- The commodisation of quinoa: the good and the bad. Ah, that pesky Law of Unintended Consequences, why can we not just repeal it?
- No doubt there are some varieties of quinoa in Chile’s new catalog of traditional seeds. Yep, there are!
- Well, such a catalog is all well and good, but “[o]ne of the greatest databases ever created is the collection of massively diverse food genomes that have domesticated us around the world. This collection represents generation after generation of open source biohacking by hobbyists, farmers and more recently proprietary biohacking by agronomists and biologists.”
- What’s the genome of a spleen sandwich, I wonder?
- And this “marine snow” food for eels sounds like biohacking to me, in spades.
- But I think this is more what they had in mind. Grand Challenges in Global Health has awarded Explorations Grants, and some of them are in agriculture.
- Wanna help ILRI with its biohacking? Well go on then.
- Digging up ancient Chinese malarial biohacking.
- Digging up Thomas Jefferson’s garden. Remember Pawnee corn? I suppose it’s all organic?
- The Mediterranean diet used to be based on the acorn. Well I’m glad we biohacked away from that.
- How barley copes with extreme day length at high latitudes. Here comes the freaky biohacking science.
- Why working out what is the world’s rainiest place is not as easy as it sounds. But now that we know, surely there’s some biohacking to be done with the crops there?
Mapping some life
Yes, indeed Map of Life is indeed live, as we Nibbled yesterday, at least for amphibians, birds, reptiles, mammals and fish. 1 MoL pulls in point data from GBIF, of course, but also polygon distribution maps from IUCN, user-uploaded maps, local inventories from various sources and the regional checklists from WWF. That’s a whole load of different sources, formats and types of data to be served up in one googly visualization. Quite impressive. Which does make one wonder why one is reduced to screengrabs to share the results, as for example below for the yak and Dall’s Sheep, two of the high altitude mammals we featured a few days back. No doubt they’ll sort that out.
And we of course also look forward to the inclusion of plants, and in particular crop wild relatives, in the near future. We can point them to some data sources for those…
Arnold Arboretum goes mobile
The Arnold Arboretum has a nifty new app which lets you access information about individual plants right on your mobile phone as you walk around the grounds. And that of course includes lots of crop wild relatives…
Feral or relict: you decide
What do you call an escaped agricultural plant? I ask because two recent items have made me wonder. Exhibit A, a Zester Daily article entitled Wild Apple Adventure. Naturally I conjured up scenes of derring do in the mountains around Almaty. How disappointing, then, to discover that Zester’s version of “wild” is actually “feral,” apple trees that have either survived the orchard around them or else are seedlings growing in the wild.
Exhibit B, a recent announcement on a mailing list of a meeting on Nordic Relict Plants. 2 I’d always thought of relicts as leftovers from massive ecological changes, like relict rain forests, or relict pockets of pre-ice age flora. But no …
This meeting is for everyone with an interest in relict plants, particularly but not exclusively, in Nordic and Arctic areas. By a relict plant we mean a plant species or variety that was, but is no longer, cultivated in a particular place, and has survived in that place after cultivation stopped. These plants are important parts of our cultural history and can sometimes contain genetic material that is different from more modern varieties of the plant.
So, what should one call these plants? Wild, to me, sounds wrong. Feral, most dictionaries I consulted agree, suggests both “not domesticated or cultivated” and “having escaped from domestication”. To which at least one helpfully adds “having escaped from domestication and become wild,” which is surely not true of erstwhile crops.
I rather like “relict”. What do you think?”
Nibbles: Warm weather, Invasives, Agrobacteria, Extension, Seed sales
- Don’t deny the warmest 12 consecutive months in the US.
- Don’t think you can eradicate invasive species by eating them.
- Don’t think the dustbowl was only about dust.
- Don’t rely on mobile phones or radios for agricultural extension.
- Don’t train farmers to select their own climate-smart seeds.