- Brazil’s flora moves online. And its agriculture into its favelas.
- Taxonomy 101.
- Wish the people who wrote this press release on “canary seed” had taken a taxonomy course. It’s Phalaris canariensis, it turns out.
- African breeders to be trained at UCDavis. Ok, but what about WACCI? What’s going on? Cornell-Davis smackdown?
- Further proof, if any were needed, of the importance of wild bees.
- Tajikistan gets its first World Heritage Site. Includes most of the Pamirs, so surely a whole lot of agricultural biodiversity, both wild and cultivated, plant and animal. Not that that was the prime mover for protection, probably.
- Incidentally, there’s a list of World Heritage Sites in danger, and it includes Rennell Island in the Solomons. The reason I bring it up is that it is famous for a local coconut variety. Hope that’s not endangered!
- Nordic Food Lab gets money to experiment with cooking insects.
- Belize TV looks to agrobiodiversity to cope with climate change.
Dog domestication controversy growls away
Awesome, by @ewencallaway RT @mammuthus: Nice summary of recent research into dog evolution http://t.co/sZ92QM5wt4 (h/t @paleogenomics)
— Ed Yong is not here (@edyong209) June 18, 2013
Scientists investigating the transformation of wolves into dogs are behaving a bit like the animals they study, as disputes roil among those using genetics to understand dog domestication.
Sound familiar? Remember the chicken story? It’s a genomic jungle out there.
LATER: A jungle that goes way back.
Nibbles: Indigenous conservation, Rice and conservation, Amazon medicines, Organic products, Sustainable oysters, Cherfas at Seed Savers, Calestous Juma, Cassava website, Israeli agritech, Fragaria breeding, Catacol whitebeam, Weather sensors, FAO Commission & Conference, Amartya Sen
- A toolkit to help indigenous communities do conservation. Should they need one.
- On the other hand… Half of Japan’s endangered species hotspots are found in satoyama, which are under pressure. Compare and contrast with rice farming in Thailand.
- Learn all about some medicinal plants of the Amazon, minus their scientific names. Not including runa tea. Lots of other opportunities out there, though.
- Maybe even including oysters.
- Jeremy no doubt to feast on the mollusc after spilling the beans on the EU seed regulations at the Seed Savers jamboree.
- Wonder what Calestous Juma thinks of those regulations.
- But I bet he (and his father, who introduced the crop to his region of Kenya) would like this cassava website to rule them all.
- The Volcani Institute‘s gifts to the world…
- …probably include new strawberries, but not this one.
- Scientists straining, failing to find plant to meaningfully compare to the giant panda.
- Bioversity does up its iButtons.
- And gets a namecheck in a paean to the FAO Commission on GRFA on its 30th birthday. All this FAO stuff is because its Conference is on this week. I don’t suppose any of it will be more important than Amartya Sen’s speech.
Nibbles: Public goods, Again, Tainted love, Strawberry Fare, Organic money, Organic unbuttered parsnips, Insect resistance, Cassava quakes, Gin and other botanics
- A well-briefed Olivier De Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, reflects on biodiversity for food and agriculture as a public good. Video. Comments closed!
- UK genebanks are wonderful, says chair of British Society of Plant Breeders.
- Getting ready for a possible ban on pig castration, the Nordic Food Lab tells us how to deal with Boar Taint.
- The things you can learn from strawberries (if you can hold off eating them).
- More money for research on organic agriculture shock plea.
- HRH Prince Charles didn’t use the R-word, but you know he might just possibly agree.
- I wonder whether he realises that the evolution of resistance by insect pests is predictable.
- If cassava is such a Rambo root, how come it quivers before a fly? Even a super-fly?
- And if that isn’t enough to keep you busy over the weekend, how about celebrating World Gin Day tomorrow, with a good book (and a glass) in hand, natch.
The state of chickens
Luigi pointed me to a nice graphic poster of the officially approved bird for all 50 of the United States. Among them, I noticed two chickens, for Delaware and Rhode Island. Rhode Island might seem obvious enough, the Rhode Island Red being almost the canonical farmyard bird.
But Delaware, not so much.
In fact Delaware was one of the biggest poultry and egg producing states in the Union. Sussex County DE, where the modern broiler industry began, still holds the record for egg and poultry sales, “with $707 million, or 1.9 percent of the total U.S. value” in 2007. That’s almost 2% of the value from 0.024% of the land. But Delaware’s state bird – the Blue Hen Chicken – is not one of the squillions (many of them carrying Rhode Island Red genes, I’ll warrant) that contribute to Sussex County’s top cock status. It isn’t even a real breed. 1
Nope; apparently Delaware’s blue hen chicken is a reminder of the Revolutionary War. Exactly how remains uncertain. Cock-fighting was common there at the time, and the Delaware Regiment may or may not have carried feisty blue gamecocks into battle, may or may not have been as feisty as a blue gamecock, and may or may not have looked like a flock of feisty blue gamecocks in their natty uniforms. There is a flock of blue hen chickens at the University of Delaware, whose mascot is the blue hen chicken, but it was created in the 1960s by H.S. Hallock du Pont, and has not been recognized as a proper breed, perhaps because it does not, in fact, breed true. Yet.