Onkel Bob seems to know a lot about the Silk Road, do read the whole thing:
The exchange of food was very much a one way exchange, and surprisingly few staples went over this route.
Nibbles: Bison, GMOs, Maize map, Snails, Fruit bat market, News
- Buffalo on California’s Santa Catalina island being sterilized. In other news, there are buffaloes on Santa Catalina island.
- GMO hotspots deconstructed. Zzzzz.
- Maize genome mapped. Zzzzz.
- Nigerian nutritionist pushes slimy micro-livestock. France surrenders.
- How to shop for fruit bats.
- New newsletter from Nepalese NGO. Li-Bird, where is it on your site?
Mobiles against hunger
Over at his other place, Jeremy expounds on an unusual idea for “solving” hunger. What do you think? Does he have too much time on his hands?
Nibbles: Old goat, Ethiopian sorghum
- Reptile-like Balearic goat.
- Sorghum diversity hotspots identified in Ethiopia.
So what’s with them bees?
Overall, we must conclude that claims of a global crisis in agricultural pollination are untrue.
That’s from a New Scientist digest of a Current Biology paper by the authors themselves. 1 Roughly, the argument is that (1) bees are responsible for the production of a lot of our food, yes, but not that much; (2) pollinators are declining, yes, but not worldwide, and probably not irreversibly; and (3) pollinator decline can threaten agricultural yield, yes, but it hasn’t actually done so yet. The data come from a huge FAO dataset of “yield, and total production and cultivated area of pollinator-dependent and nondependent crops.”
But not so fast. The relatively small proportion of agricultural production that depends on pollinators has quadrupled during the past 50 years. So if there’s no pollinator crisis now, there may well soon be one.