Are species like cans of soup?

A longish article in the latest Wired does what seems to this untutored eye a good job of describing the controversy about barcoding. Here’s the case against in a nutshell:

“We’re not accusing Hebert of being a creationist, just of acting like one,” says Brent Mishler.

and the case for:

The space ship lands. He steps out. He points it around. It says “friendly – unfriendly – edible – poisonous – dangerous – living – inanimate.”

There are a lot of pithy quotes like those and astute observations, such as the one that Charles Darwin was a parataxonomist. Well worth reading. We have, of course, blogged about barcoding before.

Blue bananas

Ripe bananas are of course yellow. However, under black light, the yellow bananas are bright blue, as discovered by scientists at the University of Innsbruck (Austria) and Columbia University (New York, USA). The team, headed by Bernhard Kräutler, reports in the journal Angewandte Chemie that the blue glow is connected to the degradation of chlorophyll that occurs during ripening. In this process, colorless but fluorescing breakdown products of chlorophyll are concentrated in the banana peel.

I kid you not.

Nibbles: Poland, Aguaje, Climate Change, Seed Law, Apples, Seed Secretariat