Luigi Guarino

July 1, 2015July 1, 2015

Australian Aboriginal agriculture?

Watching a very poignant interview with Bruce Pascoe, an indigenous Australian writer, alerted me to the fact that his most recent book, Dark Emu, which was out last year, is apparently a reconsideration of whether Aboriginal peoples were in fact solely hunter-gatherers. That is what the conventional wisdom holds, or at least held, the last time I checked. I clearly haven’t checked in a while.

Hunter-gatherer societies forage and hunt for food and do not employ agricultural methods or build permanent dwellings… But as I read these early journals, I came across repeated references to people building dams and wells, planting, irrigating and harvesting seed, preserving the surplus and storing it in houses, sheds or secure vessels…and manipulating the landscape.

I’ve only been able to find one academic review of the book online. Is it being ignored by the establishment?

June 30, 2015June 30, 2015

Of plants and their pests

For whatever reason, there was a spate of papers on the coevolution of plants and their pests last week. Or at least I got to hear about them last week.

The one that got the most attention by the popular press — well, actually, the only one that got any attention by the popular press — was a study comparing changes in glucosinolates in the brassica family with speciation in the Pieridae butterflies, whose caterpillars feed on these plants. Glucosinolates give wasabi and mustard their zing (hence the press interest), but are deadly to insects, which is why they evolved in the first place. Each major innovation in the chemistry of glucosinolates since they first arose in the brassicas at the K-T boundary is correlated, the authors found, with a burst of diversification in detoxification mechanisms among the insects at which they were aimed.

The other two studies don’t delve quite so deeply back into evolutionary time, focusing on the role of domestication. The first looked at populations of the green peach aphid (Myzus persicae) growing on a diversity of both crops and their wild relatives. The authors found that aphid populations on domesticated species were more genetically diverse, but evolved more slowly, because selection was less strong and populations larger, weakening the effect of genetic drift. Applying this result to the brassica-butterfly model would suggest that the strength of the association between glucosinolate and butterfly diversity should decrease for the domesticated brassicas compared to the wild ones, but I’m not sure this was looked at in that study.

The third paper investigated the apple’s fungal pathogen Venturia inaequalis. The dispersal characteristics of dozens of strains collected on both domesticated and wild apples in Kazakhstan were compared. The authors found that apple domestication has led to enhanced colonization capacity by the pathogen: strains from orchards have more, bigger spores. Seems to me that’s somewhat contradictory to the aphid example.

The relationship between plants and their pests is, well, complicated.

June 30, 2015June 29, 2015

Nibbles: Organic research, Plant models, Tabasco peppers, Andean shepherds, Weird pigs, Wild rice harvesting, Heritage ducks, Nutrient content

An investment in organic research. At last.
Plant models go online. Not those kinds of models.
Where the peppers for Tabasco sauce come from.
Apparently, “[w]hite alpacas have been overbred.” But not that kind of breeding, I think.
Pigs are weird.
Learn how to make poles. Yes, those kinds of poles.
Even ducks can be heritage.
Higher carbon dioxide bad for nutrition.

June 29, 2015June 23, 2015

Brainfood: Nigerian fruit & veg, South African veggies, Veggies in home gardens, Standardizing phenotyping, Potato diversity, Triploid chamomile, Chocolate chip, Fungi & oils, Melon diversity, CC and grasslands

Promoting food security and enhancing Nigeria’s small farmers’ income through value-added processing of lesser-known and under-utilized indigenous fruits and vegetables. It’s the infrastructure, stupid.
The role of wild vegetables in household food security in South Africa: A review. No, it’s the information, stupid.
Indigenous wild food plants in home gardens: improving health and income — with the assistance of agricultural extension. Nope, it’s the extension, stupid.
Towards recommendations for metadata and data handling in plant phenotyping. It’s the standardization, stupid.
Cytoplasmic diversity in potato breeding: case study from the International Potato Center. It’s a genetic bottleneck, stupid.
Towards breeding of triploid chamomile (Matricaria recutita L.) — Ploidy variation within German chamomile of various origins. It’s the triploids, stupid.
Making a chocolate chip: development and evaluation of a 6K SNP array for Theobroma cacao. Oh, very clever, now everybody and their uncle will be able to breed cacao, stupid.
Arbuscular mycorrhiza differentially affects synthesis of essential oils in coriander and dill. It’s not just genetics, stupid.
Comparative transcriptional profiling analysis of developing melon (Cucumis melo L.) fruit from climacteric and non-climacteric varieties. It’s the sugar metabolism, stupid.
Climate-driven diversity loss in a grassland community. It’s the increasing aridity, stupid.

June 29, 2015

One rare lettuce

Screen Shot 2015-06-29 at 9.16.18 AM Speaking of crop wild relatives, there’s one in India which is known only from its type locality. I wonder how many around the world?