If you were intrigued by Cary Fowler’s reference during his TED talk to the book “The Apples of New York,” you’ll be pleased to hear that it is online in a variety of formats. You can download it, or read it online at Google Books. Incidentally, there’s also a similar book on the pears of New York, though by a different author, “the sixth in a series of monographs on fruits, all of which have become classic references on the fruit cultivars of the period.” The pear book mentions a specific tree, the Endicott Pear Tree at Danvers, Massachusetts. That tree, which may have come to America from England on the Arbella in 1630, is still there. It is said to be the “oldest living fruit tree in North America,” although I’m pretty sure the word “exotic” should be in there too, and I do wonder about Mexico.
Nibbles: Wild cassava, Oilseed rape breeding, Byelorussian food
- Wild cassava relatives could be used for nutritional enhancement.
- “…quality improvement did not significantly reduce the genetic diversity of European and Chinese Brassica rapa cultivars.”
- Byelorussian agrobiodiversity bazaar.
The latest on the results of the Egyptian pig cull
The BBC has done a follow-up to the story of the Egyptian pig cull. It’s been a disaster for many. Here’s one of the rubbish collectors — zabaleen — who were Cairo’s pig keepers:
I sold pigs twice a year. To pay for mending the car and the school fees for our three young children. There is no way I can replace that income.
There have also been health consequences, especially for children, and some people blame a rat infestation on the accumulating garbage that used to be fed to the pigs.
The government says farmers can restock – but only if the pigs are reared in a more modern farming environment on the outskirts of the city: where pigs are kept in isolation, where they can be slaughtered in a proper way and the meat cooled ready for market.
But the zabaleen say they cannot afford that.
Nibbles: Urban bees, Borlaug, Cotton, Income, Mammals, Human disease, Caribou, Chestnut, IRRI
- There are 227 bee species in New York City. Damn! But not enough known about the work they (and other pollinators) do in natural ecosystems, alas.
- Borlaug home to be National Historic Site?
- Archaeobotanist tackles Old World cotton.
- FAO suggests ways that small farmers can earn more. Various agrobiodiversity options.
- About 400 new mammal species discovered since 1993 (not 2005 as in the NY Times piece). Almost a 10% increase. Incredible. Who knew.
- But how many of them will give you nasty diseases?
- The caribou wont, I don’t think. And by the way, its recent decline is cyclical, so chill.
- Saving the American chestnut through sex. Via the new NWFP Digest.
- “The best thing IRRI can do for rice is to close down and give the seeds it has collected back to the farmers.” Yikes, easy, tiger! Via.
“It was serendipity that we had the seeds lying around”
Our title is evolutionary geneticist Arthur Weis to journalist Carl Zimmer on the topic of an experiment he and colleagues at UC Irvine carried out a few years ago where they compared those seeds — that had been “lying around” in the intervening few years in a cool, dry place — with seeds of the same species newly collected from the same sites. The result of the experiment was that…
…[t]he newer plants grew to smaller sizes, produced fewer flowers, and, most dramatically, produced those flowers eight days earlier in the spring. The changing climate had, in other words, driven the field mustard plants to evolve over just a few years.
The point of Zimmer’s article is that evolution can take place over short periods of time, and that because of climate change “life will undergo an evolutionary explosion.” 1 What Zimmer doesn’t say is that we have about 6.5 million similar samples of seeds in the world’s crop genebanks, and not by serendipity. Some date back decades. There would be a great research programme in comparing the genetic makeup of those samples with newer samples. Assuming that the populations are still there. And that there is enough documentation associated with the samples to find their original collecting sites.
A final thought. The assumptions behind the ecological niche modeling work which has been proliferating of late to predict changes in distributions, for example of crop wild relatives, is that the species don’t move or evolve fast enough to keep pace with climate change. They may well in fact evolve, adapt and survive, and that would certainly be a good thing. But helping them do that through in situ protection should not be an argument for downplaying the complementary importance of ex situ conservation. After all, with the kind of selection pressures likely to be involved, populations are very likely to be significantly genetically narrower in the future. Whether the species adapts or not, we’ll still need to collect seeds and store them in genebanks if we are to have available for use as much as possible of the genetic diversity that is currently — just — still in the field.