Rwandan farmers diversify into fish. Again.
Long-crowing chicken origins
You may have noticed a neat new feature on the blog. There’s a “Show on map” link after some of the latest postings which whisks you off to a pointer to the geographic location of the story. Jeremy will say a bit more about how he did it and why later on. I bring it up now because it was the reason why I stumbled on an interesting paper.
You remember that video of the long-crowing chicken from a few days back? Well, how do you geo-tag that? Where does the weird creature come from? The caption on MySapceTV says that it is a pure-bred Totenko cockerel. If you google that, one of the things you get pointed to is a DNA study that suggests that this and a couple of other long-crowers were bred on Okinawa from fighting cocks from southern China or Indochina. Want to see exactly where Okinawa is? Click below…
MegaFishes Project
National Geographic has project to save world’s biggest freshwater fishes.
How the cat became a pet
A DNA study of almost a thousand wild and domestic cats from around the world is helping to unravel the evolutionary history of this most numerous of household pets. There are five wild subspecies of nearest-relatives, including one in the Near East, from which all domesticated cats are derived, though there has been subsequent hybridization of house cats with local wild populations here and there. Modern cat breeds can trace their origin to at least five mothers domesticated in the Fertile Crescent around the same time as agriculture started, over 9,000 years ago. And, coincidentally, there’s news also today of archaeological evidence from nearby Cyprus backing up that date.
Wake-up call
Some diversity serves no purpose other than to amuse one species: our own. I had heard of long-crowing roosters before, but never seen or heard one. There are long-tailed breeds too. (see No. 4 at this page.)
Hat tip: Paul Bordoni.