“Banana apocalypse” my ass, I’m not a banana.
Call me when bananas start falling from the sky, oceans turn into banana juice, and the Son of Banana returns.
The 4 bananas of the apocalypse ride in.
Aw, yours are better!
And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, Come and see.
And I saw, and behold a white horse:
Not planting in monocultures for example?
Mixing with other crops might help already.
Isn’t this the 3rd banana apocalypse at least?
I feel like sensationalist headlines like this only have a boy who cried wolf effect. Using words like “apocalypse”, really?
It’s already happened once.
The Big Mike banana was super popular until the 1950s, when a fungal infection basically wiped them out. (they’re still grown in a few places, but are super susceptible to infection)
So, the banana growers switched over to the Cavendish banana. It was resistant to the fungus.
But the days of the Cavendish were always numbered because of how they’re grown. A seedless banana can only grow via cuttings. Which is how they’ve been grown since the beginning. Every single banana on the shelf at your local supermarket is genetically identical. They’ve been identical since the 50s, and the fungus has adapted to them. Worse still, the particular fungus that’s now attacking the Cavendish cultivar is extremely resistant to fungicides.
So yeah, without some sort of massive shift in genetic diversity, the Banana will no longer be a thing in Central America. Do note, that the banana is not a native plant in the Americas, and is cultivated widely in Southeast Asia. So yeah, the Banana will not go extinct, but it will vanish from American and European stores.
Attempting to preserve this variety may not be very viable unless they genetically alter it, or keep a large enough population alive in a clean environment for a decade until all the other ones die and the fungus is diminished. Seems easier to just grow a different variety maybe, but not as commercially viable at that point? I don’t know enough about how/why bananas are as cheap as they are (aside from the awful bits of the industry).
Fusarium spores are viable in the soil for more than 30 years. They also tend to infect multiple species, once they are in a region they are there for good. The spores are transmitted around the world in on seeds or soil. The spores are found at a very low rate (like 1:1,000,000,000) on the surface of many species of seeds. It’s well below the detection level of any test.
They are cheap because they are a commodity and exploit low paid workers.
So then transplanting and treating with UV would work for seeds or shoots. Fusarium can’t tolerate UV, or above ground fungicides.
Bananas are clonally propagated. The pathogen is inside the vascular tissue. No way to get rid of it from plants once infected.
Fusariums have developed resistance to many fungicides. They keep becoming resistant to more.
Funguses like fusarium scare me. They lie in wait for us to die so they can breakdown our bodies for molecular scrap. They eat our food, our homes, even live inside of us. Some don’t even have the decency to wait until death and start to dig in while we’re still alive. It’s been a cool, wet summer where I live an blight is already already starting to emerge in my tomato plants. My worst nightmares center around being consumed by mold.
