Plants don’t get enough respect

That’s not our view. Well, it is, but you know what I mean. It’s the view of über-blogger P.Z. Myers, the man with a cracker in his mouth and a price on his head. PZ stepped manfully into the breach when the scheduled compiler of the Tangled Bank Carnival of the Vanities was diagnosed with a serious illness ((Best of luck, Jeff.)) and so Tangled Bank 110 is back where it started, at PZ Myers’ Pharyngula.

Luigi’s rumination on La Zucca was apparently the “sole entry from the vast field of botany” and it wasn’t that long a post either.

There’s some stuff over there about birds and other animals that eat plants.

And if you think plants get short shrift, consider agriculture. sometimes we do feel we are wandering in the wilderness, but at least this Tangled Bank seems to have smoked out some quasi-useful comments on Luigi’s missing potato dish. So, welcome, and thanks again PZ.

An agricultural economist answers

You may remember that I pointed to Freakonomics Blog a few days ago because they had a nice little feature where people could ask an illustrious agricultural economist pointed questions. Well the answers are now up. Here’s my favourite one:

Q: Are there any good arguments that support farm subsidies?

A: No.

Actually that’s a bit unfair, there is more to the answer than that. Check it out. And let us know if you want something similar here on agrobiodiversity.

Useful plants of tropical Africa databased

PROTA is an international, not-for-profit foundation. It intends to synthesize the dispersed information on the approximately 7,000 useful plants of Tropical Africa and to provide wide access to the information through Webdatabases, Books, CD-Rom’s and Special Products.

I knew that, but hadn’t checked out progress on the centrepiece database in a while. Until today. I couldn’t get the “word wheel” thing to work, whatever that is, but the search function seems to work fine and the actual content is great. Now, why not link to GBIF?