Forget war. Forget pestilence. Forget famine. Forget climate change. Forget being forced to sit and listen to an entire Taylor Swift album. The real horror in today’s news? The terror that overshadows every other possible calamity that could come our way?
There is now a virus that is threatening the global supply of chocolate.
Chocoholics may want to stock up on candy bars while they can — a devastating disease is ravaging the cacao trees in West Africa, potentially putting the global chocolate supply in jeopardy, scientists have found.
“This virus is a real threat to the global supply of chocolate,” said Benito Chen-Charpentier, a professor of mathematics at the University of Texas at Arlington, who authored the disheartening study published recently in the journal PLOS One.
Wait, what? A professor of mathematics? Has anyone considered getting a virologist or even a generic biologist involved in this? You know, just to check the data?
Dubbed the cacao swollen shoot virus disease, it spreads via several species of mealybugs that feed on the chocolate crop.
Once infected, the plant can exhibit a range of symptoms, including swelling of the stems and roots, red veins appearing on immature leaves, and rounding and shrinking of the cacao pod.
Scientists attribute the disease’s proliferation to “globalization, climate change, agricultural intensification and reduced resilience in production system,” per the study.
So now this evil has a name: the cacao swollen shoot virus. So, if you’re a cacao farmer, and your cacao experiences a swollen shoot that lasts for more than four hours, you need to contact a professor of mathematics, I guess.
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It’s hard to imagine life without chocolate. Only recently, my doctor told me I needed to eat more vegetables, to which I replied, “Well, chocolate comes from plants, so I think I have it covered,” which argument didn’t exactly grow wings. I guess she’s not a choco-doc. But this virus presents a real choco-nundrum. A smart cookie would be stocking up on chocolate now to avoid any eventuality in which things get coconutty.
Fortunately, since an insect spreads the virus (as so often is the case), there may be hope for the chocolate market.
Thankfully, Chen-Charpentier and his team have devised a bold new way to combat the choc-blocking scourge by using mathematical data to determine how far apart vaccinated trees need to be planted to stop mealybugs from hopping from plant to plant and spreading the virus.
“Mealybugs have several ways of movement, including moving from canopy to canopy, being carried by ants or blown by the wind,” the mathematician explained. “What we needed to do was create a model for cacao growers so they could know how far away they could safely plant vaccinated trees from unvaccinated trees in order to prevent the spread of the virus while keeping costs manageable for these small farmers.”
Well, that explains the “professor of mathematics” angle.
Before we go all dark chocolate over the prospects of this, let’s weigh in with some biology: In any case like this, there are usually some of the affected organisms that survive, that prove more resistant to the virus, and those trees will then reproduce, hopefully passing on whatever trait made them resistant, and the population recovers, giving us a renewed supply of delicious chocolate.
But if that doesn’t happen… Holy crap, what’s next, a bacon shortage?
This seems appropriate.
