Mainstream – Page 370 – Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

November 16, 2007

Elephants free to drink in peace

We were had. Paris Hilton does not care about drunken elephants or rice wine. What does she care about?

November 16, 2007March 31, 2008

Mongolian megafish

Mongolians protect giant trout by not eating it. More for everybody else, I guess.

November 14, 2007November 13, 2007

Phytochemicals in yams

Yoruba twins due to yams?

November 13, 2007

Paris Hilton and agrobiodiversity

Paris Hilton worried about elephants getting drunk on rice beer. Pocket pig bandwagon awaits her.

November 13, 2007November 13, 2007

Garlic; cooking and diversity

How to cook garlic. Oh, and also how to identify duplicates in garlic germplasm collections by DNA fingerprinting.

1. Swapping maize for indigenous crops won’t fix African food systems designed around markets and policies that still favour a narrow range of crops.
2. Cassava is both a food security fallback and a commercial crop in Uganda, but disease, climate change and declining diversity make its conservation an increasingly urgent form of insurance. But what about the markets and policies?
3. When livestock and crops fail, Ugandan pastoralists draw on wild plants for food, underlining how much food-system resilience still sits outside the formal agricultural system, with its markets and policies.
4. The Morton Arboretum is using living collections and genetic research to help the threatened butternut tree cope with changing conditions.
5. Webinar discusses global approaches to seed provenancing and transfer zones, useful for anyone who wants to move native plants without moving the wrong genes. Butternut very interested.
6. San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance’s Frozen Zoo preserves genetic material of plant and animal species that may disappear, from DNA to cells to organisms. Butternut volunteers.
7. New Indian facility combines ex situ fish conservation with community aquaculture. Good model for much of the above?
Published on October 6, 2026