I only ask because on the same day (yesterday), the BBC published a piece entitled “Ivory Coast’s sweet cocoa success” while the Financial Times had “Ivory Coast’s cocoa industry stares hard at a bleak future.” Maybe it’s my gloomy nature, and my plummeting faith in the BBC, but I believe the FT story more.
Invasion of the (edible) killer crabs
Two stories of invasives, one with a silver lining (perhaps), the other not so much.
The Chinese mitten crab has settled in the Thames, causing trouble of varied sorts. Bad. Boffins at the Natural History Museum think it can be harvested and sold in restaurants and special food shops. Good. I look forward to seeing participants at the Henley Royal Regatta dodging around the crab farms.
And from Utah — the Beehive State, ironically — the first sightings of Africanized “killer” bees. As if bees didn’t have enough problems already, what with their colonies collapsing and everything. Never rains but it pours.
LATER: And here’s another invasive you can eat.
LATER STILL: There’s a nice roundup of Colony Collapse Disorder at CABI’s blog.
Chocolate destinations
Here’s an idea that could have legs: chocolate tourism.
LATER: Good thing Ivory Coast is not on that list.
Maize aguafiestas
From Jacob van Etten.
Uncorking a big bottle of agrobiodiversity, that is what Mexico’s first farmers did when they domesticated maize. Not only is maize enormously malleable, genetic diversity also goes everywhere through cross-pollination. That is in traditional farming systems. Modern maize improvement has been about sorting out this abundance by “freezing” it into breeding lines, to get some control over the diversity feast. But what happens when the hybrids are released into the dance room again?
An Italian study just out quantifies the gene flow from hybrids to traditional varieties. It finds different degrees of purity in the traditional varieties, but no genetic erosion. This is an interesting finding in the light of writings about “creolisation” in Mesoamerican agriculture. Creolisation, the mixing of modern and traditional varieties, is thought to lead to plants that combine their benefits. I have always wondered if the creolised varieties of Mesoamerica are not modern varieties “creolised” by selection instead of mixing with traditional varieties. Something similar to the Italian study would be needed to find this out.
The question is only one step removed from the issue of gene flow from transgenic crops to traditional varieties. Perhaps you remember the Quist and Chapela paper published in Nature in 2001 on the presence of transgenes in Mexican traditional maize, and the controversy it generated. A new study confirms the presence of transgenes in Mexico with an improved study design. Through genetic population simulations it also explains why detection of transgenes is erratic and prone to giving false negatives. The distribution of the transgenes is likely to be very skewed. A few fields will have much of them, but most will have very few. This has to be taken into account and therefore authors call for more rigorous sampling methods to detect transgene presence.
There is little discussion or speculation about the effects of transgenes on maize diversity. Will the transgenes just add to the existing diversity, like the hybrids in Italy? Will they perhaps produce some benefits, like the creolized varieties? Or will, in some Monty Python-like scenario, the big seed companies pick up the message about rigorous sampling and start to trace transgenes in Mexico in order to charge farmers for unlicensed use of their technology?
A citrus species in need of research?
It seems that citrus canker, a nasty bacterial disease, has been officially eradicated in Australia. Good news, but there is a bit of a dark lining. Along with 495,000 commercial citrus trees and 4000 residential trees, the eradication programme has included destroying a lot of trees of native Citrus glauca in the affected area. Desert Lime is well-known bush tucker, as well as a potential resource for Citrus breeding. It’s not currently considered endangered, but there’s not really all that much research about it ((That’s a bit of a casual way of introducing the fascinating Australian New Crops Web Site. Thanks to Danny for the tip.)), so that might be optimistic. There are only 8 germplasm accessions worldwide (page 29), apparently. That sounds inadequate to me. Especially given the historic proportions of the current drought, which is affecting the whole of SE Australia, including areas of C. glauca.
LATER: See also a map of the latest spate of bushfires in Australia. A threat to this and other crop wild relatives?