Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
You may remember a post a few days ago in which Jeremy announced that Dr José F. M. Valls has won this year’s Meyer Medal. Well, José was briefly at SIRGEALC last week before going off to get his medal, and he gave a great talk on his life’s work on wild peanut conservation and use. Unfortunately, this terrible picture is the best I could do to capture the occasion. 1
Beetles in the Bush hosts the latest edition of Berry go Round, the blog carnival dedicated to plants, and fungi, and things that eat plants and fungi. We found some good stuff there.
Our friend Andy Jarvis and co-workers recently published a paper in the Journal for Nature Conservation entitled “Assessment of threats to ecosystems in South America.” Very interesting in its own right, but check out the map below. Andy has very kindly superimposed for us the location of peanut and potato wild relatives on the ecosystem threat map from the paper. A good way to prioritize conservation? You saw it here first.
We’ve been a bit forgetful lately, not submitting items to Scientia Pro Publica, one of the most popular science blog carnivals around. But that doesn’t mean we’ve ignored the latest edition, at Genetic Inference. There’s a bunch of stuff there on climate change, and a link to a long post on David Roubik’s 17-year quest to understand the impact of African Killer Bees.
We nibbled Science Daily’s take on the original scientific paper, but on an amazingly busy day. So it is good to see Greg Laden take a somewhat longer view. To the press release, which he thoughtfully copies, Laden adds the observation that “the so called “African Killer Bees” are nothing other than the wild version of the honey bee,” and points out that people have a hard time relating loving, gentle European honey bees to these killers out of Africa’s dark heart. The interbreeding of wild and domesticated honeybees restored some aggression to domestic stocks and in the process of “Africanizing” them also boosted their honey-gathering abilities.
Roubik’s study concluded that although there have been swings in populations of various bee species, pollination has not suffered. Local bees, sometimes outcompeted by Africanized honeybees, are finding other flowers to sustain them. Most of the local plants are still doing fine, and some that are favoured by local bee species have even spread. But Roubik also sounded a cautionary note that hinges on the insurance value of plant biodiversity.
Basically we’re seeing ‘scramble competition’ as bees replace a lost source of pollen with pollen from a related plant species that has a similar flowering peak–in less-biodiverse, unprotected areas, bees would not have the same range of options to turn to.
That’s crucial. Roubik studied bees in “Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve — a vast area of mature tropical rainforest in Quintana Roo state on the Mexican Yucatan”. With fewer flower species among which to choose, local bees might not do so well. On the other hand, if the flower species aren’t there, they won’t suffer from the loss of local bees.