- How should journalists report biodiversity loss?
- Ireland maps its threatened species, including a crop wild relative or two.
- Eat like a nomad.
- Why agriculture was such a bad idea.
- “The heightened voyaging from A.D. 1000 to 1450 in eastern Polynesia was likely prompted by ciguatera fish poisoning.”
- Is Floyd Zaiger the most prolific fruit breeder in the world? Read about his “designer fruits.”
- “It is truly the apricots that have kept me interested and focused at this job for the past 22 years.”
- Jordan’s Bedouins struggling to cope.
- Donkeys running for their lives in Ghana.
- Chile’s winemakers move south.
- The continuing success story that is Cuban urban agriculture.
Photos of livestock and people published
Coincidentally, I also heard about another lot of agrobiodiversity photos today. Ellen Geerlings posted an announcement on ELDev about the publication of her book “People and livestock.”
The book contains photos taken over a period of 16 years. It includes 76 pages of photos of livestock keeping in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Cameroon, Egypt, Mexico, India and Wales and more.
You can see the first 15 pages on the publisher’s website. And National Geographic has more photos. Well worth a look.
Nibbles: Pathology, Aquaculture
- Local plant clinics are a hit in Uganda.
- African catfish is a hit in Cuba, kinda.
Bedbugs redux
Caveman Forecaster is a blog about “the art and science of time series analysis and forecasting.” There was a post about a month ago about bedbugs that really piqued my interest. It seems that bedbugs (Cimex lectularius) were virtually eradicated in the US fifty years ago, but are making a comeback. That has even led to the organization of a National Bedbug Summit, which took place last month. The post was mostly about using Google search data to monitor and predict the seasonal outbreaks and longer-term trends. But it got me looking into the reasons for the resurgence, and wikipedia has a reasonable summary of that, with plenty of references. Basically, genetic diversity studies suggest that there was never complete eradication, but that the pesticide-resistant populations moved to alternate hosts, “have slowly been propagating in poultry facilities, and have made their way back to human hosts via the poultry workers.” So here’s another example of a human pest which can also hang out with agrobiodiversity, and jump back and forth.
Nibbles: Savannah
- “Experimental botany, murderous pirates, secret tunnels and an all you can eat buffet; there are very few places where these things can all be found together.”