In situ

April 21, 2009April 21, 2009

Little cemetery on the prairie

Also in The Economist, news that a little patch of prairie has turned up in the middle of urban St Louis, Missouri. It’s in a graveyard in the north of the city.

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There could be some crop wild relatives in this 25-acre remnant, I suppose: wild sunflowers, maybe? No word on whether there are any bison there, or whether they will be re-introduced as part of the management plan, which at the moment involves controlled burning and weeding.

April 21, 2009April 21, 2009

Nibbles: Assisted migration, Livestock and ecosystems, Agrobiodiversity tourism, Earthworms, Fish, Cucurbits

Assisted location is now managed relocation. So that’s alright then.
Transhumance is good for ecosystem. Oh, and bison too.
Geotourism in Yellowstone has a website. Can agroecotourism be far behind? I’m afraid so.
No relationship between parasite load and genetic diversity in earthworms. Alas.
“The naming of fish is a nightmare. They have more aliases than Maltese pimps.” Which is why Latin binomials were invented, duh.
Pix of Colombian cucurbit (and other) diversity.

April 20, 2009January 21, 2020

Nibbles: Pepper, Persimmons, Prosopis, Bio-banking

Is Kampot pepper the best in the world?
How the Japanese deal with persimmons.
Making the Atacama bloom. Sort of.
Bio-banking is all well and good, but will it be applicable to agrobiodiversity as well as orchids and pandas?

Wouldn’t you know it. That Kampot pepper link has rotted away. But you can still find the original thanks to The Wayback Machine.

April 7, 2009April 8, 2009

A neck bred for biting

Quick, what do you think of when I say “Transylvania”? Right. And where do vampires generally bite? Right again: on the neck. So, what are we to make of a breed of chicken called the Transylvanian Naked Neck? That is was bred to be bitten?

I think not. Naturally I was more than piqued when I saw Transylvanian Naked Neck in the subject line of a mailing list Luigi hangs out on. Ugly buggers, we both agreed, but one fancier swears that “over a dozen hens have chosen Turkey-Neck ((That’s him over there on the left.)) as their heart-throb. We think this is because he’s gentle with girlfriends and very stern with younger, oversexed roosters.” The condition is apparently the result of a single gene that “affects the arrangement of feather-growing tracts over the chicken’s body”. Indeed, it reduces the density of feathers all over the chicken, “but this is not evident until the bird is handled”. The lack of insulation means that naked neck breeds should be given extra protection against low temperatures, but that “does not detract from the utility of the bird”.

As for the original discussion, it ended with reference to a paper Prospects for conserving traditional poultry breeds of the Carpathian Basin in which the Transylvanian Naked Neck is just one of the breeds considered. There’s a bunch of stuff in there about why the breeds are valuable and how they’re being conserved, and lots of pictures. But not an answer to the fundamental question: What (if any) evolutionary value does a naked neck give its holder? Probably none. And if they suffer more in cold weather it could even be harmful, but at least some people, and not just photophobic immortals, find them attractive. Which is a good enough reason to conserve them. Luigi reckons they probably taste good too.

Photo by Flint-Hill, used with permission.

April 7, 2009April 7, 2009

More complex, more interesting, more hopeful

There is simply no way to summarize Willie Smits‘ Ted Talk. It is a masterful description of putting the complexity in an agricultural ecosystem to work to solve the problems of humans and orang-utans. Just astonishing. And so much more intellectually satisfying than a simplified system. Luscious.