Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
The latest of Mitsuaki Tanabe’s monuments to wild rice was unveiled in the FAO building in Rome yesterday. Tanabe has donated this sculpture to the Global Crop Diversity Trust, and it is now installed by a window just in front of the Trust’s offices. Representing a seed of Oryza meridionalis, which is found in northern Australia, “Momi-2008” is about 9 m long and about 250 kg in weight. It took 20 men to get it up the stairs. This photo doesn’t really do it justice.
The EU-funded “Assessment of African Protected Areas” is out:
The purpose of the work is to provide to decision makers a regularly updated tool to assess the state of Africa PAs and to prioritize them according to biodiversity values and threats so as to support decision making and fund allocation processes.
It is great stuff: detailed, standardized descriptions of the importance of — and threats faced by — each protected area in Africa. I wonder if something similar will ever be done for agricultural biodiversity. An interesting first step might be to mash these results with those of the recent survey of crop wild relatives in protected areas. Unfortunately, the agrobiodiversity and protected areas communities hardly ever speak to each other.
And another trifecta to round off the day, this one of stories about the historical remains of agrobiodiversity, in a broad sense.
We start with an article in Britain’s Daily Telegraph about a genetic study of the skulls of a couple of lions from the menagerie which medieval royalty maintained in the Tower of London. It turns out they were Barbary lions from North Africa, now sadly extinct. Ok, they’re not strictly speaking agricultural biodiversity, but it’s a fun story and I couldn’t resist it.
Next there’s news of an excavation in Egypt which revealed the buried remain of donkeys. I think we actually nibbled this a few days ago in another guise, but the NY Times article is worth reading. The find is interesting because although the donkeys were definitely used as pack animals (the evidence is wear and tear on the bones), they didn’t look any different from wild asses — at least as far as their bones are concerned. Certainly they were no smaller, and a rapid reduction in size has been seen as a marker of animal domestication — the domestication syndrome. So, time for a rethink there.
And, finally, the Boston Globe has a piece on an exhibition of Jewish mosaics from Roman North Africa, entitled “Tree of Paradise” because of its depictions of nature’s bounty. Ancient representations of plants and animals are fascinating, because they are really the only way we can know the external phenotype of old, extinct breeds and varieties. There are unfortunately no pictures in the article, and the exhibition website only has one. Pity.
Having visited when it was still very difficult to get there, and to get around once you got there, I found myself ambivalent about news of road development on Socotra. The people there could certainly do with a couple of decent roads: there were none at all when I was there in the late 1980s, and I remember a couple of really heavy walks, carrying herbarium presses to boot. The place is beautiful, and should attract tourists, but they’re going to need roads too. On the other hand, it sounds like the road system and other development may not be as well planned as it might. The only wild relative of the pomegranate is endemic to the island, but I doubt any road is going to go anywhere near the few populations left. As I remember, they were (and hopefully still are) in really inaccessible places.