- Tragic. But was cassava really to blame?
- Breeding the wind out of cows.
- “I just got back from Italy, where there are now 250 breweries. A few years ago, there were only 20 or 30. They’re on the verge of an explosion of beer culture…” Really? I do hope so.
Linking up livestock databases
The object of most biodiversity web sites in animal agriculture is the ‘breed’ or population, and not the individual animal within (an exception are some breed societies which present individual animal data on some of their most important breeding animals). With the linkage of CryoWEB and FABISnet, for the first time, production type databases with individual animal records are directly linked to the global breeds database network, thereby creating breeds statistics in FABISnet which are directly derived from production data. Perhaps the procedure can also be a model for other data in the biodiversity databases.
That’s from a piece on animal genetic resources databases by Elldert Groeneveld of the Institute of Farm Animal Genetic in Germany, published as article of the month in the Globaldiv Newsletter. It’s entitled Databases and Biodiversity: From Single Databases to a Global Network and you can find it on page 8. I suppose there is a similar problem in crops, where you might have evaluation data for various different lines selected from a single population. But somehow you don’t hear so much about it. Is it that the links between conservationists and users (that is, those doing the evaluation) are better developed in the livestock field?
Nibbles: Vegetable seeds, Colorado potato beetle, Castanea, Pigs, Condiments, Porpoise, Biofuels, Mouflon, Blackwood
- European are growing more vegetables. But how much of that is heirlooms?
- Canadian boffins grow wild potatoes for the leaves.
- Chinese wasp going to roast Italy’s chestnuts.
- The genetics of swine geography. Or is it the geography of swine genetics?
- The diversity of sauces.
- Cooking Flipper.
- Genetically engineered brewer’s yeast + cellulose-eating bacterium + biomass = methyl halides.
- Wild sheep runs wild in Cyrpus.
- “It can be planted in farms because it does not compete for resources with corn, coffee or bananas and acts as a nitrogen-fixing agent in the soil. The mpingo is also considered a good luck tree by the Chagga people who live on the slopes of the Mt. Kilimanjaro.”
Nibbles: Indian livestock, Breadfruit, Grants, CIAT, Coffee
- “Estimates indicate that 50% of the indigenous goat, 30% of sheep, 20% of cattle and almost all poultry breeds are threatened.”
- Fiji studies breadfruit varieties.
- Research grants for young scientists in developing countries. ABD is in. Via .
- CIAT has a blog, and it’s pretty.
- Small coffee farmers honoured in Peru. For conservation!
Cats and dogs and maize: A Darwinian view
The Rough Guide To Evolution lists the entire content (with linky goodness) of the current early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences of the USA. As Mark Pallen notes, it “is chock full of articles on evolution from a recent colloquium”. Two that we’ll be reading over the weekend are:
- From wild animals to domestic pets, an evolutionary view of domestication, and
- Tracking footprints of maize domestication and evidence for a massive selective sweep on chromosome 10.
Who says we don’t know how to have fun round here?