Category: History

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What’s your poison?

One of the more interesting — and controversial — uses of biodiversity, both wild and agricultural, is to cause altered states of consciousness. As luck would have it, there were three things sort of on this topic which caught my eye today.

First, a short article from the New Scientist appeared in my feed reader about how the UN Environment Programme has singled out for conservation a chunk of desert in Chihuahua, northern Mexico. The importance of this area comes from the fact that it is the home of the peyote cactus, source of the hallucinogenic alkaloid mescaline, and objective of an annual pilgrimage by the Huichol people.

Then there was a EurekAlert piece about funding for an attempt to breed new varieties of the opium poppy and of cannabis that could be used to produce useful bioproducts, but not illicit drugs. This is apparently all going to take place in an ultra-secure Canadian mine shaft. Maybe they could then store the resulting seed in another famous hole in the ground?

And finally, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has a cool interactive map where you can find out about famous British brewers.

Mescaline, dope and beer. In the words of Major T.J. “King” Kong, “Shoot, a fella’ could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that agrobiodiversity.” Well, he almost said that.

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Kill and cure

There’s a great article at Common-Place about the Great American Ham. No, not Kevin Bacon. We’re talking how to cure “the thigh of a back leg of a hog, [with its] three large cross braided muscles, now designated the inside round, outside round, and sirloin tip.” It’s down to the “three s method: salt, saltpeter and smoke.” Sugar sometimes features as a fourth s. Fascinating historical stuff, and something of a (welcome) antidote to our incredibly popular mini-pig nibble.

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A history of viruses

We’re fond of reminding ourselves here that agrobiodiversity isn’t just crops and livestock and their wild relatives — it’s also pests and pathogens and weeds and pollinators and earthworms and brewer’s yeast. It’s one of our leitmotifs. Another is that agricultural and “wild” biodiversity interact. Here’s a paper that kind of brings these two leitmotifs together, into a sort of counterpoint, if I may be allowed to push the metaphor ((C.M. Malmstrom et al. (2007) Barley yellow dwarf viruses (BYDVs) preserved in herbarium specimens illuminate historical disease ecology of invasive and native grasses. Journal of Ecology (OnlineEarly Articles). doi:10.1111/j.1365-2745.2007.01307.x)).

Carolyn Malmstrom and her team at Michigan State University isolated RNA of barley and cereal yellow dwarf viruses from old herbarium specimens of Californian grasses, dating back to 1917. They used such historical samples to trace the history of these agriculturally important viruses back through time, building up a sort of family tree. The analysis suggests that the viruses were present in the Californian native flora in the 18th and 19th centuries, when invasive Eurasian annual grasses (some of them weedy crop relatives) displaced native perennial grasses. In fact, they may have facilitated this invasion by helping the exotic grasses outcompete the natives ((“Non-native invaders amplify spring aphid populations and increase BYDV infection in natives, which in turn suffer substantially reduced survivorship when infected.”)).

The team also found “potential correspondence in the timing of virus diversification events and the beginning of extensive human exchange between the Old and New Worlds.” Humans may have caused the branching of the family tree of some viruses by moving them and their hosts around the world.

Here’s Malmstrom on the significance of her work:

This work points out that the virus world does have an active, long-term role in nature, not just in agriculture… We very much need to understand how viruses can move and influence our crops. If we care about our crops, we need to care about what’s happening in nature.

So: aphids, viruses, native grasses, exotic weedy invaders, crops. Quite a fugue.