- Climate change shrinking sheep, exploding insect populations.
- Japanese boffins sequencing tuna genome, planning super-tuna. Godzilla unavailable for comment.
- Birds eat beetles which eat seeds. So no birds, no forest. Such is the wonderful web of life.
- Buffalo cloning and its future. But what is that guy in the picture doing?
Nibbles: Earthworms, Artisanal fishing, Urban Ag, Bees, Geeks
- Giant spitting earthworms need love too.
- “…local subsidies to artisanal fisheries have also proved to contribute to the disappearance of species, as in the case of Senegal.” Oh, come on, gimme a break!
- Urban Agriculture Magazine wants your contributions on “Urban Nutrient Management“. via CFtF.
- Inbred bumblebees less successful.
- What do you geek? Interesting campaign. Well, what do you geek?
Shifting baselines and genetic erosion
A posting from the good people at Bioplan ((A mailing list on biodiversity policy issues set up and maintained by the UNDP and UNEP.)) forwarded to me by my friend Mary Taylor has just alerted me to an article over at Mongabay which would probably have eluded me as I’m on the road at the moment and not checking the feedreader very systematically. So thanks, Mary.
The post is about the “shifting baselines” theory, apparently an influential concept in conservation thinking during the past decade and more but one that alas I hadn’t come across. It proposes that…
…due to short life-spans and faulty memories, humans have a poor conception of how much of the natural world has been degraded by our actions, because our ‘baseline’ shifts with every generation, and sometimes even in an individual. In essence, what we see as pristine nature would be seen by our ancestors as hopelessly degraded, and what we see as degraded our children will view as ‘natural’.
And if people can’t register the loss, how can conservation be made important to them?
I’ll leave you to read the details of the paper at Mongabay. It’s about the perception of changes in the local bird fauna among 50 rural Yorkshire villagers, compared to the “reality” revealed by the results of regular ornithological surveys. Suffice it to say that the authors found evidence of both “generational amnesia” (when people fail to pass knowledge down from generation to generation) and “personal amnesia” (when people forget how things used to be earlier in their lives).
Is this relevant for studies of genetic erosion in crops? For plants, including crops, there is a pretty good way of documenting changes in distribution, abundance and even genetic diversity, and that’s by comparison of the present situation with herbarium specimens and genebank samples. And old seed catalogues have also been scoured for evidence of loss of varieties of fruits and vegetables in Europe and the United States. I’ve suggested myself in the past that these are all valid, complementary approaches to the estimation of genetic erosion, though they all have their shortcomings. But I can’t think off the top of my head of a study which has combined making historical comparisons with asking people about how many varieties of a particular crop they used to grow, to gauge the accuracy of their recollections, though my own recollection of the literature may be faulty too! It seems to me that farmers are more likely to accurately recollect the crop varieties they used to grow than almost anything else, including the birds that fly around them, especially if you get a group of them together to discuss the issue, but it would be an interesting thing to test.
One of the authors of the paper does mention specimens in passing in his Mongabay interview.
“If the issue is with personal amnesia, just talking to people and triggering their memories about how things were, perhaps with the aid of props like photos or old specimens, will help them to ensure that their perceptions of change are accurate,” Milner-Gulland says.
That’s as part of a discussion of the “increasingly creative” ways of “finding data regarding past conditions that may no longer be remembered” that certainly has relevance for crops.
“One author (Julian Caldecott) used school meal records from remote village schools to reconstruct wild pig migrations in Borneo. There are many authors now using historical records and archeological remains, for example in charting the changes in fish stock compositions in the North Sea over thousands of years. Other people use contemporary accounts from eye-witnesses, while still others use scientific methods like pollen analysis, which can go back far beyond written accounts.” Milner-Gulland says, adding that “the important issues involve recognizing and accounting for sources of bias in the records that you use.”
And that goes for the knowledge of farmers too.
Variegation is mimicry?
