Designer Microbes

I understand that they are doing all kinds of things with genetic engineering these days.  They already have developed a microbe that eats oil spills, unless perhaps Mother Nature has beat them to it.  Remember when that undersea oil rig blew out in the Gulf of Mexico some years ago, and it took them months to shut it down?  There was some talk about releasing a bunch of those oil eating microbes to help clean up the mess, until it was discovered that microbes of a similar type were already present in the Gulf.  I don't know if they were designer microbes gone wild or if they had evolved naturally because of all the oil that already was there from previous spills.  I remember reading something once that said, whenever a new food source evolves, something will evolve to take advantage of it.

That's also true when a new invasive species comes to town.  The round goby is an invasive fish that has been present in out local waters for some time now. The don't grow very big, but people were worried that they would disrupt the food chain by competing with the native small fry.  It wasn't long, however, that the larger fish learned that those gobies were good to eat.  It is illegal to possess live round gobies or use them for bait, but I understand that somebody is making an artificial lure now that looks like one.  There is some evidence that our native fish have developed a taste for zebra mussels as well. They'll never eat them all, but they seem to have thinned them out to the point that they are no longer causing problems, at least in our neighborhood.

Nature is a tough mother. She has survived meteor hits, climate changes, and mass extinctions, all before there were any humans on the planet.  She was here before we got here, and she will still be here after we are gone.  Too bad we won't be here to see it.

The reason I knew what was in that Venetian sack was that it hit the water right next to me and burst open on impact.  Our gondola wasn't moving very fast, being propelled by a single gondolier with a rear mounted sweep oar.  They had modern motorboats in Venice as well, and probably still do, but they mostly operate in the Grand Canal.  The little branch canals are too narrow, and the bridges that cross them are too low to readily accommodate such craft.