Fish are agricultural biodiversity too!
Sheep weed vineyards
A novel use for highly trained sheep: weeding vineyards.
Pollo y kumara
Chickens crossed to South America from Polynesia, while sweet potatoes went the other way, who knows, maybe in the same canoes. Ok, let’s unpack that a little bit. A DNA study has found links between 14th century (i.e. pre-Columbian) chicken bones buried on the coast of south central Chile and chicken bones from Polynesian archaeological sites, particularly on Tonga and American Samoa. Meanwhile, ocean circulation models suggest that, contrary to previous thinking, a ship setting off from various points along the western coast of South America could indeed have delivered sweet potato seed pods (and bottle gourds?) to Polynesia (in particular the Marquesas) in a relatively short period. These studies have been all over the news lately and are being much discussed in the blogosphere. For example, Gene Expression and John Hawks work through some of the anthropological questions.
Guinea pigs
As well as feeding Andean peoples for centuries, guinea pigs have helped win twenty-three Nobel Prizes.
Marginality and animal genetic resources
The conventional wisdom is that landraces and local breeds are better adapted to marginal conditions than modern crop varieties and livestock breeds. A paper has just been published in Agricultural Systems that tries to quantify this. The researchers defined marginal areas “as those areas where possible land uses are relatively limited because of higher altitude, shorter growing season, steeper slopes, less fertile soils or broadly speaking because of generally lower soil productivity.” They calculated a synthetic index of marginality using all kinds of environmental and socio-economic data and mapped its value throughout Europe. They also mapped the distribution of goat and sheep breeds using data from the Econogene project. Then they calculated how good the marginality index was at predicting the presence of local breeds. The result: “Increasing marginality, as measured by these indices, is positively and significantly correlated to the fact that local, traditional breeds are present.”