- Vanilla domestication 101.
- Bhutan ponders biodiversity database. We say: Don’t forget the crops, people.
- “Crap crops of the Incas.” One man’s on-off relationship with oca.
Satoyama: Japan’s Secret Water Garden. A different approach to rice.
Professor screws up on domestication?
I’m having a domestication research moment today, after reading an interview full of inaccuracies by a renowned professor (I won’t name names). After spotting two major screw ups in his logic and several outright wrong ‘facts’, I’ve decided to be more thorough and start digging into West African yam domestication and the process that leads to it.
Oh name names, Mathilda, please!
Incidentally, there’s lots of agrobiodiversity stuff, including on domestication and crop wild relatives, at the open-access journal Ethnobotany Research and Applications. Just found out about it at Cultural Landscapes.
Nibbles: Banana, Pigs, Bees, Wiki, Cat, Award, Genomics
- Banana going extinct. Again.
- Pigs are good weedkillers.
- Bee bailout in the UK.
- India has an agricultural Wikipedia. With a blog. Via.
- Do you know this cat?
- SEED 2009 Awards for entrepreneurs. Found at the LEISA blog.
- TED talk on building better wines through genomics.
Nibbles: Earth, Cheese, Silkworms, Biodiversity, Food, Cows, Pigs, Blog, Oysters, Organic
- Stunning images of Earth from space. Direct agricultural (biodiversity) interest at 3, 6 and 15.
- A cheese that’s full of agrobiodiversity. In more ways than one.
- Agrobiodiversity useful in space. And from space.
- Biodiversity in Africa. Agriculture mentioned, and not just in a bad way. Nice maps too.
- Eggplants. Agrobiodiversity. Cooking. Sex. Video.
- Sad story of a farmer losing his cows. Not just cows, “the oldest pure breed on Earth.”
- Farmers bred colourful pigs for the sheer hell of it.
- CABI blog reviews 2008.
- Keeping oysters healthy is hard.
- Legendary breeder Khush says organic rice not a good idea.
- Variation Under Domestication. Darwin’s Origin blogged.
Cooking the books
The news that the DNA in medieval parchments is to be fingerprinted has been making quite a splash. Parchments are made of animal skins, of course, and it seems that it is possible to recover DNA in decent shape — the latest example of archeogenetics. The idea is to produce “a taxonomy of manuscript manufacture,” which must be of tremendous excitement to medievalists. But John Hawks describes another possible application in his anthropological blog that’s more in line with our agrobiodiversity interests here:
…the results may be equally useful for understanding the processes of animal breeding in medieval Europe. Today’s domesticated breeds are a remnant of a much larger diversity of local breeds that once existed. People bred animals both locally by selection and across large regions by introducing favored animals from long distances. Sometimes they favored diversity — and considering the revival of interest in legacy breeds like Highland cattle.
Wish I’d thought of that…