- Donwload a guide to sustainable sushi.
- It was World Mangrove Day last Sunday. Who knew.
- Poland/Belarus’s Bialowieza Primeval Forest and its bison threatened by climate change, politics.
- Endangered dormouse found crossing highway, but is it the edible sort beloved of the Romans?
- “Endangered heritage breeds have one saving grace: They’re generally tasty.” Even in cocktails.
- Radix gets to grips with Apios americana. Good luck!
- Did someone say fermentation?
- Did someone say single-issue bores?
Nibbles: Crops for the Future, Fertile Crescent, Canadian First Nation
- A common collection of publications on neglected crops.
- Crescent, maybe, but fertile, not so much.
- “The beaches now are empty of herring roe, its harvest a lost art.”
Fire and crop wild relatives
As wildfires rage across much of southern Europe, causing death and destruction, it’s sometimes difficult to remember — and perhaps insensitive to mention — that this is in fact a common occurrence, even necessary for the maintenance of vegetation and biodiversity in the Mediterranean.
In the Mediterranean, as in the mediterraneoids, fire occurs where vegetation is flammable. Combustibility is not a misfortune but an adaptation: plants that burn do so because they are fire-adapted. They make fire-promoting resins and other chemicals, or they have structural adaptations, such as producing a loose, airy litter of dead leaves and twigs which dries out and burns. Their ecology involves catching fire from time to time and burning up competitors.
Still, one wonders whether this might be too much of a “good” thing, and whether we’re heading for even more with climate change. What will this mean for particular species, for example crop wild relatives? Do we know how many are fire-adapted? And do we know even for those that are so adapted whether beyond a certain frequency or intensity fire becomes a threat rather than a necessity?
A Svalbard for animals in the making?
I had somehow missed news earlier this year of a failed (just) attempt to clone the Pyrenean ibex. That’s an extinct subspecies of the Spanish ibex, Capra pyrenaica. I was belatedly alerted to it by a piece in LiveScience about “a new project to store tiny samples of tissue from endangered animals at New York’s natural history museum.”
With room for up to 1 million specimens, the AMNH’s frozen tissue lab currently stores frozen butterflies, frog toes, whale skin and alligator hides, among many other samples, in nitrogen-cooled vats. The collection is used today for conservation research — the genetic information gives clues to the breadth of the animals’ hunting grounds and breeding behaviors. In an agreement signed this month with the National Park Service, the museum will begin storing tissue samples of endangered animals living in the nation’s parks. The first samples — blood from a Channel Islands fox — should be delivered in August, museum officials said.
Maybe they should also include the caribou, “a species historically considered so numerous — and so distant from human activity — that most assumed it was beyond human ability to affect it.” But is perhaps in trouble now. Room for 1 million specimens might not be enough.
Nibbles: Camel, Maya forestry, Ancient barley, Cattle diversity, Poisons, Agroforestry Congress, Lactase persistence
- Wild camel genetically distinct from the domesticated kind. Well I never.
- Maya tapped into their “sacred groves” to build temples, which did not end well.
- Boffins extract DNA from ancient barley in Upper Egypt, find it was 2-rowed, but derived from a 6-rowed ancestor. No word on whether it was used to make beer, but my guess is yes.
- Large Y chromosome microsatellite study of Eurasian cattle does “not support the recent hypothesis on the origin of Y1 from the local European hybridization of cattle with male aurochsen.” This could run and run.
- I like this idea: a garden of poisons.
- Agroforestry’s coming-of-age party coming up. You going? Let us know.
- Multiple explanations for lactase persistence.