Dr Roland Bourdeix is a senior researcher at CIRAD and an honorary research fellow at Bioversity International. He’s long worked on coconut genetic resources conservation and use, including at the Marc Delorme Research Station. He’s now in the South Pacific on a mission — in collaboration with my old pals at the Secretariat of the Pacific Community — to collect a famous Samoan coconut variety, and you can follow his progress on his new blog.
Where are those haskaps anyway?
A friend was excited to see a recent Nibble about the edible blue honeysuckle berry, or haskap. Alas, as she politely pointed out, “the link goes nowhere”. Which is weird because it obviously went somewhere when we wrote about it. On checking, though, and much searching, it turns out she is right. It seems like the source was what we in the trade call a splog, a blog that is effectively nothing but spam, and I cannot find anything on the web about the 1st virtual international scientific conference about those blasted berries. So, I’m removing the link from the Nibble, but leaving the text, and adding here a couple of genuine haskap links.
There’s Haskap Canada, which has a blog, and the Plants for a Future database entry. And those links are guaranteed not dead. And if you know more about that conference, we’ll be happy to include a genuine link in future.
Nibbles: Wild strawberries, Year of Biodiversity, Dog breeding, Vancouver’s Old Apple Tree
- NY Times does Svalbard.
- Gus Molina does agrobiodiversity.
- Dogs “continue to wither genetically.” Ouch.
- Rescuing an historical apple tree.
The ins and outs of accessing bugs
“We didn’t get the permit” to export the wasp, said Fabian Haas, head of the Biosystematics Support Unit at the Kenya-based International Center of Insect Physiology and Ecology.
He was trying to bring the wasps from Sri Lanka to Kenya to fight the fruit flies which made the same journey accidentally in 2003 and are now ravaging mangoes in Africa. Seems unfair. Maybe the CBD’s meeting in Japan in October will sort it all out. Or maybe not.
Nibbles: Heirloom veggies, Rubber, Breadfruit
- Royal Horticultural Society asks Welsh gardeners to “bring out their dead” (TM Cherfas).
- Rubber photos.
- More on breadfruit from our friend Diane Ragone.