Category: Wild relatives

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Imagining the past

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.

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Wild pomegranates threatened?

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.


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A modest proposal

That last but one post of Jeremy’s got me thinking. How do we find out if Arachis ipaensis is still at that locality? I mean, short of mounting a fully-fledged expedition of groundnut experts at vast expense, that is. One way might be to ask a local person to check for us. Ok, a wild peanut species might not be the best thing to try this with, but you get the idea. Problem is, how do we identify a local person who knows that area?

Then I remembered something Jeremy sent me recently. WikiLoc is a website to which you can upload your favourite walk or cycle ride as a GPS track. You can then view all these in a number of different ways, including in Google Earth. So I gbiffed (sensu Cherfas, 2008) the localities of wild Arachis species and viewed them in Google Earth together with all the tracks from South America available on WikiLoc.

Well, of course, none of the trails was anywhere near the locality of A. ipaensis. But I did find others that came near — or very near — the localities of other species. Check this one out, for example:

It’s a 32 km circuit around Piribebuy in Paraguay, and it was uploaded by someone called Yagua. It takes about 4 hours to walk it. And it so happens that a specimen of Arachis glabrata was collected along Yagua’s favourite trail, around its southeastern corner:

glabrata-closeup.jpg

Now, I don’t think A. glabrata is a particularly significant component of the groundnut genepool, but say, for the sake of argument, that it had been. Couldn’t we ask Yagua to keep an eye on it for us? Multiply by the more than 10,000 tracks on WikiLoc and pretty soon you’re talking about a real global network of agrobiodiversity monitors. But maybe we should test the idea out with a somewhat more — ahem — charismatic plant. And imagine if germplasm collectors start adding their tracks to WikiLoc.

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Stalking the wild peanut

A propos of the peanut’s past, it just so happens that one of the great peanut people of the world (as immortalized in this specific epithet) now lives just down the corridor at work. So I showed him that article. He was well pleased to see it, explaining for me how it confirmed previous ideas based on crossing and geography. Then, on the way out, he casually mentioned that seeds of one of the ancestors had been collected only once, and that it had never been found again.

“It’s probably extinct,” he said.

Ipaensis Well, that certainly adds a certain spice to an otherwise moderately routine story, I thought. So at the first opportunity I asked Luigi, who understands these things, to gbif A. ipaensis for me. ((Webbies are well aware of the verb “to google.” To GBIF is not yet a verb, as far as I can discover. Probably not in the present tense, and definitely not in the past. I hereby lay claim to it.)) Quick as a flash, he sent me arachis.kml, a KML file for Google Earth. There were precisely two entries, one for the type specimen at the Missouri Botanic Gardens and one for an accession in the USDA genebank. To me, they looked suspiciously located, on exactly the same latitude but about 45.5 km apart. And while the USDA’s specimen was reasonably near to a stream, Missouri’s was nowhere near water that I could see.

Arachis Ipaensis Luigi quickly confirmed that the Mo specimen, collected in 1971 and thus well pre-GPS, was probably in the wrong place; OK. These things happen. Then he was on the IM again, telling me that I could look at an image of the type specimen (that’s it over there) and that the USDA specimen was “unavailable”.

“What’s that mean?”

“Could be dead. Could be regenerating and they don’t have stock.”

“Bummer.”

“Yeah.”

And then we went about our independent business for a while until he sent “Can you imagine how hard that would have been 10 years ago? Or even 5?”

And it’s true. A few quick clicks, some very spiffy intertube tools, and we had the kind of information that could have taken months to gather back in the day. Information is going to be the life and death of efforts to conserve and make use of agrobiodiversity. And easy though it was to find out a bit about A. ipaensis, we don’t really know anything about the plant itself. Is it drought tolerant? Disease susceptible? Fertile with A. hypogaea? Got good genes?

And, in other Arachis news:

That’ll do, for now.