- iSPOT to map common names to Latin names. Jeremy says “Good luck with that.”
- International Conference on Biodiversity Informatics. Jeremy says “Good luck with that too.”
- Online discussion forums for the ICBI, above. Agriculture! Forestry! Fisheries!
- Uganda joins the rush to Svalbard global genebank.
- Scientists to clone pashmina goat. Er … why?
- Adopt-an-Italian-olive-tree.
- International Plant Protection Convention (IPPC) meets so we can eats.
- Inverted root grafting of canistel at the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden.
- In vino veritas.
Notes from Cartagena
I’m in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia at a conference on the state of plant genetic resources in Latin America and one of the presenters this morning said that people in the region of Iquitos in Peru consume 193 fruit species, of which 57 are found in local markets. I had never run across this statistic, and was a bit skeptical, but it’s clearly extremely solid, coming from a paper by one of the greats of tropical American botany. Only thing is, the paper is 20 years old. Would be good to count again. I bet that number will be down a bit.
Another interesting little bit of information that emerged is that Chile has, since 2006, a “…Comité Agro Gastronómico, entidad público-privada que busca unir la producción agrícola y del mar con la gastronomía chilena, de manera de poner en las mesas de Chile y el mundo preparaciones que rescaten productos que reflejen la identidad nacional.” ((“…a private-public entity which seeks to unite the harvest of land and sea with Chilean gastronomy, so as to put on the tables of Chile and the world dishes that feature products that reflect the national identity.”)) This kind of thing can be taken too far, and I don’t know whether a committee is necessarily the best way to do it, but the idea of promoting agrobiodiversity through gourmet “ethnic” cooking is not a bad one.
Poppies 2 Pomegranates
Down an “Active Pretox Drink,” plant a pomegranate in Afghanistan. Local varieties, I trust.
Wallacean agrobiodiversity overlooked?
There was an International Conference on Alfred Russel Wallace and the Wallacea in Makassar last December. Wallacea is of course one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots, a link between the Sahul and Sunda landmasses. I was only able to find a sketchy programme on the internet, so I don’t really know in detail what was covered. In particular, was agricultural biodiversity included in the discussions? There have been fleeting mentions of “Long-term biodiversity monitoring including that of the Anoa dwarf buffalos on Buton (Phillip Wheeler, University of Hull)” as one of the papers. ((Why was this thing never domesticated?)) But what about spices, for example? Does anyone know?
Incidentally, while looking into this I came across some great pictures of the house where Wallace lived on Ternate. Another site to add to the list for our long-planned tour of the Spice Islands, Robert?
Millennial beans
Nice enough beans, ((And thanks to Bisse for letting me use her flickr pic.)) but is the story circulating about them really true?
The story of Anasazi beans varies, depending on who is telling it. In popular mythology, the beans were uncovered by an anthropologist, who discovered a 1,500 year old tightly sealed jar of the beans at a dig in New Mexico. Some of the beans germinated, and the new variety of bean entered cultivation again.
I tried to track the story down, and the closest I got to paydirt, I think, was a passage in Beans: A History by Ken Albala. But even that is pretty vague really. Archaeologists from UCLA somewhere in the midwest in the 1980s, or maybe 1950s, uncover a clay pot sealed with pine tar which they carbon date to 500 BCE. Some of the beans sprout and an intrepid businessman markets them. Yeah, right. To go back to the source of the previous quote:
Since most botanists agree that most beans are unable to germinate after approximately 50 years, it is more probable that the beans remained in constant cultivation in the Southwest, probably in Native American gardens, and that they were picked up by companies looking for new “boutique beans.”
There are plenty of companies marketing Anasazi beans now. But actually it is not impossible for legume seeds to keep their viability for more than 50 years — that’s what genebanks are for. And the dry, relatively cool conditions of an Arizona cave might just be good enough to ensure the survival of a few beans for centuries.