Tangled Bank 113

Just a week after 112, 113 appears. The fortnightly Tangled Bank schedule, in other words, is over its little hiccup and is back on track at En Tequila Es Verdad. Which reminds me, I wish I could get our resident peanut expert to explore his other favourite plant, agave, and give the straight dope on all those fine tequilas he’s experienced. But I digress. Which is what Dana does too in her post. All over the shop. In time and space. Visiting some parallel universe, she aims to persuade one C. Darwin to publish his book, where the less than thunderous reception of his paper at the Linnean Society seems to have dimmed his ardour. Perhaps in that universe Mr Darwin actually bothered to trek up to London for the evening and bored the Burlington Berties rigid himself. Anyway, Dana sets him straight, I think, with a massive round-up of the many, many fields of endeavour that depend ultimately on him publishing that blessed book.

The best bit, natch, is that our own humble contribution elicits exactly the correct response from the parallel Mr D. and gives Dana the opportunity to expound on the Tao of Science.

We’re chuffed. But there’s also lots of other good stuff there. I passed a few very pleasant minutes reading about mumps in Vancouver (maybe not your cup of tea) and Sterile Insect Release, and I have an agricultural question related to the latter: aside from screwworm and medfly, has it been used successfully on other agricultural insect pests?

Go. Read. Comment.

Another blog carnival for your delectation

Berry Go Round No. 8 is up at Not Exactly Rocket Science. This is “the carnival that celebrates the blogosphere’s coverage of all things botanical” and, very gratifyingly, there’s some faintly agricultural stuff there. Some of it we had already noted here, but one we hadn’t. Midoria has an introduction to Quercus serrata, konara in Japanese, an oak that is used as a substrate for shiitake mushrooms. Yum.

Breadfruit catalogue online

From Diane Ragone, director of the Breadfruit Institute at the National Tropical Botanical Garden in Hawaii.

A catalogue of the breadfruit germplasm collection at the National Tropical Botanical Garden is now online as a searchable database on the Breadfruit Institute webpages. Varieties come to life through stunning photographs (courtesy of Jim Wiseman, DigitalMedia Hawaii/Pacific) that interactively present the visual gestalt of each tree, so necessary for accurate identification.

The database combines variety information acquired during field work in the islands of origin as well as descriptors, weights, and measurements of fruits, leaves, seeds, and male flowers, collected during a decade of research on the breadfruit trees at Kahanu Garden. Data and photographs are now available for close to 80 varieties. The entire collection of more than 100 varieties and three species will become available as photographs and data are completed.

Varieties from the Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Hawaii, Kiribati, Mariana Islands, Palau, Samoa, Seychelles, Solomon Islands, Tonga, and Vanuatu are currently represented in the database.

The database search page allows the user to find varieties by searching on scientific name (species), variety name, geographic origin, distribution, fruit weight, shape, or skin texture, seed number, and find those that do well in coastal, sandy soils or atolls. There is also a search option for varieties that will be available for distribution. Other search options include 20 selected varieties, a Pacific map showing where varieties were collected, and a list of variety names and synonyms.

Training Opportunity

Via the RMAP blog, news of internships with the International Development Research Centre in Canada. The announcement at the IDRC web site gives all the details, and while some of the topics genuinely have nothing to do with agricultural biodiversity, others could definitely do with an injection of agrobiodiversity. Urban Poverty and Environment, for example, and Rural Poverty and Environment could both incorporate a diversity angle, as could Ecosystem Approaches to Human Health, I suspect.

Closing date is 12 September 2008.