Via 365 Gay: This Week in Terrifying Science: Of Supermice and Men



This Week in Terrifying Rodents

In this week’s slice of What Hath Humanity Wrought, common house mice with immunity to the pesticide warfarin have turned up in Germany.

As in total, serve-me-up-a-pot-of-warfarin-fondue-because-the-only-way-to-make-it-tastier-is-to-add-cheese immunity.

The interesting thing about that if you’re a biologist is that it seems to have happened via horizontal gene transfer, which has only been observed in microbes before; those ordinary-looking house mice were secretly packing a heaping slice of Algerian mouse DNA.

The interesting thing about that if you’re not a biologist is that there’s a population of mice – inevitably a growing population – that is laughing until their plague flea-covered bellies shake at one of our most common pesticides.

And they will be breeding. And traveling.

The German house mice and the Algerian genetically immune mice got to be special new close friends by hitching rides with human travelers, which is how the new supermice will inevitably be spreading all over the world. Unless we can keep them out of cargo holds by spreading around some… Wait a minute. Damn.

Grit your teeth and purchase some high-end seafood. It’s time to start sucking up to the cat.

No, wait. forget sucking up to the cats. They’ll most likely size up the situation and make a separate treaty with the mice, figuring they can survive on birds and fish until the Great Work of the Philosopher’s Can Opener is finished.

The important thing here is to figure out how to head off Total Mouse Domination.

Unless you like the idea of coming home to find your furniture rearranged into a maze and drinking your evening cocktail out of a poorly cleaned sippy bottle.

That better mousetrap idea you were kicking around? Now is the time. Try to make it better than the humane mousetraps I bought years ago that were humane in the sense that they were convenient places for the mouse to drop by for food and then cheerfully leave at its own convenience, but left a little to be desired in the trapping department.

Since the new gimme-a-pesticide-of-fries-with-that mice will inevitably be exchanging DNA with stronger, faster, and smarter mice, whatever you’re working on should involve lasers, guard towers, and maybe a sarlacc pit.

On the upside, fans of pesticide-resistant bedbugs will be delighted to learn that their little naptime pals will soon have new indestructible playmates.

And even though we have a scrabbling-and-pellet-intensive future ahead, the human world will be getting into much better shape. The mice will eat up our snacks and we will all be doing some punitive time on The Wheel.

Ali Davis is donating her book royalties through the end of the month to Truth Wins Out. She calls it “Books Against Bachmann.” You can help irritate the Bachmanns in paperback or on Kindle.

Comments