How do you best stop insects from eating your crops? Forget insecticide: it poisons the plants, the land, and the people who eat it. The solution is to simply make all of the male insects gay. And a British company (it had to be those Brits with their ambiguous sexuality, didn't it?) has come to the rescue of desperate farmers in India's Punjab by devising a charged wax powder soaked in female insect hormones.
The powder is sprayed in a cloud over the crops, affixes itself to the insects and soon all the would-be-breeder males are chasing each other indiscriminately. Of course some will nail actual lady bugs (as opposed to ladybugs) but most will have spent their energies on other fellas and missed the chance to procreate.
Exosect, says the BBC, means the Indian farmers can tackle their insect problems and lower their use of insecticides to a 40th of what it was previously.
The queer effect is only temporary, sadly for the farmers and the (male) insects.
P.S. We KNOW it's not butterflies that are eating the crops, we just like the look of them more than a dull old picture of a rice borer.
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