The suggestion has just been published that leaf variegation may have evolved as a defence mechanism against being eaten. Variegated leaves look like they’ve already been attacked, so they’re avoided by pests. Working on an Ecuadorian rainforest floor aroid, researchers found that
While moths infested almost 8% of green leaves, they infested 1.6% of variegated ones and just 0.4% of those painted to look like they were variegated.
Damn, another paper to read. This one is in Evolutionary Biology.
There are lots of variegated taros. Would it help to scatter a few around a field, I wonder? Or even to invest in some correction fluid…
UG99 pushes hot buttons
We’ve been keeping a weather-eye on the new strain of wheat stem rust called UG99 (it was isolated in Uganda in 1999) since very early in the history of this blog, trying to keep at least vaguely abreast of its spread and efforts to fight it. In truth, it has not been a very happy story, and if our coverage has dropped off just a bit, that may be because it can get tiresome crying wolf, no matter how much joy it might give us to be proved right.
Anyway, there’s been another outburst of interest, and while the news still isn’t good, it is fun to see how different people tell the story. First off, there’s The Hero :
Like the warrior Beowulf, subject of the Old English epic poem, [Norman] Borlaug slew a monster, saved his world and lived to a ripe old age. Like Beowulf, this old warrior of science has had to climb back into armour to battle the rise of a new monster. And once again, the world is looking to him for salvation.
Elizabeth Finkel, teller of that particular tale, certainly has a sense of drama. ((She’s also been busy lately.)) And she gives a very full account of the fight against wheat rusts in general. Across it all strides Borlaug, whom Finkel describes as “frail”. Any 95-year old is entitled to be frail, but my understanding is that he is in worse shape than that. How will the scientists and funders fare in his absence? I hope they redouble their efforts, in memoriam as it were.
Then there’s the army of soldier ants, selflessly toiling in defense of the greater good:
After several years of feverish work, scientists have identified a mere half-dozen genes that are immediately useful for protecting wheat from Ug99. Incorporating them into crops using conventional breeding techniques is a nine- to 12-year process that has only just begun. And that process will have to be repeated for each of the thousands of wheat varieties that is specially adapted to a particular region and climate.
Karen Kaplan’s story, in the LA Times, is as broad as Finkel’s, but paints a different picture. Borlaug doesn’t even get a name check. Instead, scientist after US scientist gets a brief moment to explain how complex and yet tedious the job is, how ill-prepared they were, how each depends on all the others, and how the rest of humanity depends on them. We need both stories, I think, scientist as individual hero and scientist as soldier ant, breakthrough and toil, and I hope readers get them.
Yet another narrative crops up, though. I’m not sure what to call it. Pot of Gold? Silver Lining? Unexpected Benefit?
Crop scientists have discovered a new threat to wheat crops within the United States, leading to a race to be the first to breed a resistant wheat plant, before there is trouble. Any outcome could have a big effect on related agriculture exchange traded funds (ETFs).
Setting aside all the guff about the threat being “new,” Tom Lydon, in Commodity Online, points his readers to two such exchange traded funds, noting that “fear that the fungus will cause widespread damage has caused short-term price spikes on world wheat markets”. In other words, there may be money to be made.
Why the current spate of interest? That’s hard to say. There have been meetings in Mexico and Syria, which account for the most recent spike in Google Trends. But nothing that I have noticed more recently than that. Just coincidence, perhaps. And in all the stories about how to deal with UG99, there’s one that has been conspicuous by its absence. Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Basket.
Faced with the cost of controlling disease in monoculture, two solutions emerged – to keep producing new varieties and new fungicides. But both of these solutions led to the Red Queen problem in Lewis Carroll’s ‘Through the Looking Glass’: ‘Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place’. Mixtures of appropriate varieties, however, can restrict disease and increase yield reliably, without need for fungicides.
Martin Wolfe is the name perhaps most associated with the renaissance of the idea that mixtures may be the way to cope with at least some diseases. That’s something else we’ve written about before, but as far as I know there have been no trials designed specifically to ask how wheat mixtures fare under UG99. Seems at least worth a try.