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Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution

phys.org

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Re: Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution

#271

Post by K0balt »

dmix wrote: post #192
root_axis wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LSD is a very comforting, pleasant, and soft experience Not necessarily, it is a totally subjective experience and very much dependent on the individual and the dosage. > at most you see some visual stimuli, like blending colors. This is an incorrect and dangerous statement, the effects of LSD can be very intense and very easily traumatizing, even in a controlled environment. The intensity of the visual hallucinati…

> Very wrong. I am going to flag your post because it contains serious misinformation that could be dangerous if taken as genuine by someone without accurate knowledge of the risks and effects of LSD. Well I'd expect someone would do a bit more research than the four sentences I typed out here... Do you honestly think people are going to run out and get LSD, without any regard, after reading my comment? The majority…

I think you may be badly misinformed. Perhaps with a small enough dose, what you say is true.

I used to trip regularly. Lsd effects can definitely inude hallucinations!

As a matter of fact, not having strong hallucinations was often a reason to drop another tab lol.

A lot of us used to drop acid in college.... Almost everyone tripped balls.

Vitamin C, for whatever reason, seem to intensify some visual aspects. (maybe placebo)

Even if you are an experienced psychonaut, you can get yourself into a bad trip, especially by being paranoid about having a bad trip lol.

That said, Lsd was a very useful thing to have experienced. I learned from mushrooms as well, but by far my deepest experiences have been Salvia divornium. It's so deep, it's not really a recreational drug.... You have to invest, and it can be violently dissociative.

I have (obviously false) recollections of an entire different life from my experiences with Salvia.... But I got insights from those experiences that I would have been unlikely in the extreme to have had without the drug.... And those insights have served me very, very well.

Re: Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution

#272

Post by 3131s »

lexicality wrote: post #157
ComradeTaco wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he felt bad about the caterpillars being mashed up.

She was going to kill them anyway, they're a virulent pest.

> virulent pest

Humans are also by any measure really.

Re: Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution

#273

Post by red75prime »

notpresident wrote: post #127
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably a bad one. I agree that killing insects is fine if there's a reason. But I was reacting to "I kill things because they annoy me." Which is valid, but always frustrating. My parents used to flip out and kill caterpillars, spiders, etc whenever they saw them. More than once I'd notice one and corral them outside while my parents weren't looking. There's just no point in killing something because it simply exis…

At home it was my Dad who told me to be nice to spiders. :-)

Sure, they are good at killing flies and you don't have to feel sorry killing flies yourself. Win-win.

Re: Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution

#274

Post by freeflight »

Houshalter wrote: post #234
freeflight wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We just need to save the planet long enough that evolution can run its course and some lifeforms start taking advantage of all the energy locked inside our "waste". You realize evolution works in timeframes that are like really really long? On an evolutional timescale 2000 years is pretty much nothing, to us humans it's pretty much our whole modern history of massively polluting this planet. The pace with which we…

Well that's a very long time for animals yes. Bacteria reproduce as fast as every half hour. In that 2000 years, that's 35 million generations of bacteria. You can go through a thousand generations in 3 weeks. And every landfill has hundreds of trillions of them. Constantly mutating and competing for resources.

If life on Earth would only consist of bacteria you would have a point, but there's quite a bit more variety to it.

Re: Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution

#275

Post by mirimir »

chongli wrote: post #265
mirimir wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if "all life should fall on the safe side of the line", what would you eat? Perhaps only organisms that have died without human intervention. Scavenging, I mean. But that wouldn't support very large populations.

Dead bodies, unless mummified or otherwise desiccated into jerky, are teeming with bacterial life. There's simply no way to survive without destroying other life. Even plants kill other living things in self defense (and many plants prey on animals).

Yeah, pretty much. Especially if you're an animal.

Eventually, maybe we'll become effectively plants, creating our food from sunlight, CO2 and minerals. But what about our microbiota?

Re: Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution

#276

Post by freeflight »

literallycancer wrote: post #242
freeflight wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The problem is that it's mixed in with a lot of other kinds of waste. We don't need new ways to destroy polyethylene. We need ways to separate it from mingled waste streams or prevent mingling in the first place. We already have these ways, they are called waste separation and recycling. As a German, I've been separating my garbage for as long as I can think back: Plastics, paper, organic waste and whatever remains…

Well, since you can't put food stained plastics in the plastic bin (or do you guys do it?), it has to go into the residual waste, and it's that way with many things.

>Well, since you can't put food stained plastics in the plastic bin.

Why couldn't you? If it's just stained it's not much of an issue after all the food is biodegradable and will just rot on its own from bacteria and insects.

There are some people actually washing out their plastic garbage to prevent bad smells coming from their plastic garbage bag. Imho that's a massive waste of water, just put the garbage bag somewhere where the smell does not bother anybody, the stuff is garbage after all so it's not supposed to smell like roses.

Re: Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution

#277

Post by red75prime »

orthecreedence wrote: post #190
greenshackle2 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a fully-coherent, logical system for deciding which lives to care about, and how much? I'd be interested to hear. 'Animals' is not a natural kind. There's no logical reason to care about all animals just because they are animals. I care about dogs, pigs, other people, etc. not because they're 'animals', but because I think they are plausibly conscious (to varying degrees) and they can experience joy and s…

So you argument is that it's fine to not care for insects because there are a lot of them, and because their lives are short and brutal. I would say the opposite. Animals whose lives are rife with pain and misfortune can use all the help anyone is willing to offer. Granted, I will not seek out every fly and try to "save" it. But if I come across one I can help, I will do so. I think you're making the argument "either…

Would it be more or less ethical if researchers killed caterpillars infected by parasitic wasps, preventing them from being eaten alive?

Re: Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution

#278

Post by make3 »

fenwick67 wrote: post #44

I am skeptical that any sort of bacteria/insect based plastic decomposition project will address the problems with plastic waste. The biggest problem with plastic is not with the products that make it into the landfill, where bacteria could be used. The problem is with what happens when they don't make it into a landfill, and they end up as basically permanent pollutants in the water.

they specifically say in the article that the objective is to find which enzyme is used in order to mass produce it in a chemical plant. multiple times

Re: Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution

#280

Post by ams6110 »

freeflight wrote: post #207
panste wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Landfills are actually not that bad of an idea. If we someday find a way to recycle that stuff we can just dig it up again and use it. If a caterpillar eats it who knows where it ends up. In the water? In the ground? In our food? In our blood?

>If a caterpillar eats it who knows where it ends up. In the water? In the ground? In our food? In our blood? That assumes landfills are hermetically sealed systems, they are not. We have plenty of examples where landfills contaminated the groundwater and with it large swaths of ground. It's an irresponsible practice that's pretty much based on the naive principle of "out of sight out of mind". If the goal is to recy…

> We have plenty of examples where landfills contaminated the groundwater and with it large swaths of ground.

The old "dumps" had this problem. Modern landfills with liners, leachate management, etc. are probably the best way to handle garbage, out of all the possible options. It's simply not possible or even practical to recycle everything.

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