Glyphosate: the bad boy of alien warfare?

Glyphosate has been used commercially since its introduction by Monsanto in 1970, but has never been without controversy, as the chemical has been questioned on countless occasions by many people and organisations around the world over the adverse effects it has on people, plants, animals, and all sorts of other wildlife. In a bid to break down what *glyphosate really is about, here are a few things you should know:

Glyphosate is classified as noncarcinogenic to humans, but investigations involving glyphosate exposure to wildlife and humans show adverse effects resulting from genotoxicity, cytotoxicity and reproductive toxicity caused by exposure to glyphosate.

Children are particularly vulnerable to pesticides, including glyphosate.

Glyphosate can last decades in soils with a pH balance favouring acidity (lower than six on the scale). In water, it has a long persistence in sediments.

It kills plants by disrupting the plant's shikimate pathway (a way for plants to digest nutrients), essentially starving the plants. Glyphosate has desiccating effects, which starve plants of water.

As a powerful antibiotic, it kills beneficial bacteria and other microorganisms in the soil which severely limits replanting after glyphosate use.

It is a threat to non-target plants as a result of spray drift, as well several other other organisms near the area sprayed.

In laboratory experiments, frog embryos exposed to dilutions of the chemical showed several physical malformations.

Glyphosate is soluble in water, and binds more to clay soil particles than it does to sandy soil particles.

Even when settled into soil particles, it may dissolve back into water.

Glyphosate presence in soil can change the balance of bacteria and fungi, altering the soil ecosystem.

In laboratory studies, Argentinean researchers found that glyphosatecontaining herbicides could also be toxic to earthworms, causing damage to cells and DNA at levels “close to the applied environmental concentrations”.

According to Dr Andrew Yates, "there is plenty of technical material regar-ding the side-effects of glypho-sate on the health of bees, but the most obvious, and significant impact of glyphosate is not a side-effect but rather it is the direct effect inasmuch that it kills the source of pollen on which the bees feed to live". – Blake Linder *Sources:

The Unintended Consequences of Using Glyphosate (the main ingredient in the herbicide Roundup) by Sharon Rushton, Ann Spake, and Laura Charlton, published January 2016

Ecotoxicology of Glyphosate and Glyphosate-Based Herbicides — Toxicity to Wildlife and Humans by Paul K. Mensah, Carolyn G. Palmer, and Oghenekaro N. Odume, published in 2015 The environmental impacts of glyphosate by Friends of the Earth Europe, published June 2013