Wild relatives

June 6, 2009June 6, 2009

Identifying plants online

The USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service has online (and, indeed, downloadable too), interactive, polyclave identification keys for American grasses and legumes, by state. It’s unclear to me from the introduction whether these cover all grasses in each state, or only the ones which occur in wetlands. In any case, they are for testing purposes only at this stage. But the multi-entry keys are much easier and efficient to use than conventional dichotomous keys. And there are a lot of crop wild relatives included (e.g. see Phaseolus in New Mexico in the screenshot thumbnail below). I don’t think the keys have been build using LUCID (at least I don’t see any reference to it), which seems a bit like re-inventing the wheel, but anyway, better keys are always worth having.

June 5, 2009August 18, 2009

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

“No a la droga, si al caucho y al cacao.”
Spotting banana Xanthomonas wilt (BXW) with biochemical tests.
The tree that owns itself. Take that, lawyers!
“The old Chinese gardener in ragged blue coat and trousers with a wispy white beard who potters around smoking one of these long pipes with a tiny bowl — and a mongol cap, periodically performing elaborate grafting techniques on the plum tree.”
Mexican coffee growers protect surrounding forest. Nepal forest community moving in similar direction?
Mapping the competition between soy and forest in Brazil.
Weird agrobiodiversity corner: pseudomonad bacteria help maize take up nutrients.
Using herbicides to help prairie establishment (including sunflower wild relative).
Stop press: “Agricultural genetics is one of the easier parts of the solution.”
“…wildcats preferred resting sites in shelter structures near forest edges.”
Video on Greek yogurt. Jeremy comments: “I’m going back to Crete.”

June 4, 2009

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

June 2, 2009June 2, 2009

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

Coconut beetle attack in Cambodia.
Indian Green Revolutionary goes organic.
Forests leave fingerprint in wine.
School gardening in Ghana, farmer field school for women and children in Panama.
WWF launches podcast series “The Wild Things.” Bioversity to counter with “The Cultivated Things.”
Oldest pottery found in Chinese cave with oldest rice.
The transition to agriculture “was entered into slowly and reluctantly.” Evidence from the Netherlands, of all places.
Got an apple orchard? Wanna be a star?
Hunting down The Fruit Hunters.

June 1, 2009June 1, 2009

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…