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Could Fear of 'Gay Flies' Inspire Conservatives to Care About Air Pollution? [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-06-23
I should start by emphasizing that I am in no way minimizing the potentially globally catastrophic implications revealed by this new research. Sometimes, though, one has to laugh to keep from crying, and the idea of leveraging conservatives’ homophobia into willingness to confront air pollution is both amusing and uplifting.
How would we do that? By informing them of recent research conducted at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, showing that air pollution, with its concomitant increase in atmospheric ozone levels, disrupts insects’ sexual pheromone levels, to the point of causing female insects to be less attracted to males, and to males being less repelled by other males, and thus (gasp!) courtship behavior between males:
Consequently, elevated ozone levels not only caused females to be less attracted to males; rather, ozonated males were suddenly interesting to their male counterparts. "We knew that elevated ozone levels could affect insect mating systems because the breakdown of carbon double bonds, and thus pheromones, by oxidation is not rocket science in chemistry. Nevertheless, we were shocked that even slightly elevated ozone concentrations had such strong effects on fly behavior. Actually, we initially wanted to focus on the interactions between males and females. We could explain that males started courting each other after a short ozone exposure, because they obviously could not distinguish ozonated males from females. However, we had not thought about this before. Therefore, we were quite puzzled by the behavior of the ozone-exposed males, which lined up in long courtship chains," Nanji Jiang and Markus Knaden summarize the effects of ozone on mating behavior.
Granted, these experiments centered on flies, and perhaps one could be forgiven for not being particularly concerned about a reduction in the number of flies (although I suspect even that could have adverse ecological consequences), but as the researchers point out, there is little reason to believe that many essential pollinator species, like bees and butterflies, would be any less affected.
But hell—why not try to get Pence and DeSantis onboard with a campaign to reduce air pollution, in order to save the straight flies . . . you know, because Jesus? Air pollution is so woke, right Ron? And then Trump would have to find a more “anti-woke” position than DeSantis had established . . . death penalty for air polluters?
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/6/23/2177218/-Could-Fear-of-Gay-Flies-Inspire-Conservatives-to-Care-About-Air-Pollution
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