Nibbles: Coca to cacao, BXV, Chinese gardening, Forest conservation, Amazon, Soil bacteria, Prairie, Genetics, Wildcats, Milk product

When did you last see your common ancestor?

Just came across a truly amazing website called TimeTree. You give it the names of two organisms and it goes away and looks at its database of published literature on molecular clock studies and calculates the time when they diverged.

I put in Oryza sativa and Oryza meridionalis and it returned a figure of 2 million years ago (Mya) based on a recent paper. Asian rice and maize diverged about 36.25 Mya. And Homo sapiens and rice last shared a common ancestor 1,397.06 Mya, in case you were wondering. The sheep and goat diverged about 9 Mya.

So much fun one could have… I hope they put in a lot more crop wild relative data, though.

timetree_poster_final

Nibble: Coconut, Punjab, Oak barrels, Schools, Podcasts, Origins squared, Apples, Fruit book

Short-haired bumblebee goes home

The bumblebee Bombus subterraneus is extinct in the UK — it was last seen in 1988 at Dungeness nature reserve on the south Kent coast — but has been thriving in New Zealand.

The short-haired bumblebee was exported from the UK to New Zealand on the first refrigerated lamb boats in the late 19th Century to pollinate clover crops.

It has disappeared in Britain (though it apparently is still to be found on the continent) because of “[l]oss of extensive, herb-rich grasslands, especially those containing good stands of plants of the families Lamiaceae and Fabaceae, through agricultural intensification.” But now there’s a plan to set up a captive breeding programme using the expats, with a view to reintroduction, including in restored habitats.

I could not find any information on whether the decline of the short-haired bumblebee affected the pollination of any plant species, or whether the slack has been taken up by other bumblebees. But be that as it may, this is an interesting example of assisted migration, of a sort, though I don’t think climate change has been implicated in the fate of the insect in Britain. It’s also an example of going back to former colonies to look for genetic resources that are no longer to be found in the “mother” country. Like those Hopi peaches of a few days back. Uhm, I feel another post coming on…

“Global human sensor net” to be cast for biodiversity

Another attempt to harness the “wisdom of crowds” is in the offing. The eBiosphere informatics challenge is asking people around the world to send in observations of “species of interest.” That basically means mainly invasives and threatened species, for now. You can contribute photographs to Flickr or use Twitter or send an email. You don’t have to be a taxonomist: you’re asked to do your best on the identification, and they’ll bring experts in for confirmation. All the observations coming in will be integrated it with other scientific knowledge (e.g. taxonomy, maps, conservation status) on the species.

Now, if you’re a regular reader you’ll know this kind of approach is one we’ve occasionally contemplated here for crop wild relatives, landraces and other agrobiodiversity, in particular to monitor threats and erosion. So I’ll be watching closely.