Category: Mainstream

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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:

  1. From wild animals to domestic pets, an evolutionary view of domestication, and
  2. 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?

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Using local resources to cope with high food prices

The 34th session of the Committee on World Food Security at FAO Headquarters in October 2008 included a side event of the Standing Committee on Nutrition on the Impact of high food prices on nutrition. Pablo Eyzaguirre, Senior Scientist, Bioversity International gave a presentation entitled, Coping with high food prices: making better use of local food sources.

Then he was interviewed. Well worth watching. Thanks, Arwen and Facebook.

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Trading farming places

The BBC World Service has a new radio documentary out soon called “Farm Swap.” The conceit is you take a farmer and you plonk him or her into a completely different farming situation. An Ecuadorian organic farmer goes to Hawaii and an English potato farmer goes to Eastern Europe, judging from the brief on-air adverts, but there are no details at all on the website yet. I’m not sure if this is a one-off or a series, but I hope the latter, as it sounds like fun. Especially if subsistence farmers are included, say maize farmers in Kenya and Mexico exchanging experiences, or coconut farmers in India and Ghana. Not enough of that goes on, I think. It would also be nice to see what a particular British allotment gardener would do in another milieu.

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Bactrian camel a little less on the edge

Today’s BBC story about the unexpected birth of a Bactrian camel calf at Knowsley Safari Park in the UK reminded me how little I know about camels — although my performance on the camel question on the recent domestication quiz should have warned me. In particular, I didn’t know that there are wild Bactrian camels (Camelus bactrianus) in NW China and Mongolia, though admittedly they are down to about a thousand and endangered. It’s unclear from the Knowsley website whether the Bactrian camel birth is part of a captive breeding and re-introduction programme, but there are such programmes there for other species:

Our Pere David’s deer herd is one of the largest in the UK. These deer were classified as extinct in the wild until the mid 1980’s when a group of 39 deer went back to China as part of a project organised by the Zoological Society of London. Four of our deer formed part of this group returned to the 1,000 hectare Dafeng reserve. Now classified as critically endangered, they are protected from hunting on the reserve and the captive breeding herds such as ours at Knowsley are still very important to ensure the future of these deer.