- Donwload a guide to sustainable sushi.
- It was World Mangrove Day last Sunday. Who knew.
- Poland/Belarus’s Bialowieza Primeval Forest and its bison threatened by climate change, politics.
- Endangered dormouse found crossing highway, but is it the edible sort beloved of the Romans?
- “Endangered heritage breeds have one saving grace: They’re generally tasty.” Even in cocktails.
- Radix gets to grips with Apios americana. Good luck!
- Did someone say fermentation?
- Did someone say single-issue bores?
Nibbles: Crops for the Future, Fertile Crescent, Canadian First Nation
- A common collection of publications on neglected crops.
- Crescent, maybe, but fertile, not so much.
- “The beaches now are empty of herring roe, its harvest a lost art.”
A Svalbard for animals in the making?
I had somehow missed news earlier this year of a failed (just) attempt to clone the Pyrenean ibex. That’s an extinct subspecies of the Spanish ibex, Capra pyrenaica. I was belatedly alerted to it by a piece in LiveScience about “a new project to store tiny samples of tissue from endangered animals at New York’s natural history museum.”
With room for up to 1 million specimens, the AMNH’s frozen tissue lab currently stores frozen butterflies, frog toes, whale skin and alligator hides, among many other samples, in nitrogen-cooled vats. The collection is used today for conservation research — the genetic information gives clues to the breadth of the animals’ hunting grounds and breeding behaviors. In an agreement signed this month with the National Park Service, the museum will begin storing tissue samples of endangered animals living in the nation’s parks. The first samples — blood from a Channel Islands fox — should be delivered in August, museum officials said.
Maybe they should also include the caribou, “a species historically considered so numerous — and so distant from human activity — that most assumed it was beyond human ability to affect it.” But is perhaps in trouble now. Room for 1 million specimens might not be enough.
Nibbles: Camel, Maya forestry, Ancient barley, Cattle diversity, Poisons, Agroforestry Congress, Lactase persistence
- Wild camel genetically distinct from the domesticated kind. Well I never.
- Maya tapped into their “sacred groves” to build temples, which did not end well.
- Boffins extract DNA from ancient barley in Upper Egypt, find it was 2-rowed, but derived from a 6-rowed ancestor. No word on whether it was used to make beer, but my guess is yes.
- Large Y chromosome microsatellite study of Eurasian cattle does “not support the recent hypothesis on the origin of Y1 from the local European hybridization of cattle with male aurochsen.” This could run and run.
- I like this idea: a garden of poisons.
- Agroforestry’s coming-of-age party coming up. You going? Let us know.
- Multiple explanations for lactase persistence.
Nibbles: Camel sweets, UG99, British woods, Rice, India and climate change, Soay sheep, Fish, Seed fair, Barn owls, Food maps, Earthworms
- Chocolate made from camel milk for the first time. And last?
- “Slow rusting” genes from Ethiopian wheat landraces.
- Brits (and Yanks, for that matter) look for ancient trees in woodlands becoming ever less distinctive.
- The world needs GM rice, but alas “the environment for accepting genetically modified crops is not as good as it should be.” Meanwhile, IRRI keeps hammering away at drought tolerance and resistance to other assorted stresses. It’s hard being rice.
- ICAR looks at the likely effects of climate change on crops and what can be done about it.
- Climate change making Soay sheep (and, incidentally, European fish too) not just smaller, also darker. Speaking of fish, there’s trouble in the Zambezi too, but not necessarily due to climate change. Although…
- A Greek seed bazaar.
- FAO turns to barn owls to stop Laotian rodent plague.
- US food policy destinations on Google Maps.
- Vermicomposting is good news for the Indian textile industry. Vermicomposting: I like saying that word.