- How can you do Eggplant’s Rich History and not wonder why this generally huge, generally purple thing is called an eggplant?
- Domestication of the Gray Ghost Organ Pipe cactus; exceedingly complex. Oh and there’s a cool photo here.
- How berries protect the brain from age-related malfunction. Are you listening, Dmitry?
- Protect medicinal plants, says letter-writer.
- The world doesn’t understand drought tolerance, says another letter-writer.
- Agrobiodiversity in Mesoamerica conference.
- Chaffey’s Plant Cuttings from Annals of Botany. Must-read stuff.
- A wild relative contributes trait for early morning flowering to rice, allowing it to escape sterility induced by high temperatures.
- The Cornelian Cherry and the Baobab explained.
- Voice of America devotes Special English report to Pavlovsk. If that ain’t viral, what is?
- Genebanks on a roll in China. In Australia, not so much.
- Dam dataset online. Let the mashups proliferate.
Untangling an agave story
Odd things happen when you’re utterly immersed (at least some of the time) in agricultural biodiversity, and so are your friends. You see a harmless enough story on a trade magazine’s website, which says that a century plant — which it specifies is Agave abrupta — at Royal Botanic Gardens Kew is flowering. Kew Director Stephen Hopper is quoted as saying that, being as how this is the International Year of Biodiversity, the “specimen is a great example of the beauty, joy and economic use that we get from the plants we share our planet with.”
Hort Week manages to garble Kew’s Press Release and blog post to tell us all about “the species”.
Native to tropical America, the century plant was introduced to Padua Botanical Garden in Italy – the world’s first botanical garden – in 1561 and is now widely cultivated throughout the world.
The species is now naturalised in the driest parts of southern Europe, and is often used for fencing in Mexico and Central America, as it is impermeable to both cattle and people once established due to its size and needle-sharp spines.
It was introduced to Spain in the 1940s for the production of sisal for rope, but subsided due to the arrival of nylon and synthetic ropes. In addition, the fermented juice of the agave plant is used to make the drink mescal.
So you send a link to a couple of chums who you know are interested in this sort of thing, reject the idea of writing about it on the blog, and think no more about it. Back comes one chum. “Agave abrupta doesn’t ring a bell for me.”
There are, it must be said, a large number of Agaves, maybe “293 recognized species.” Kew would know though, right?
Maybe not. I checked a couple of taxonomy databases, and A. abrupta didn’t ring any bells for them either. One site suggested that it was a synonym of Agave americana ssp. americana var. expansa (Jacobi) Gentry, which fits with the fact that Howard Scott Gentry wrote a famous monograph on Agaves, published in 1982; he presumably reclassified A. abrupta Trel. 1901, but Kew has chosen not to follow Gentry. I suppose that’s their prerogative. As chum 2 observed, “they’re a complex lot, and difficult to keep herbarium specimens”.
On to uses. Kew says it was used as fencing and grown for sisal. Not, then, “mescal”. Nor tequila, which was where my ignorant thoughts went. Ah, but … Chum 1 claims that the meteoric rise in tequila’s popularity has resulted in “some Agave-starved tequila companies … resorting to buying off old henequen plantations in the Yucatan peninsula to use the fiber-producing plants in their distilleries in order to keep the ‘100% Agave’ label (and the associated premium price) on their product.” Henequen is A. fourcroydes, grown for its fibre, which is almost identical to sisal. Presumably that breaks the law about “true” tequila, but as Chum 2 pointed out, the Geographical Indication that protects tequila is neither socioeconomically nor ecologically sustainable.
That said, aside from possibly adulterating tequila, henequen is also used to make its very own licor de henequen. Whether this is a traditional drink, as some claim, or a recent invention in response to henequen’s eclipse by nylon and other synthetic rope fibres, I’m unwilling to say.
All that information flowed from one rather silly article and press release, if you know the right people. Which we do.
Flickr photo of henequen fibre by Just Another Shot, used under a Creative Commons License.
And please note, the astounding Euro-centricity of the claim that Padua was “the world’s first botanic garden” has not passed unnoticed. Maybe another time.
Long-term experiments and crop wild relatives
So I was idly reflecting on the recent paper by Magurran et al. in Trends in Ecology & Evolution on long-term datasets for biodiversity monitoring which I Nibbled earlier, then I ran across another paper, and that really got me thinking. When we talk about protected areas, we usually mean national parks and reserves and the like (or at least that’s what I usually mean), but I wonder whether that misses something. I’m thinking here of long-term exclusion experiments, ((Including “accidental” experiments, perhaps.)) such as the one in Kenya that second paper talked about, for example. There must be other such things around the world: long-term experimental areas, rather than legally recognized reserves, but still (somewhat) protected, and with time series of vegetation and floristic data to boot. Is this something that has been looked at, either regionally or on a global scale, in the context of crop wild relatives conservation? Will investigate.
