So the Missouri Botanical Garden herbarium reached its 6 millionth specimen. 1 2 Pretty impressive, as these things go, and as good an opportunity as any to sing the praises of natural history collections. The specimen in question is Anthurium centimillesimum, a new aroid species from Ecuador. I wonder if it will ever join the ranks of the world’s 35,000 cultivated plants.
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.
Underutilized species given undivided attention
It seems that two key organizations dealing with underutilized crops — the Sri Lanka-based International Centre for Under-utilised Crops (ICUC) and the Global Facilitation Unit for Underutilised Species (GFU), based at Bioversity International in Rome — are merging and establishing a new entity. It will be called Crops for the Future (CroFu) and will be based in Malaysia. Best wishes for the future to CroFu.
Nibbles: Poland, Aguaje, Climate Change, Seed Law, Apples, Seed Secretariat
- Growing a new agriculture in Poland.
- After açai? Aguaje!
- Hector Mongi is heading to a CTA seminar on Implications of Climate Change for Sustainable Agriculture. Hope he blogs it.
- “Anti-farmer” seed law in Pakistan.
- “Look,” he says. “This was an orchard.”
- Wonderful photos of autumn; agricultural biodiversity prominent.
- Afghanistan’s National Seed Secretariat opens, re-opens hornets’ nest?