It was only just over a year ago that I wrote, from Nairobi, a post about silk making in Kenya that elicited a number of comments. Seems like a lifetime ago. Anyway, today there’s an article in Science in Africa about attempts to make an industry out of wild silk in southern Africa. Sounds very promising. Via.
African protected areas surveyed
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.
Bee colony collapse disorder follow-up
This is important. If you care at all about colony collapse disorder, the way science is done, and the way results are reported, go to Ian Parnell’s What’s Your Ecotype and read his long and detailed report on the latest news concerning Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus, Australian bees and CCD in America. You’ll be glad you did, because you’ll be better informed than almost everyone else.
Publicity for neglected species
Our friends at the Global Facilitation Unit for Underutilized Species have scored a minor publicity coup by getting a series of posts on the University of British Columbia’s Botany Photo of the Day web site. BPOD, as aficionados know it, is a daily source of stunning images and information to match. Sometimes the featured plant is economically important, and some of those are agricultural. But this is the first time I can remember a series devoted to agricultural biodiversity.
So far BPOD has covered Emmer wheat, ((I could actually quibble and insist, again, that farro is a mixture of hulled wheat species, but I wont.)) bay laurel and maya nut. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?
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.