- Beyond the binary: Queer inclusion and invisible labour in Samoa’s fisheries value chains. Fisheries in Samoa depend on significant but largely unrecognized labour by LGBTQ+ people, particularly fa’afafine and fa’afatama, whose contributions are overlooked by policies based on rigid gender categories.
- Genetic and morphological diversity of indigenous chicken of Kenya: A Review. Kenya’s indigenous chickens are adapted to diverse environments, resilient to disease, and important for rural livelihoods.
- Uncovering the lives of rock doves (Columba livia) in Late Bronze Age Hala Sultan Tekke, Cyprus. Rock doves lived alongside people in a major Late Bronze Age port city, revealing a more complex relationship than simple domestication in which doves exploited urban environments while providing food and other resources.
- Farmed Escapees Threaten MHC Diversity in Wild Atlantic Salmon. Escaped farmed Atlantic salmon can erode the diversity of major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes in wild populations through interbreeding, which could reduce the long-term resilience and adaptability of wild salmon.
- Creation of intermuscular bone-free genetic mutants in grass carp and multiomics reveals molecular regulatory basis. Genome editing was used to produce grass carp lacking the numerous fine intermuscular bones that reduce consumer appeal, opening new possibilities for breeding more marketable fish while deepening understanding of skeletal biology.
Nibbles: Fit for Biodiversity, Food value chains, FAO, SeedTracker, Morocco genetic erosion, Pastoralists, Cannabis seedbanks
- A conference on biodiversity in agri-food systems. Including agrobiodiversity?
- A photo essay about food value chains in India. Including agrobiodiversity?
- A few examples of FAO’s work on how agriculture sustains biodiversity. Including agrobiodiversity.
- An app to track seeds. And therefore agrobiodiversity.
- A warning that 75% of the agrobiodiversity of Morocco’s wheat and barley has been lost in the past 50 years. Ah, so that 75% number is true of something after all. Maybe they could use SeedTracker.
- A reminder that pastoralists guard biodiversity. Including agrobiodiversity.
- A Genesys for weed. Well, I guess it’s agrobiodiversity.
Brainfood: Indigenous edition
- Rapid adaptive increase of amylase gene copy number in Indigenous Andeans. Indigenous Andean populations evolved exceptionally high copy numbers of the AMY1 salivary amylase gene, likely linked to long-term adaptation to starch-rich diets associated with potato domestication roughly 10,000 years ago.
- Horse genetics, archaeology, and the beginning of riding. Horse domestication was not a sudden genetic event beginning around 2200–2100 BCE, but a long and regionally varied process in which Indigenous Eurasian pastoralists progressively managed, rode, milked and selectively bred multiple horse lineages over many centuries, transforming mobility and social organization well before the rise of the dominant modern domestic horse lineage.
- Bridging biodiversity and food systems: A nationwide synthesis of non-conventional food plants (PANCs) in Brazil. Brazil’s non-conventional food plants (PANCs) and associated Indigenous and traditional knowledge could help build more diverse, climate-resilient and socially inclusive food systems while strengthening biodiversity conservation, rural livelihoods and public food programs.
- Indigenous Wisdom for a Changing World: Bridging Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Biodiversity Conservation. Sacred groves and other community-managed landscapes in central Ethiopia conserve high levels of biodiversity through Indigenous institutions, ritual practices and traditional ecological knowledge, suggesting that effective conservation depends on treating cultural stewardship systems as integral to ecological resilience rather than as secondary to scientific management.
- When Knowledge Isn’t Free: Legal and Ethical Imperatives of Protecting Indigenous Intellectual Property. There’s a persistent mismatch between Western intellectual-property regimes and Indigenous concepts of collective ownership, biocultural heritage and intergenerational custodianship of knowledge, and that’s unfair.
- Crediting and citing Indigenous Knowledges within research. Biodiversity conservation becomes more effective when Indigenous scientists and communities participate as equal partners rather than merely as local stakeholders or informants.
Nibbles: Pearl millet redux, Garden plants, Armenian pics, Seeds galore, Heavenly Book, Pastoralism threats
- Pearl millet is getting the hybrid treatment. And, loving it.
- Want to know what to grow in your garden? Yes, even pearl millet.
- Nice pics of Armenian landscapes, food and foodways. No pearl millet in sight.
- The latest monthly newsletter from The Botanist in the Kitchen does seeds. Pearl millet unavailable for comment.
- China is genotyping and phenotyping (almost) everything. Pearl millet feeling left out.
- If pearl millet fails, there is always pastoralism. No, wait…
Brainfood: Silk Road, Wheat domestication, Peanut domestication, Olive wild relatives, Pearl millet movement, Maori horticulture, Wild meat, Fermentation
- Domesticated: How Cultivated Species Altered Ancient Silk Road Societies. Different stages of adopting and intensifying the use of domesticates (livestock, horses, and later crops) reshaped economies, mobility, and social organization in north-central Asia, ultimately enabling the emergence of the Silk Road. So domesticated species were as active drivers of Eurasian historical development as of prehistory.
- Ancient grains illuminate the mosaic origin of domesticated wheat. Domesticated wheat arose through repeated hybridizations between distinct wild populations carrying complementary non-shattering spike mutations, followed by ongoing gene flow and regional adaptation, making domestication a prolonged and interconnected process. Long before the result got to the Silk Road.
- A single hybrid origin of cultivated peanut. Domestication of the peanut seems to have been easier than that of wheat.
- A synthetic eco-evolutionary proposal for the conservation of wild relatives of the olive tree. If we ever have to re-domesticate the olive, we should make sure these 53 wild populations are conserved.
- Westward expansion of pearl millet agriculture into the Lac de Guiers basin, Senegal, by c. AD 200. I wonder what the Sahelian equivalent of the Silk Road was.
- Horticultural intensification and plant-based diets of 18th century CE Waikato Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand. At least some Maori ate predominantly sweet potato and taro during the Traditional Period. Which of course were brought to Aotearoa via the ara moana, which, stretching a point, is the South Pacific equivalent of the Silk Road.
- Increase in wild animal consumption across Central Africa. Yeah, but who needs domesticated species anyway.
- Fermentation as food pedagogy: insights into how teaching fermentation facilitates engagement with the food system. Are fermentation microbes domesticated?