Category: Mainstream

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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.

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DIVERSEEDS puts out DVD

DIVERSEEDS is a scientific project supported fully by the European Commission´s 6th framework programme. We are “Networking on conservation and use of plant genetic resources in Europe and Asia.”

And I think we may have mentioned them before. Anyway, the latest news from the network is that they have a DVD out:

This documentary shows why biodiversity is important for agriculture and how it is conserved and used in many different locations in Europe and Asia.

The DVD costs about US$40, but you can get a discount if you order five or more. I haven’t seen it, so I can’t tell you much more about it. But the contents seems to consist of a series of fifteen or so short (average 3 minutes) films on a wide variety of agrobiodiversity conservation and use initiatives, ranging from the Austrian NGO Arche Noah, to the Thai genebank, to crop wild relatives in the Fertile Crescent, to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. I’ll try to get hold of a copy and report.

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Unripe for plucking

Zurayk is a professor of Agriculture at American University Beirut. If Mouzawak is the poet of Lebanese produce, Zurayk is its academic dean. He’s a founding member of Slow Food Beirut, the author of a book on local food culture, and an avid produce blogger. He told me that as far as he knew, “Nobody has studied this aspect of eating.”

“This aspect” being the eating of unripe fruit, which is apparently a common feature of Lebanese gastronomy. Of the various reasons advanced by the professor for this predilection, the one I like best is this:

One of the origins of the taste for unripe fruits may be that poor country kids used to steal fruit from farmers. As the fruit ripened, the farmers were on alert, so the kids had to make their moves as early as possible, long before the fruit was ready to eat.

But in fact this — and indeed the other reasons proffered too — do not seem particularly peculiar to Lebanon. So is scoffing unripe fruits common elsewhere around the world? For example, my wife, from Kenya, likes to munch hard, unripe mangoes, skin and all. And are some varieties preferred for this early plucking over others?

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Nibbles: Byssus, Crops for the Future, African horticulture, Swine, Seeds, Soils, Phosphorus