Monarchs and Corn Pollen

[Cris Guppy & Aud Fischer]

Your comments regarding weaknesses in the paper on Bt-transformed corn pollen are of course correct. However, setting the concentration of corn pollen to visually match that seen on milkweed leaves in the field does tell us that the correct order of magnitude was used, since a 10 fold increase or decrease in concentration would have been visually obvious. And yes the statistics are weak, and Nature was definitely sloppy in accepting  sloppy statistics. And the controls were less than ideal, but sufficient to indicate that the Bt-transformed strain was more toxic than a non-transformed strain. However the bottom line of the paper was exactly what you state, more research is badly needed given the tentative nature of what was published. So who is going to do the high quality follow up study????????

Cris Guppy
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