You may remember a longish post sometime back describing a piece of software called LUCID which can be used to prepare multi-access keys for the identification of species or varieties. Well, I’ve recently come across a slightly different use to which LUCID can be put. Normally you would enter into the software what each species looks like — the length of their petioles, colour of their flowers, shape of their pistils. What if, instead, you put in how each species performs under different conditions — of altitude, precipitation, soil pH, salinity, management etc.? What you would end up with is a tool for selecting which species would do well under specified combinations of conditions, or for specific purposes. And that’s exactly what a consortium of organizations interested in forages for the tropics has done. There are also factsheets on each of several dozen tropical forage grasses and legumes, including photographs and maps of suitable geographic areas.
Cows get relief
Boffins to breed belch-less fodder. Al Gore unavailable for comment.
Pig tusk money
Livestock body parts = money in Vanuatu.
Gone fishing
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…