Nibbles: Protected area management, Yam domestication, Ottoman cooking, Measuring rice drought tolerance, Proteomics, Lupinus, Areca, Jethobudho, Nutrition megaprogramme, Soil bacteria
- Concentrating management practices on conserving a particular plant species may have bad consequences for other bits of biodiversity. Lessons for crops wild relatives?
- Benin’s farmers ennoble wild yams.
- A Lebanese lunch is an educational experience. Right.
- Paddyomics video. Nothing to do with the Irish. It’s about how IRRI is automating, er, everything about its phenotyping.
- Tamarind’s environmental niche is, in fact, er, niches?
- Different wheat genomes generate distinct protein profiles.
- Phylogenetic relationships of a new Mediterranean lupin.
- Betel nut chewing endangers coral. Kinda. Traditional and all that, but an unpleasant habit nonetheless.
- Our friend Bhuwon and others tell the story of the participatory improvement and formal release of Jethobudho rice landrace in Nepal.
- CGIAR elicits comment on the Agriculture for Improved Nutrition and Health megaprogramme. Until August 1.
- Bacterial diversity boosts maize yields.
Looking for leimotifs in the early history of wheat and rice
There are two papers out just now which review in detail archaeobotanical and genetic data to elucidate the early history of crops. Dorian Fuller and numerous co-authors do it for Asian rice (Oryza sativa) ((Fuller, D., Sato, Y., Castillo, C., Qin, L., Weisskopf, A., Kingwell-Banham, E., Song, J., Ahn, S., & Etten, J. (2010). Consilience of genetics and archaeobotany in the entangled history of rice Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, 2 (2), 115-131 DOI: 10.1007/s12520-010-0035-y)), Hakan Özkan and others do it for emmer wheat (Triticum dicoccoides). ((Özkan, H., Willcox, G., Graner, A., Salamini, F., & Kilian, B. (2010). Geographic distribution and domestication of wild emmer wheat (Triticum dicoccoides) Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution DOI: 10.1007/s10722-010-9581-5)) And Fuller actually also comments on the emmer paper on his blog. ((Which is called The Archaeobotanist and is well worth following. In fact, I cannot resist linking to something else that Fuller has pointed to recently, a fascinating Science profile of Dr Dolores Piperno, who has pretty much single-handedly “revolutionized views of early agriculture in the Americas” through her use of microscopic remains of phytoliths and starch grains.))
In such situations, my first instinct is to look for commonalities, rather than get lost in the specifics. ((Is this evidence of some personality disorder? No, don’t tell me.)) Certainly, the occasional difficulty of reconciling archaeobotanical and genetic data comes up in both reviews. Actually there’s a third paper out which looks at that too, suggesting that “genetic and archaeological studies represent complementary perspectives on domestication, each highlighting a different facet of this complex problem.” ((Gross, B., & Olsen, K. (2010). Genetic perspectives on crop domestication Trends in Plant Science DOI: 10.1016/j.tplants.2010.05.008)) Complexity is a word that recurs a lot, in fact. Here’s Fuller: “Asian rices have had a complex history.” And here’s Özkan: “The spread of domestic emmer would have been extremely complex…”
But the really interesting question to me is whether there are similarities within the complexity. As Tolstoy might have asked, are the early histories of different crops complex each after their own fashion? Fuller summarizes the emmer story as one of “multiple starts of cultivation, gradual domestication, but the possible predominance of one domesticated line at the end of the process,” and there certainly are some echoes of that in rice. But I want to focus on one little series of events or processes that occurs in both rice and emmer, in each case with its peculiarities, but nevertheless comparable.
Cultivated emmer (Triticum dicoccon) was developed from its wild progenitor (T. dicoccoides) in south-eastern Turkey. ((Perhaps in one of that country’s Important Plant Areas?)) It then spread to the north-east, where it came into contact with wild Aegilops tauschii. Somewhere in the corridor between Armenia and the Caspian Sea, hybridization between the two gave rise to hexaploid bread wheat from tetraploid emmer. Well, something kind of similar also happened in rice. Fuller’s paper has a nice diagram summarizing the relationship between japonica and indica rices. Simplifying wildly, japonica arose in China from wild Oryza rufipogon. It was then taken to India, where it came into contact with cultivated proto-indica rices and also the wild species from which that was derived (O. nirvana). Hybridization and back-crossing eventually led to fully indica varieties. A crop develops in one place, then moves somewhere else, where it interacts with something, leading to the development of a somewhat different crop.
Now, I’m not sure whether the differences in this process, in particular the fact that polyploidy was involved in the emmer case but not rice, are more important than the similarities. But I wonder if the domestication and spread of crops can perhaps be broken down into a series of similar tropes, or maybe leitmotifs, I’m not sure what one would call them. At the very least it might help people like me make sense of — and try to remember, and keep straight — the complexities.