Fusarium head blight fungus genome decoded.
More on bluetongue and climate change
UC Davis vet explains how bluetongue disease is changing.
Uses for giant earthworms
A comment on the threat to the Banaue rice terraces prompted me to go Googling, and it seems the story has legs. Unlike the giant earthworms, which may or may not be an all-female species related to a worm called Polypheretima elongata. SciDev.net reports on the efforts of an Indian scientist, Ravindra Joshi, to help the villagers to get rid of the giant earthworms and the rats 1.
To tackle the earthworms, Joshi’s team taught the Ifugao a method of ‘worm farming’ that is popular with small-scale entrepreneurs in the lowlands. The Ifugao collect the worms and rear them in a mixture of soil and old newspapers. They then harvest the worms and process them into feeds used by fish farmers.
Elsewhere in the Philippines people eat worm sausages and burgers, but the Ifugao people who built Banaue have a taboo against soil dwelling creatures. There wasn’t such a taboo against eating rats, so Joshi worked with the locals to develop a community system of rice traps that uses a particularly aromatic rice planted early as a trap crop to lure the rats to their death.
There’s another rodent, though, that eats the giant earthworms. So the villagers have learned to distinguish Rattus tanezumi from Chrotomys whiteheadi, eating the former but releasing the latter to eat the giant earthworms.
Animal diseases reviewed
Thanks to Danny Hunter for pointing to two recent posts at CABI’s blog, one on bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease to you and me), the other on bluetongue disease. BSE seems to be running its course and to be more or less under control, even though many mysteries still surround it. Bluetongue, however, is altogether more menacing, because it seems to have reached Britain at least partly as a result of climate change, which has allowed the midges that spread the virus to expand their range. This could be the start of something big. I don’t believe there is any resistance associated with different breeds of cattle, but I could be wrong.
Conserving crop wild relatives
A paper just out in Biological Conservation discusses crop wild relatives (CWR) in the UK. 2 The authors include some of the same British boffins who wrote a global survey of CWR conservation. The paper describes how to develop a comprehensive national plan for the conservation of CWR, using the UK as an example. Unfortunately, it is behind a paywall, but I’ll summarize the main points.
First, of course, you need to know what you’re dealing with. A UK national inventory of CWR was developed as part of the EU-funded PGR Forum project. It contains 15 families, 413 genera, 1955 species (44 endemic) — that’s 65% of the native flora. So then you have to prioritize. For example, 13 of the UK’s CWR species are considered threatened according to IUCN criteria and one is apparently extinct in the wild ( the grass Bromus interruptus). The authors ran an iterative algorithm on the distribution data for about 250 CWR species 3 to identify the smallest number of areas which would contain the largest number of species. Seventeen 10×10 km grid squares were selected within which could be found two thirds of the priority CWR species.
To what extent are these “hotspots” already protected? Interestingly, none of them “did not overlap with existing UK protected areas.” What’s now needed is to confirm the presence of the target species in the protected areas and come up with management plans specifically aimed at the CWR.