Thanks to Paul Bordoni at the Global Facilitation Unit for pointing us in the direction of this illustrated compendium of African recipes, including this one involving egusi, which are the seeds of various cucurbits.
Tissue culture in Africa and the Pacific
A somewhat confusing (to me at least) article on SciDev.Net promises a new African collaborative initiative on plant breeding in the title, but delivers something quite different in the text. It seems that a network is being set up in East and Central Africa to promote the adoption of tissue culture for conservation, multiplication and exchange of genetic resources, presumably mainly of vegetatively propagated crops. Dr Mary Taylor of the Secretariat of the Pacific Community’s Regional Germplasm Centre has recently organized a similar network in the Pacific. Perhaps the two networks could collaborate?
Google Earth
I’ll be posting later this week about the importance of geo-tagging biodiversity, but for now I just wanted to point out that Google Earth Blog, an independent forum for the discussion of the things you can do with Google Earth, has a section on the environment. Many of the things Frank Taylor posts on under this tag will be relevant to the study and conservation of biodiversity. And here’s a great Google Earth application I’ve recently come across, though from another source. The Malaria Atlas Project is pulling together data on the global distribution of the malaria parasites as a prelude to modelling their spatial limits.
The perils of rarity
It stands to reason that as the cost of finding and an over-harvested medicinal plant, say, increases beyond the market value of the product, people will stop looking for it, hopefully giving the population a chance to recover. Well, yes, but what if the very increasing rarity of the plant – or animal – actually in turn ratchets up its value? The result is a positive feedback loop which can only end in extinction. Or so says a mathematical model described in Nature, backed up by some telling examples. So publicizing the fact that a species may be rare and threatened (for example, in a Red Data List) may actually make things worse! Taking species into cultivation may be one way around the problem.
Possible blogging hiatus
We may or may not be having a coup today here in Fiji, so blogging may be erratic for the next couple of days…