- “Experimental botany, murderous pirates, secret tunnels and an all you can eat buffet; there are very few places where these things can all be found together.”
Finnish genebank attacked
Something else to add to the long list of problems that can afflict field genebanks:
Hordes of moles have penetrated into the MTT Agrifood Research Finland plant gene bank in Laukaa during the winter.
A lot of damage was done to fruit tree saplings in particular. Fortunately, there is a back-up site, but not all material is safety duplicated. More protective measures are to be introduced. Also, there seems to be a lot of cryopreservation work going on at Laukaa, so maybe in time there will be an added level of protection. MTT Agrifood research have a nice pamphlet on Finnish agrobiodiversity and its conservation.
Kesar magoes on the ropes in Gujarat
Farmers in Gujarat are cutting down their mangoes because they no longer yield enough.
Kanu Korat, a farmer of Mandola village in Talala, earlier grew Kesar mango trees on 3.5 hectares of land; but he had to hew them owing to the crop failure. A change of weather conditions in recent times ruined the crop in the region, with mango production falling by 75 per cent. As a result, the farmers here have not been able to quote the normal price of mangoes.
That’s a pity, because Indian mangoes have only recently been allowed back into the US market. I don’t know anything about mango diversity, but the Kesar variety seems popular and fairly common (over 8,000 Google hits), so I don’t suppose it will be endangered by the cull. But still. The shape of things to come? Is this climate change in action?
Wild fruit relatives threatened in Central Asia
Fauna & Flora International and Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI) have published a Red List of Trees of Central Asia. This is part of the Global Trees Campaign.
The new report identifies 44 tree species in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan as globally threatened with extinction. Many of these species occur in the unique fruit and nut forests of Central Asia, an estimated 90% of which have been destroyed in the past 50 years.
One of the threatened fruit trees is the red-fleshed Malus niedzwetzkyana, from Kyrgyzstan.
Working with the Kyrgyz National Academy of Sciences, the Global Trees Campaign is identifying populations of this rare tree in Kyrgyzstan and taking measures to improve their conservation. With distinctive red-fleshed fruit, the Niedzwetzky apple is an excellent flagship for the conservation and sustainable management of this beleagured forest type.
The report is available online.
Penis pepper finally reveals its identity
A weird, comma-shaped fruit is often to be seen “floating over the soldiers marching off to be sacrificed or flying priests” in the artwork of the Moche, an agricultural people that frequented the coastal plain of northern Peru from A.D. 100 to 800. That’s been recognized since the 1930’s, when archaeologists gave it the name ulluchu — meaning “penis pepper” because of its shape — but without actually been able to say what the fruit was. Modern-day Peruvians just don’t recognize it, and botanists need more to go on for a scientific identification.
They got it recently when the actual remains of a fruit were found during excavation of the the tombs of Dos Cabezas in the ancient Moche city of Sipan. Ethnobotanists Rainer Bussmann and Douglas Sharon had been asking around for ulluchu for years:
“We would go to these markets and people would say, ‘We think we know what that is, but it’s not being sold here,'” said Sharon, the retired director of the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California-Berkley. “Well, one of the reasons it wasn’t being used is because the Ulluchu seems to show up during sacrifices. And no one is being sacrificed anymore.”
But armed with the physical specimens, desiccated as they were, Bussman, who works at the Missouri Botanical Gardens, eventually homed in on the genus Guarea, which is in the mahogany family, not the pepper.
“Rainer is a first-rate taxonomist,” Sharon said. “He studied every physical characteristic of these plants until he was absolutely certain we had it.”
Guarea seeds contain hallucinogenics and chemicals which raise blood pressure. Both would have been useful in sacrifices.
Bussmann, director of the garden’s William L. Brown Center for Plant Genetic Resources, plans to further study the plant’s chemistry and suspects it might have applications as a blood pressure and erectile dysfunction treatment.
The sacrificial soldiers in Moche artwork over which ulluchu fruits float often appear to have erections. Expect huge plantations to spring up in the Peruvian lowlands.