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In the Jurassic period there were giant insects like dragonflies with 4ft wingspan. Turns out THIS is how we get to Jurassic park

You are correct, but having spent 7 years of my life learning general chemistry, biochemistry, and organic chemistry.... I will fight with my last breath that chemicals exist.

To play devils advocate, lets say we "agree" that "no chemicals" means no harmful chemicals.... now we have given corporations the weasel defense to say anything has "no chemicals" because they will define away any measure of harm.

Pointing out the incorrectness of the article doesn't mean it has no merit, but now the critical reader must be extra cautious because the author has demonstrated very poor domain knowledge, and their conclusions are suspect.

You don't serve the greater good by misusing words. A new sticky substance as an alternative to chemicals? If you want to educate people through your reporting, then you try to make it accurate and choose words carefully.

It doesn't invalidate the whole article, fair enough. But it does make a "wise" person question what else they got wrong.

I've watched chunks of society freak out over everything from basic food ingredients to vaccines because they contained polysyllabic words that people decried as "chemicals".

And I've spent my whole damn life listening to people abuse the word "theory" until the the Christofascists and neo-nazis managed to become mainstream.

People abuse technical words with a purpose. Don't play apologetics for them because you believe their understanding of words is more nuanced than they are.

It just really feels weird to me to describe something as GLUE, but then also say that it doesn't use chemicals. One thing I take into consideration most times I'm using glue, is whether the item I'm gluing will be melted by the glue.

I get what they're trying to say, but glue is a description of a chemical compound in my mind.

Sticky grapes that taste like orange peel.

You don't think they could, you know, wash them before selling them?

A new non-toxic pesticide can be valuable regardless of the journalist who wrote an article.

While I agree in principle, the people who write the headlines are very often not the writers of the article or the people who are actually working on the solutions to the problems.

We gotta start somewhere. Remember that food security is a big part of the issue as well. We can't just stop spraying the toxic stuff without an alternative because global food systems could collapse. I don't like that we were using the toxic stuff in the first place but it has become a cornerstone of our food production.

Well at least one person agrees with me.

Thrips are a pain in the ass but if you use pesticides you kill the beneficials that eat them, for example Minute Pirate Bugs (Orius insidious).

Article says larger bugs are ok

They are if the stickiness is tuned so that larger, predatory insects are easily able to escape the glue.

Ecologist here ... you're absolutely right. We can have less efficient agriculture that doesn't require indiscriminate killing of species.

Not surprised you got downvoted here, the literal grass-touching prevalence on this site is extremely low.

"boy do I have thrips" triggered a funny memory.

When I worked in Ag. Research we had a big international field day. People from 50+ countries visiting in. I got the wonderful job of doing presentations in the field all day long. This was in late summer on a bad thrip year.

Well, one of the office goons decided that they would order all the staff polo shirts for the three day event. We were all supposed to wear the same color on the specified day.

They ordered in a light blue, yellow, and green polos. The first day was to be light blue. I "accidentally" wore the green one instead and had a few very irate office goons on my back first off that morning. Strangely enough all of the experienced outdoor staff "accidently" wore the green shirt as well.

For those that don't know, thrips are highly attracted to light blue and they bite. I laughed my ass off most of the day.

The following two days everyone wore green. Except for the one determined office goon who wore the yellow shirt. In a field full of honeybee hives...

It's literally in the post. Not even in the article, it's in the synopsis. Why didn't you read that before commenting?

It's not because they're gross, it's because they eat our food. And we grow monocultures so it's a perfect breeding ground for pests. Also if you read the article the new pesticide is physical and doesn't harm large predatory insects.