Say Goodbye to Bananas: Panama Disease is Coming Back

1. Ali S.
   June 1st, 2008 at 9:48 am

   Oh man! I love bananas so this is scary news. What we need to do is grab some bananas and start spontaneously growing them everywhere!

2. Tom
   June 1st, 2008 at 11:05 am

   They will all fall prey to the disease. All cavendish bananas are genetically identical–like clones, so there is no genetic diversity, and thus possibility for immunity in some small area, so there is no way to repopulate with resistant bananas. This is the same thing that happened back in the 60’s, as mentioned in the article. Banana growers have known that this would be a problem since then, but they did nothing to prevent it. We’ll just all have to switch to a new, likely less tasty variety.

3. Tempscire
   June 1st, 2008 at 12:14 pm

   there is no genetic diversity, and thus possibility for immunity in some small area

   Hmm. Exactly the thing my genetics prof tried drilling into us when he’d rip into the big corporate farms with patents on genotypes.

4. robbi
   June 1st, 2008 at 12:51 pm

   When I was in Bali I got to have little bananas for breakfast every day. They were so much better than our US imports! I’m guessing the cavendish wasn’t chosen because of flavor or texture, but some trait that allows it to travel and store well.
   The part of this that scares me is that African staple foods are at risk.

5. avraamov
   June 1st, 2008 at 2:25 pm

   i hope this doesn’t affect sally.

6. Homer J. Simpson
   June 1st, 2008 at 2:37 pm

   This would seem to be a pretty serious strike against the argument that bananas are “intelligently designed”:

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z-OLG0KyR4

7. gibson8or
   June 1st, 2008 at 4:16 pm

   Ah, the joys of a monoculture.

   @Homer
   A lot of the people who go around saying “Well, look at bananas (or housecats, or corn, or whatever)! Obviously they were created by an intelligent being!” fail to take into account that almost all of the plants and animals humans surround themselves with have been heavily altered by humans. Corn was bred from a type of grass; wild bananas from thousands of years ago were doubtless just as different. We manipulate evolution to benefit ourselves, and this (the banana blight) is the consequence of breeding for ease of use without regard to the dangers of a monoculture.

8. DOJ
   June 1st, 2008 at 8:30 pm

   isn’t this what seed vaults were made for?

   homer, i enjoyed the video

9. Homer J. Simpson
   June 1st, 2008 at 8:51 pm

   Would there be any way to take the wild bananas that the ones we eat evolved from and once again manipulate them to evolve into edible bananas? Or are the wild bananas also affected by Panama disease?

10. Moodindigo
    June 2nd, 2008 at 3:18 am

    Don’t panic. There are around 200 species of Banana. We may eventually just have to get used to a different one.

11. PK
    June 2nd, 2008 at 10:13 am

    DOJ: Commercialized bananas are sterilized to reproduce asexually, thus they have no seeds. They were all identical copies with hardly any genetic variations, and were multiplied by artificial planting methods.

    (Some wild bananas do have seeds, like how watermelons are used to be.)

12. kid_icarus
    June 2nd, 2008 at 12:20 pm

    what will all the fruit flys do? where will they go?

13. someguy
    June 2nd, 2008 at 3:23 pm

    I think I must clear something up with the anti-creationism crowd here. Creationists/Intelligent Design scientists AGREE that the kind of “evolution” talked about here happens (i.e. variations of bananas).

    The difference is whether the fruits we have today merely evolved from other fruits from a long time ago, or whether they evolved from primordial soup or aliens or whatever.

    By the way: Intelligent Christians don’t get their science from Kirk Cameron or whoever that other guy is in the video. I like Kirk, but he doesn’t represent the Christians well is the science department.

14. Sid Morrison
    June 2nd, 2008 at 4:19 pm

    Gibson8or has good commentary.

    As a practical matter, generally diseases like that affect an entire species pretty uniformly. So while relying on a single cultivar like ‘Cavendish’ doesn’t help, in truth, probably the whole species will be affected. What sometimes happens though, is that a rare individual plants *within* a species exhibit some degree of atypical resistance. When that happens, the resistant plant can be cloned (usually through age-old vegetative means such as cuttings) and then crossed with existing cultivars such as ‘Cavendish’ in the hope that a variety can be produced that has the good features of ‘Cavendish’ without the disease susceptibility.

    This is a great plan, but it can take decades and decades… such has been the case with producing a American Chestnut that is immune to chestnut blight — that was introduced in 1904 and has completely decimated the U.S. Chestnut forests.

    While there have been some individual trees within the native chestnut species that exhibited some resistance, most of the effort on finding a blight-proof solution has been doing crosses with other species that are more resistant (but otherwise lamer trees). So they start off by crossing a blight-sensitive American Chestnust with a blight-resistant Chinese Chestnut ( a different species) and select the most resistant “children” (seedlings) and then backcross these with American chestnuts. The idea is that in the end you have a tree that is almost indistinguishable from an American Chestnut, but is blight-resistant. This can take 8 or more backcrosses & since chestnuts takes years to fruit (and have seeds) it can take a long long time.

    It sounds like something must be needed for bananas. They’ll need to cross seeded cultivars with other species that are more resistant, come up with something resistant and then get to work at developing a seedless cultivar thereafter. It will be a ot of work, but the banana market is huge, so they’ll have the bucks to do it. Time is time, however…

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