Attack of the Giant Parsley

David Brenner, a curator at the USDA genebank at Ames, Iowa, has just grown what may be the world’s tallest parsley plant.

Brenner says the seeds for the record-breaking parsley plant were first collected from Hungary in 1983. Even though it resembles a large bushy weed, he says it’s a perfect example of parsley. “It also had big tubers,” Brenner says. “The roots are almost four inches across and in Europe, the roots of parsley are another food crop, almost like a potato, so it has a double-barreled purpose.”

The Guinness people have been summoned. The existing record is six feet and this plant is almost eight.

GRIN knows about six Petroselinum accessions collected in Hungary in 1983, from five different villages, and donated in 1987. However, they’re listed as “inactive.” Not for long, I guess. But with the news making it to the media and Guinness on the way, I hope Dr Brenner manages to regenerate a lot of seed. To find out which one of the six the giant is, we’ll have to wait for the characterization data to go online. Look for that “plant height” descriptor…

Shifting baselines and genetic erosion

A posting from the good people at Bioplan ((A mailing list on biodiversity policy issues set up and maintained by the UNDP and UNEP.)) forwarded to me by my friend Mary Taylor has just alerted me to an article over at Mongabay which would probably have eluded me as I’m on the road at the moment and not checking the feedreader very systematically. So thanks, Mary.

The post is about the “shifting baselines” theory, apparently an influential concept in conservation thinking during the past decade and more but one that alas I hadn’t come across. It proposes that…

…due to short life-spans and faulty memories, humans have a poor conception of how much of the natural world has been degraded by our actions, because our ‘baseline’ shifts with every generation, and sometimes even in an individual. In essence, what we see as pristine nature would be seen by our ancestors as hopelessly degraded, and what we see as degraded our children will view as ‘natural’.

And if people can’t register the loss, how can conservation be made important to them?

I’ll leave you to read the details of the paper at Mongabay. It’s about the perception of changes in the local bird fauna among 50 rural Yorkshire villagers, compared to the “reality” revealed by the results of regular ornithological surveys. Suffice it to say that the authors found evidence of both “generational amnesia” (when people fail to pass knowledge down from generation to generation) and “personal amnesia” (when people forget how things used to be earlier in their lives).

Is this relevant for studies of genetic erosion in crops? For plants, including crops, there is a pretty good way of documenting changes in distribution, abundance and even genetic diversity, and that’s by comparison of the present situation with herbarium specimens and genebank samples. And old seed catalogues have also been scoured for evidence of loss of varieties of fruits and vegetables in Europe and the United States. I’ve suggested myself in the past that these are all valid, complementary approaches to the estimation of genetic erosion, though they all have their shortcomings. But I can’t think off the top of my head of a study which has combined making historical comparisons with asking people about how many varieties of a particular crop they used to grow, to gauge the accuracy of their recollections, though my own recollection of the literature may be faulty too! It seems to me that farmers are more likely to accurately recollect the crop varieties they used to grow than almost anything else, including the birds that fly around them, especially if you get a group of them together to discuss the issue, but it would be an interesting thing to test.

One of the authors of the paper does mention specimens in passing in his Mongabay interview.

“If the issue is with personal amnesia, just talking to people and triggering their memories about how things were, perhaps with the aid of props like photos or old specimens, will help them to ensure that their perceptions of change are accurate,” Milner-Gulland says.

That’s as part of a discussion of the “increasingly creative” ways of “finding data regarding past conditions that may no longer be remembered” that certainly has relevance for crops.

“One author (Julian Caldecott) used school meal records from remote village schools to reconstruct wild pig migrations in Borneo. There are many authors now using historical records and archeological remains, for example in charting the changes in fish stock compositions in the North Sea over thousands of years. Other people use contemporary accounts from eye-witnesses, while still others use scientific methods like pollen analysis, which can go back far beyond written accounts.” Milner-Gulland says, adding that “the important issues involve recognizing and accounting for sources of bias in the records that you use.”

And that goes for the knowledge of farmers too.

Strawberry fields video

Our friend Michael Hermann sent a link to a German TV item about strawberries. ((Unfortunately, I can’t see a way to embed the video here directly. , and I cannot be sure that the link will survive, in that form. If you click, and reach a video about something else entirely, please let me know and I’ll see if I can fix it. Luckily Luigi was able to find a permalink, which should now work properly.)) It packs an enormous amount of information into just 3 1/2 minutes, from a strawberry genebank and breeders to a master patissier who uses them to adorn a French tart.

Good news from Trinidad & Tobago

While many newspaper readers and television viewers overseas are, repeatedly, exposed to negative news about this country, particularly with respect to the uncomfortable rise in the level of murders, it would be a plus for the image of the twin island State if these people could be apprised as well of the contribution of Trinidad and Tobago’s International Cocoa Gene Bank.

Go get ’em, George Alleyne, who writes to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Cocoa Gene Bank. We all share the problem of interesting people in news about agricultural biodiversity, when what they really want is murder and mayhem.

A different way to conserve coconut

Good news from Roland Bourdeix of CIRAD. His idea for a new approach to the conservation of coconut genetic resources has taken a first important step. Roland wants to find uninhabited, isolated islets around the world and plant each one with a single coconut variety. Think of it: no maintenance costs, no expensive controlled pollinations to preserve the genetic integrity of each population, seednuts whenever you want them. Ok, of course there are drawbacks, but given the costs and difficulties of maintaining conventional coconut field genebanks, it’s worth a try. Roland calls it the Polymotu Project.

Well, Roland now tells us that he has his first islets. Marlon Brando’s family and their company Pacific Beachcomber SC has made available 5 islets from its Tetiaroa atoll. A different Tahitian variety will be conserved on each. As Roland says: “il nous reste encore 45 îlots et vallées à trouver…” Good luck!