More on the bison‘s polluted genome.
More trouble in Naples
Brucillosis threatens mozzarella. Camorra unavailable for comment.
Getting ready for changing climates
Four papers together give an insight into what global warming promises for agriculture and agriculturalists, and how to deal with it.
Some people will tell you that global warming is something we can cope with because it won’t actually create any new climates, just shift the old ones around a bit on the the surface of the Earth. They’re wrong. ((Williams, J. W., Jackson, S. T., & Kutzbach, J. E. (2007). Projected distributions of novel and disappearing climates by 2100 AD. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104(14), 5738-5742.)) John Williams and his colleagues published an article in PNAS in the spring that shows conclusively that even the IPCC’s B1 scenario, in which modest reduction sees CO2 stabilized at 550 parts per million by 2100 AD, creates considerable risk of completely novel climates.
Canadian fish in trouble
Two separate pieces in EurekAlert in the past couple of days point to something being decidedly rotten in the state of Canadian fisheries. First, evidence that parasitic sea lice from salmon farms are spreading to nearby wild populations and may wipe them out within a few years. ((Can anyone think of a similar thing happening with a crop and its wild relatives? I can’t.)) And the historic American eel fishery is also in trouble, possibly as a result of pollution in Lake Ontario. Bad luck, or something more?
A mighty wind
My recent post about lighting strikes in a coconut genebank was picked up by the excellent Coconut Google Group and generated some interesting responses. In particular, there’s a comment from Charles Clement of the National Institute of Amazonian Research in Manaus, Brazil recounting how a high-velocity wind blast — an Amazonian wind storm — took out a large chunk of his peach palm (Bactris gasipaes) genebank. Ex situ conservation in field genebanks can be a risky business indeed. The solutions are clear: more replications within collections, cleverly distributed in space; safety duplication of the entire collection somewhere else entirely (in vitro or as seeds as appropriate); and complementary conservation in situ. But that all costs money. I would say that most food crop accessions maintained in field genebanks around the world are unique. Take coconut. The Coconut Genetic Resources Database records 1416 accessions from 28 genebanks in 23 countries. More than 600 of them are represented by a single accession.