. Unlike Roundup®.
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The video itself doesn’t give enough information to tell us whether it will work or not.
According to the Texas Water Resources Institute web page at http://cise.tamu.edu/caddo, the weevils exclusively eat salvinia. During tests, they did not eat any other plant matter.
Also, they prefer warm weather. They probably cannot survive the winters there, but that’s being tested.
So it looks like it might really work out fine. It’s certainly better than spraying chemicals.
Trivia: Caddo Lake is Texas’ only natural lake (except oxbows).
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There was an interesting documentary about this area called “Uncertain” - briefly touched on the lake, not the weevils. You can watch the trailer here: http://uncertainfilm.com/
Like I said, doesn’t really touch on the bugs, but the people in the area were fascinating.
Chad gadya, chad gadya.
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Yup.
There’s a whole taxonomy for this kind of thing:
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Next stop Cane Toads!
I live on a lake in Michigan. We have an invasive here, Eurasian milfoil, that’s not as aggressive as what those folks are dealing with, but the end game is about the same. We (along with many other lakes) have been stocking this little weevil for several years, dumping thousands of them in the lake. They live their whole lives underwater, except when it gets cold they crawl up on shore and spend the winter in leaf mass. I think they’re absolutely adorable!
Oh yeah, my point (and I did have one) was that they pose no threat to land plants, like corn crops. So, ya know, knock on wood!
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Salvinia is an absolute bastard; it’s almost impossible to control via conventional means, and can utterly destroy a marine ecosystem in an extremely short time.
Importing a biological control can be effective:
But it can also be disastrous:
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There’s probably some pessimism due to The Precautionary Principle and history. NZ bird populations are still suffering from the unforseen effects of previous biological control experiments (e.g. stoats introduced by colonists to counter the rabbits introduced by colonists).
Massey University has this to say about those linked weevils and flies introduced to combat Nodding Thistle:
“Three biological control agents have been released in New Zealand to attack this species, but at present they are having only limited success in controlling the weed.”
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Yeah, Australia is a great cautionary tale for this kind of thing, but we do have the occasional success. After the tragic introduction of the prickly pear (cactus), the Cactoblastis bug was introduced. Now the bug, and the cactus it feed on, are in a controlled state.
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“Say there Texas town, are you sure this is a good idea?”
“I’m Uncertain.”
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