Jul 22 2024 1 mins 11
Most of the world’s population is dependent on grains for survival, and if fungal attacks on these food sources continue to increase, starvation of many of us is possible. That’s according to Arturo Casadevall, author of “Will the Fungi Win,” and a professor at Johns Hopkins.
Casadevall: The biggest threat that the fungi pose to humanity is that the fungi of the major passages of plants. Currently they threaten our big crops: maize, corn, rice. if we were to have entire failures there were just not enough calories to replace grains, so they pose essentially an existential threat to our civilization by what they can do to agriculture. They're currently devastating entire ecosystems: frogs, salamanders, we are losing the bats. :33
Casadevall notes that loss of bats would remove an important predator of insect populations, which could also impact food production. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.
Casadevall: The biggest threat that the fungi pose to humanity is that the fungi of the major passages of plants. Currently they threaten our big crops: maize, corn, rice. if we were to have entire failures there were just not enough calories to replace grains, so they pose essentially an existential threat to our civilization by what they can do to agriculture. They're currently devastating entire ecosystems: frogs, salamanders, we are losing the bats. :33
Casadevall notes that loss of bats would remove an important predator of insect populations, which could also impact food production. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.
