The National Geographic Society has awarded US$ 20,000 to a study of coconut DNA that will shed light on its history before and after domestication.
Farming butterflies conserves forests
East African farmers are making good money — and conserving their local surroundings — by going after butterflies. The Manila Times picks up a story from Agence France Presse reporting from the villages in Kenya and Tanzania where locals have learned how to trade in butterflies. The article is built on the words of the farmers themselves, and it makes for uplifting reading. A sample:
“I would be foolish to cut trees,†says Suleiman Kachuma, a 42-year-old villager, who earns between 15 and 23 dollars a month from his work with Kipepeo, double what he used to make selling timber.
“Before, people had a few chickens and goats… Now there is a big change. Farmers have more chickens, some even have some cattle. The project really changed our lives,†he says.
I thought I’d seen this somewhere before, and I had.
Tree domestication a huge success
There’s a heart-warming tale over at the Rural Poverty Portal (nice site, too) of the International Fund for Agricultural Development. A tree domestication project in west Africa has brought higher incomes and improved status for women, which has translated into schooling and better nutrition. Women are running their own tree nurseries, selecting which species to grow and nurturing them for market. So far the number of species is limited, perhaps that will improve. The project was implemented by the World Agroforestry Centre.
Rescuing the American chestnut
You know, these Nibbles (the short, soundbite-type things which appear at the top of the right sidebar of this page) are fun to do, but sometimes you end up downplaying, or over-simplifying, an important, interesting — and interestingly complex — story. Take what I said about the American chestnut a few days ago. The recent history of Castanea dentata is proud and tragic ((Looking further back, it also played an important role in native America agroforestry.)), and efforts to bring it back from the brink of annihilation well-nigh heroic. To imply, as I did, that these efforts were confined to hybridizing the American with the Chinese chestnut was justified only by the necessity for extreme brevity. In fact, of course, it is not just hybridization but repeated back-crossing. And not just interspecific crossing but also painstaking crossing among the few remaining pure American chestnuts, as reported in the article that prompted me to revisit the original story and hopefully make amends for my earlier flippancy.
Feral livestock: pest or useful resource?
I ((Contributed by Michael Kubisch)) came across an interesting article while browsing through my archives. ((Dirk van Vuren and Philip W. Hedrick. Genetic Conservation in Feral Populations of Livestock. Conservation Biology, Vol. 3, No. 3. (Sep., 1989), pp. 312-317.)) It is by now quite dated, but with global climate changes upon us, I think it may actually be more relevant now than it was 20 years ago. The article makes a case for the preservation of feral livestock which are descendents of animals that, once kept by humans, either manage to escape into the wild or are simply abandoned when no longer useful.
Not all species do this equally well. Sheep have a hard time managing on their own, while pigs, on the other hand, easily adapt to all sorts of environments. In the US there are an estimated 4 million feral pigs, many of which may be descendents of pigs brought over by the Spanish in the 16th century. Similarly successful have been feral horses in the US and camels in Australia, the latter being so abundant that there are efforts underway to use them for meat production.
The article makes the case for preserving feral livestock as a valuable genetic resource because the adaptation to life in the wild may have favored or preserved traits, for example resistance to specific parasites or a higher temperature tolerance, that domestic livestock may have lost.
Of course, there are drawbacks: in some countries feral animals are considered pests and there is no doubt that particularly pigs can and do inflict serious damage on the environment. And because of this there are often programs in place to eradicate or at least control feral populations, although such attempts have not always been all that successful. At any rate, in an age of changing climate conditions it might perhaps be more worthwhile to keep some feral livestock around than to try to get rid of it.Â