[ RadSafe ] More (or Less ? ) Blue Butterflies

[Brad Keck]

All,  

 In my morning "Science News"  - from none less than the American Association for the Advancement of Science - in a summary entitled "Fukushima Radiation Still Poisoning Insects" by Dennis Normile,  I read that Cs at less than 100 Bq/kg in foliage was "seriously toxic" to butterflies.  So much so in fact that ingestion of one tenth of one Becquerel produced a profoundly measurable result in both mortality and morphology.   (This is contrast to a tremendous quantity of work in insects over decades.)

As I have commented before, there is no mention of any control for age since harvest, locality, bacterial or pesticide content of said leaves.  Nonetheless, the AAAS is presenting this work as toxicological fact.  I encourage all to read both the Science News article (from AAAS) and the original paper (in the open journal BMC Evolutionary Biology) and comment to the appropriate authors and editors; I have copied links below.  

Bradly D. Keck, PhD, CHP

Science News: http://news.sciencemag.org/asiapacific/2014/09/fukushima-radiation-still-poisoning-insects

BMC Evolutionary Biology:  http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/s12862-014-0193-0.pdf