The insect glue, produced from edible oils, was inspired by plants such as sundews that use the strategy to capture their prey. A key advantage of physical pesticides over toxic pesticides is that pests are highly unlikely to evolve resistance, as this would require them to develop much larger and stronger bodies, while bigger beneficial insects, like bees, are not trapped by the drops.
The drops were tested on the western flower thrip, which are known to attack more than 500 species of vegetable, fruit and ornamental crops. More than 60% of the thrips were captured within the two days of the test, and the drops remained sticky for weeks.
Work on the sticky pesticide is continuing, but Dr Thomas Kodger at Wageningen University & Research, in the Netherlands, who is part of the self defence project doing the work, said: “We hope it will have not nearly as disastrous side-effects on the local environment or on accidental poisonings of humans. And the alternatives are much worse, which are potential starvation due to crop loss or the overuse of chemical pesticides, which are a known hazard.”
Fundamentally you misinterpreted what I said. I'm not being disingenuous about why we use pesticides, I'm simply saying we are doing it wrong and should not use any. The whole premise of "we must use pesticides or we'll starve" is, to put it simply, a fallacy. Because we are no longer producing food so we don't starve but so that huge corporations can profit more.
The big problems with the "well this is slightly better than the alternative" are: First, the alternatives don't necessarily kill all insects - they can be highly targeted too. Secondly, killing any beneficials is treading backwards. The more beneficials you kill the more you need things to kill the pests. In other words, it's pushing "solutions" in completely the wrong direction. And industrial ag pursues this with such fervor it's accelerating the process to the point where we may have no functional insect populations left. This is an existential threat.
We don’t kill bugs because they’re gross, we kill them because they eat our food.
In fact they don't in the large scheme of things. Or as the joke goes, they only eat a little.
I think this sums up your misinterpretation of what I'm saying and I concede it's understandable because I was a little obscure in my jest. The "eww gross" line comes from a basic prejudice that people have about insects - that they are always pests and don't serve an important purpose. And so our approach to pest control has always been one of "insect bad! kill them all!". Even the fact that if someone finds a bug in their store-bought produce - and I've seen this with my own eyes - they are inclined to take it back. That's the level of ridiculous over-reaction we have when in reality we should be enlisting the help of the insect world.
And I can personally attest this works on a commercial scale.