- Rust continues to never sleep.
- The discussion of whether there were coconuts on the Pacific coast of Panama prior to the Conquista continues on the Coconut Google Group.
- ICARDA and CIMMYT continue to love the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
- Climate change continues to be implicated in past societal collapses.
- NPR continues to plug those millets.
- Cautionary tale of Vavilov and Lysenko continues to be told, thankfully.
- The rise and rise of the drone continues. See what I did there?
- The relentless popular culture journey of citrus continues.
- And that of argan begins.
Brainfood: Wheat elements, Coconut movement, Wild lettuce, Pacific yams, Wild VIR oats, PREDICTS, Potato leaves, Perennial wheat, Wheat adoption
- Genetic Nature of Elemental Contents in Wheat Grains and Its Genomic Prediction: Toward the Effective Use of Wheat Landraces from Afghanistan. Only one significant marker, for Zn.
- Strategies for exchange of coconut germplasm in Brazil. Zygotic embryos in Petri dish containing Y3 culture medium without sucrose can last a couple of days without bacterial infection.
- Phylogenetic relationships within Lactuca L. (Asteraceae), including African species, based on chloroplast DNA sequence comparisons. The African species are probably not Lactuca at all.
- The Pacific yam (Dioscorea nummularia Lam.), an under-exploited tuber crop from Melanesia. It can be improved through crossing with itself, or with other species.
- Eco-geographical assessment of Avena L. wild species at the VIR herbarium and genebank collection. Some more collecting to be done.
- The database of the PREDICTS (Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems) project. Including 15,000 plants. No word on whether any of them Avena.
- Your Poison in My Pie—the Use of Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) Leaves in Sakartvelo, Republic of Georgia, Caucasus, and Gollobordo, Eastern Albania. Only used as first vegetable in spring in isolated high mountain areas in the southern Balkans.
- Toward a taxonomic definition of perennial wheat: a new species ×Tritipyrum aaseae described. Not entirely clear why naming it as a new species is necessary, but it’s still pretty cool.
- Dynamics of variety change on wheat farms in Pakistan: A duration analysis. For marginal farmers, it’s about yield, for others, quality. No word on how perennial wheat might do.
Coconut history 102
Yesterday’ post by Hugh Harries on the recent article in AramcoWord entitled Cracking Coconut’s History, by Ramin Ganeshram, elicited this response from another coconut expert, Luc Baudouin, on the coconut google group.
I enjoyed reading the [article], especially the picture from Dioscorides’s Tractatus De Herbis, a 15th Century manuscript. Congratulations to the author. While I share several of Hugh’s comments, I beg to differ as regards the presence of coconut on the Pacific coast of America. Several travellers mention its presence and provide multiple evidence. I will mention only two diagnostic traits.
The first one is simply that coconut has huge fruits, unparalleled among palms (except for Lodoicea maldivica, known as… the sea coconut). That the coconut fruit is as big as a human head was mentioned in virtually all accounts of coconut before AD 1500 and can thus be considered as part of the definition of coconut at that time. It is thus unreasonable to suppose that palms such as Attalea, Bactris or Elaeis were misidentified as coconut. In fact, palms of these and other genera were described as distinct ‘kinds’ by Oviedo, and their nuts were described as comparable to a coconut, but “the size of a walnut”, or “of a Seville olive” etc.
The second one is seed dissemination by oceanic currents, which is unique to coconut among palms. It was observed in the mouth of the Santa Maria river, southern from the old Spanish town of Nata. This used to be a bay which was converted into a salt works. The original population still exists in Aguadulce.
When and where was coconut first brought to America clearly remains an open question. BC 150 in the Bahia de Caraquez? AD 800 in the Gulf of Guayaquil? Or some other unidentified landing? We really don’t know but it was clearly before the Spaniards arrived. One may hesitate to admit it because of the extremely long distance from the Philippines to the American coasts, but it’s a fact. Hugh mentioned the presence of coconuts of the San Ramon type in Guam and this could contribute to ease the problem. It would be a two-leg journey.
In this context, the question of survival should be taken in the opposite way. While the Panama Tall can be described as an ‘incipient domesticate’, it did thrive at a small number of locations on the Pacific coasts of America. This shows that it did not lose its ability to propagate itself without human help (but in the absence of competitors that are more adapted to long distance dissemination).
I am talking of the Pacific coast of Panama. As regards Mexico and the Caribbean, I agree with Hugh.
Nibbles: Trees on farms, Biodiversity hotspots, Coconuts, Banana genebank, Fiddleheads, Hybrid wheat, Buckler prize, ITPGRFA hatchet job
- Trees are good for African farmers.
- A basic universal income for people in biodiversity hotspots. Agrobiodiversity hotspots too?
- Coconut History 101.
- 30 years of bananas in Belgium.
- Eat up all your fiddleheads.
- Hybrid wheat is coming at last.
- Ed Buckler wins big. Unclear if he’ll be allowed to tweet about it.
- Nonsense piece on the ITPGRFA.
Nibbles: Heirloom collection, Booze, Grape history, CWR training, New perennial wheat species, Brazilian cacao, Smelly durian, CIAT genebank
- “Every heirloom plant seed grown for food has a story…”
- The history of alcohol.
- The history of a particular alcohol-producing plant.
- U. of Minnesota students travel to crop cradle.
- They could just have gone to Washington State University.
- Brazil is back in the cacao game.
- Deconstructing durian’s smell is easier than you thought.
- The CIAT genebank in Scientific (Latin)American.