Domestication

May 10, 2012May 10, 2012

Feral or relict: you decide

What do you call an escaped agricultural plant? I ask because two recent items have made me wonder. Exhibit A, a Zester Daily article entitled Wild Apple Adventure. Naturally I conjured up scenes of derring do in the mountains around Almaty. How disappointing, then, to discover that Zester’s version of “wild” is actually “feral,” apple trees that have either survived the orchard around them or else are seedlings growing in the wild.

Exhibit B, a recent announcement on a mailing list of a meeting on Nordic Relict Plants. ((Which I’m sure they won’t mind me repeating. It takes place on 26-27 July, in Iceland, and while it does not seem to have an online presence, as yet, you can get further details from Erik Persson. Tell him we sent you.)) I’d always thought of relicts as leftovers from massive ecological changes, like relict rain forests, or relict pockets of pre-ice age flora. But no …

This meeting is for everyone with an interest in relict plants, particularly but not exclusively, in Nordic and Arctic areas. By a relict plant we mean a plant species or variety that was, but is no longer, cultivated in a particular place, and has survived in that place after cultivation stopped. These plants are important parts of our cultural history and can sometimes contain genetic material that is different from more modern varieties of the plant.

So, what should one call these plants? Wild, to me, sounds wrong. Feral, most dictionaries I consulted agree, suggests both “not domesticated or cultivated” and “having escaped from domestication”. To which at least one helpfully adds “having escaped from domestication and become wild,” which is surely not true of erstwhile crops.

I rather like “relict”. What do you think?”

May 8, 2012May 8, 2012

Nibbles: Kenyan blog, Beer, CGIAR squared, Horse domestication

And Kenya’s best agriculture blog is…Tracking The Scent! Congrats Kio Wachira!
Drinking beer as an agricultural act.
CRP4 needs a new name.
Meanwhile, here’s another example of CGIAR centres working together. Not clear if it’s in a CRP, though, and if so what it is called.
Horse domesticated once, but with occasional restocking.

May 7, 2012May 8, 2012

Brainfood: Species prioritization, In situ costs, Mycorrhiza, Crop diversity indicator, Diet diversity indicator, Ag & Nutrition, Chestnut blight, Oyster translocation, Maize introgression, Italian asses, New hosts for pests

Species vulnerability to climate change: impacts on spatial conservation priorities and species representation. Yes, you can focus on sensitive species, but it comes at the cost of representativeness.
Estimating management costs of protected areas: A novel approach from the Eastern Arc Mountains, Tanzania. Those are $ costs per pixel on the map, which I’ve never seen before. Don’t think they took into account the effects of climate change, though. Maybe they should get in touch with the Aussies above?
The use of mycorrhizal inoculation in the domestication of Ziziphus mauritiana and Tamarindus indica in Mali (West Africa). It would help.
A new integrative indicator to assess crop genetic diversity. Includes varietal richness, spatial evenness, between-variety genetic diversity, and within-variety genetic diversity. Not much left, really. Anyway, remember this from last week? Anyone out there going to put 2 and 2 together?
Assessing Nutritional Diversity of Cropping Systems in African Villages. A new tool! Different from the integrative indicator above! Anyone going to put 4 and 2 together?
Agriculture-Nutrition Pathways Recognising the Obstacles. “The pathways between agriculture and nutrition seem to be laden with impediments, particularly in the form of intricate household preferences.” Those pesky preferences.
The chestnut blight fungus world tour: successive introduction events from diverse origins in an invasive plant fungal pathogen. Asia to N. America to Europe, but more than once. All very complicated. The surprising thing is that low diversity and low admixture have nevertheless still resulted in success in disparate places. What fiendish molecular or biochemical mechanism is behind this? Only more research will show, natch.
Translocation of wild populations: conservation implications for the genetic diversity of the black-lipped pearl oyster Pinctada margaritifera. Introducing some wild individuals near farms leads to more diverse farmed populations, right? Nope. The farmed populations are way diverse already and if anything the diversity is moving the other way.
Maize x Teosinte Hybrid Cobs Do Not Prevent Crop Gene Introgression. That’s because the hybrid cobs break apart much more easily than maize.
Detecting population structure and recent demographic history in endangered livestock breeds: the case of the Italian autochthonous donkeys. Microsatellites confirm existence of 8 breeds of Italian donkey, though there is also significant substructuring within each by farm. This apparently calls for a “synergic management strategy at the farm level,” which basically means using the breed as the unit of conservation but being careful about inbreeding.
Evolutionary tools for phytosanitary risk analysis: phylogenetic signal as a predictor of host range of plant pests and pathogens. Work out host susceptibility by looking at existing pest preferences and phylogenetic distance from the stuff the pest is known to like.

April 30, 2012April 30, 2012

Brainfood: Alfalfa, Date palm, Apricot, Collecting, Reintroduction, Ribes, Payments

Assessment of genetic diversity among alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.) genotypes by morphometry, seed storage proteins and RAPD analysis. Morphology fits with geography, the others don’t.
Insights into the historical biogeography of the date palm (Phoenix dactylifera L.) using geometric morphometry of modern and ancient seeds. Analysis of seed outlines using fancy maths identifies centres of diversity and migration routes.
Loss of genetic diversity as a signature of apricot domestication and diffusion into the Mediterranean Basin. Or you could use microsatellites. Result: an Irano-Caucasian centre of domestication and two migration routes, N and S of the Mediterranean.
Big hitting collectors make massive and disproportionate contribution to the discovery of plant species. Therefore, fund a small number of expert collectors in the right places. Luigi stands ready.
Success Rates for Reintroductions of Eight Perennial Plant Species after 15 Years. Are pretty pathetic. Makes you wonder if all that collecting is worth it.
Conservation of endemic insular plants: the genus Ribes L. (Grossulariaceae) in Sardinia. Seems rather a fuss for 1 species and 1 subspecies, crop wild relatives or not.
Indicator-based agri-environmental payments: A payment-by-result model for public goods with a Swedish application. Hang on a minute, why is crop diversity not there?

April 26, 2012April 26, 2012

Farming moved north with southern farmers

This is going to be all over the serious (and not so serious) blogs and news outlets, because it grabs the imagination better than a punch of burnt old seeds. DNA from four 5000-year old human skeletons in Sweden has revealed two genetically distinct populations. Three of the skeletons were hunter-gatherers. The fourth was a farmer. And the farmer’s DNA matched that of Mediterranean people, such as the people of Cyprus, while the hunter gatherers were typical Northern Europeans, but without any great affinity with any particular people. The two groups lived side by side for a long time, more than a thousand years, according to the researchers, and eventually interbred. The result is that none of today’s Northern Europeans has the same genetic profile as the original hunter-gatherers, although some hunter-gather genes are present in most Northern Europeans.

These results help to shore up the prevailing account of the spread of agriculture: that is was the farmers themselves who spread, rather than merely ideas about how to farm. The great mystery, for now, is did those farmers bring rye (Secale cereale, the classic cereal of Scandinavia) with them, or did it arrive much later. I don’t know nearly enough about the current story on rye domestication, but the centre of diversity and wild relatives seems to be in the Fertile Crescent, along with wheat and barley. There is evidence of domesticated rye from Neolithic Turkish sites, the earliest dated about 10,000 years ago. So plenty of time for it to have reached the southern Mediterranean and then moved up to Scandinavia, but did it? Most of the Central and Northern European rye remains are much more recent, only a couple of thousand years old. I look forward to a more learned account.