Category: Threats

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In other pomegranate news…

My recent post about the wild pomegranate of Socotra (Punica protopunica) elicited a comment from the publisher of an interesting-sounding book called Pomegranate Roads, by Dr Gregory Levin ((Regular readers will know that this fruit has been much on my mind recently.)):

For more than forty years, Dr Gregory Levin trekked across Central Asia and the Trans-Caucasus in search of rare, endangered and mysterious wild pomegranates. His home was a remote Soviet station in the mountains that separate Turkmenistan from Iran. After the break-up of the Soviet Union, he found himself exiled from his own hidden Eden and his collection of 1,117 pomegranates. Gregory Levin has written a fascinating memoir of his life with pomegranates. He illuminates the botany, the history and myths, the astonishing range of tastes, and the health benefits – from folklore to pharmaceuticals – that make it the wonder fruit of our time.

I hope to read the book soon, and review it here, but I wonder what Dr Levin would make of news from Kashmir that the local pomegranate variety — called “Dane” — is threatened by an insect pest. Is this variety conserved ex situ? If so, I hope it is found in a genebank other than the one in Jharkhand that was reported late last year to be threatened with annihilation. We haven’t heard anything on that lately, by the way, and a quick search on Google News revealed nothing. Does anyone know what’s going on?

P.S. Stefano Padulosi of Bioversity International worked with Dr Levin on the pomegranate collection. There’s a video of him talking about it on YouTube.

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Feral rape: seedbank to blame

People do worry about the “escape” of agricultural plants into the pristine wilderness that surrounds farmers fields. In England, smears of bright yellow follow the roads that harvesters and trucks have taken with their loads of mustard and rape seeds. The big question seems to be whether such escapees can persist in the wild. Now, in Ecological Modelling, an “exhaustive 4-year survey” in France looked at the origin of feral crops. Seed immigration from fields and from transport are important, but the single most important factor was found to be the seedbank; the number of seeds in the soil at any given time. ((PIVARD, S. (2008). Characterizing the presence of oilseed rape feral populations on field margins using machine learning. Ecological Modelling, 212;(1-2), 147-154. DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2007.10.012))

Many cultivated species, such as oilseed rape, sunflower, wheat or sorghum can escape from crops, and colonize field margins as feral populations. The general processes leading to the escape and persistence of cultivated species on field margins are still poorly investigated. An exhaustive 4-year survey was conducted in the centre of France at a landscape level to study the origin of feral oilseed rape populations. We present here results obtained with machine learning methods, which are increasingly popular techniques for analysing large ecological datasets. As expected, the dynamics of feral populations relies on large seed immigration from fields and transport. However, the seed bank was shown to be the keystone of their persistence rather than local recruitment.

Which is good to know. But of course the real reason to blog this post is to note the unfortunate paper title, involving as it does “feral rape,” and to include a link to one of my favourite non-agrobiodiversity sources, Language Log, which just happens to be dealing with some of the Brassicaceae and which has this to say:

[Further side note: rape [rep] as the name for these greens in English has an understandably unhappy history. Even rapeseed oil, for the cooking oil made from the seeds of the rape plant, is edgy — which is why we now have canola oil, made from a variety of rapeseed originally developed in Canada.]

Of course, feral canola carries no google-juice whatsoever.

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Wild pomegranates threatened?

Having visited when it was still very difficult to get there, and to get around once you got there, I found myself ambivalent about news of road development on Socotra. The people there could certainly do with a couple of decent roads: there were none at all when I was there in the late 1980s, and I remember a couple of really heavy walks, carrying herbarium presses to boot. The place is beautiful, and should attract tourists, but they’re going to need roads too. On the other hand, it sounds like the road system and other development may not be as well planned as it might. The only wild relative of the pomegranate is endemic to the island, but I doubt any road is going to go anywhere near the few populations left. As I remember, they were (and hopefully still are) in really inaccessible places.


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Something else for honeybees to worry about

Gene Expression posted a couple of great videos yesterday. The first shows some Asian Giant Hornets attacking a colony of European honeybees, and wreaking total havoc in minutes. The second, which I’ll reproduce below, shows what the native Japanese honeybee species can do to marauding hornets.

Amazing stuff. Incidentally, hornet larvae and pupae are eaten in Japan as a kind of sashimi. And synthetic versions of vespan secretions are being marketed as dietary supplements.