What is a genetic modification that would cause a massive chain reaction to possibly horrific effects?
Let's keep things simple two rules.
- No giving sentience, This is a no brainer issue.
- Let's keep it to beings under the Animilia kingdom. "mutated virus/bacteria" is a common trope.
To start:
Let's modify ants to have lungs.
Most insects are constrained by the amount of oxygen they can acquire through their exoskeleton.
Imagine how big they can get if they didn't have that constraint?
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Octopodes no longer die when they give birth, meaning they can teach their young and form societies.
WAIT THEY DIE ON BIRTH!??
WTF this actually needs to be fixed.
Submit a bug report or fork the repo and do it yourself. It's only maintained by volunteers after all.
But they are not social creatures, so if they were, even when they died someone in the social group could still teach the youngs
Cows now have tetrodotoxin like Fugu fish. Incorrectly prepared cows now have the chance to kill you.
Why did I read this like patch notes on a game?
As it should be!
Opposite monkey paw situation, as cows are no longer farmed due to the poison risk, global emissions are massively reduced. And the huge amounts of land dedicated to feeding cows is returned to forestry, further reducing emissions.
The poisonous cows solve climate change long before the vegans can.
You're giving the vegans ideas now. Lol.
How much does the cattle rearing industry contribute to global emissions?
According to the USDA, the US cattle industry contributes about 3.7% of US greenhouse gas emissions, and livestock as a whole is around 14.5% globally on a cursory search
A breed of 100+ pound Chihuahua with the same temperament as the original.
We already have wild pigs.
Ok, take this with a grain of salt because I read about it ages ago in a dubious pop-sci book and my memory is shaky. One time, they tried to gene edit yeast to be able to survive much higher alcohol concentrations. There's lots of good reasons to want to do this... Beer/wine is just about the strongest beverage you can make without distillation of some kind because the yeast dies. Making way higher ethanol yields just from fermentation makes biofuel way more viable. Stuff like that.
EXCEPT... It nearly escaped, and was able to survive on it's own. Yeast is very ubiquitous in nature, so a wild yeast that can tolerate massive ethanol concentrations could conceivably have altered life on earth as we know it.
A cursory internet search isn't turning up anything about this, but I'm pretty sure I read it in the book Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody, if anyone wants to look harder than I did.
Both male and female mosquitos now drink blood and they spit some of the last person's blood in you when they drink, causing them to spread blood borne diseases
Don't they already spread blood borne diseases?
Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito-borne_disease
In a push to deal with micro plastics, bacteria are developed to be able to break down plastic. Eventually, it gets into the plastic installed for a purpose and starts breaking that down.
Damn I thought you were gonna say it gets into our bodies and eats us as we're becoming part plastic nowadays.
That's a horror movie premise right there.
I think that's the basic plot to Andromeda.
It took the world a million years before it figured out how to digest cellulose. It used to be like plastic. Just piled up.
I thought I read about this for real a while back? In a bid to make plastic decay faster, make it out of cellulose with embedded bacteria that can break it down. It still happens too slowly for most plastic packaging
bacteria are not animals.
Mhh, insects in general IIRC are also constrained by the fact they have exoskeletons: i.e. their internal organs are just in a bag. So they can't grow too much or they just squish I think.
Imagine them being able to become vertebrates. You can have insects the size of cats I think before the osmosis breathing tubes they currently have are not a thing. Lungs would be the next thing I guess.
Disclaimer: I'm not a biologist and just make stuff up from what I remember from high school biology, and it was last millennium!
If only the rest of the world was so honest!
According to my sister-in-law's then boyfriend (who was a biologist or an insect guy or something), spiders and insects can have lung-line organs called book lungs. So they have options. Creepy buggy insecty options.
Oh right, I've read about that on coconut crabs I think. There you go, they are already half there.
Not very up on biology, so not sure if this would even be a thing, but I would say some kind of internal structure like plants allowing animals to overcome the square-cube law
Amaranth that can grow on sand and be watered with seawater
Edit: ops, only animals? Make bees able to break down any kind of sugar into honey
All life with gills learn to breathe air without water, and suddenly all marine life is competing with us for land space
A malicious gene drive. Basically, use molecular tools to ensure that a gene is always passed down from a parent to its progeny, regardless of the other parent’s genetic makeup.
Many choices available: propagate resistance to a pesticide for mosquitos, guarantee Huntington’s disease in a family, or crash a population of beneficial species by reducing fertility, to name a few.
Ant phagogenesis
Give human level intelligence to gorillas, this is worse then just human level chimpanzees in the fact gorilla's are beefy and could rip the average human in to pieces. With human level intelligence they would be a force to me reckoned with
I heard there is a movie similar to that.
Congo?
Rewatching the newer Apes movies makes me scared shitless whenever I see a gorilla on screen. They're big, loud, strong as hell, and smart as a person. Especially the scene in Dawn when the guy goes back to the settlement to try to negotiate and you just see that gorilla come out of nowhere and just scream at the guy.
And then I laugh whenever I see one riding a horse and think "that poor horse."
99% sterility. Virus transmitted. Long incubation. People would freak out.
viruses are not animals
I loved the movie children of Men. It was very interesting. You might like it too. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0206634/
Depending on what causes the sterility it could be managed through diffecountries. It's like huge spark to class warfare instantly. especially for less well off counrries.