Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Gene Expression posted a couple of great videos yesterday. The first shows some Asian Giant Hornets attacking a colony of European honeybees, and wreaking total havoc in minutes. The second, which I’ll reproduce below, shows what the native Japanese honeybee species can do to marauding hornets.
Amazing stuff. Incidentally, hornet larvae and pupae are eaten in Japan as a kind of sashimi. And synthetic versions of vespan secretions are being marketed as dietary supplements.
Over at Ecosystem and Poverty, our friend and occasional guest contributor Andy is asking whether anyone has a use for bamboo flowering culms… BTW, thanks for linking to our latest posts, Andy.
This should be interesting. (Although I cannot for the life of me see how to make a picture appear in the black box below. Trust me; click.)
According to the blurb, “Unlike old-fashioned DVDs, this interactive Digital Learning Tool (iDLT) puts you smack in the driver’s seat. From the moment you click “Get Started,†your hosts, outdoorsy Olivia and tech-savvy Seth, are ready to take you around the world to discover agricultural biodiversity”.
Alas, from the clip all I learned was how jolly clever Olivia and Seth and the DVD makers are. But the nice people at PhotoSynthesis Productions have said they’ll send us a copy so we’ll be able to report in more depth. In the meantime, have any of you seen it? What did you think?
Jason at Hominim Dental Anthropology (a bit of a mouthful; hahahaha) has been taking a look at some recent papers on domestication. The papers are, by his own admission, nothing new. We’ve covered some of them ourselves here. What I thought was interesting was the stress on the timing and duration of domestication and Jason’s views of what constitutes “nature” and “natural”. He seems, to me, to be a bit confused as to whether Homo sapiens (just another unique species, as Rob Foley puts it) is a part of nature, or apart from nature and yet with its (our?) own nature.
There’s a workshop going on in Antananarivo on the Impacts of Climate Change on Madagascar’s Biodiversity and Livelihoods. My friend Robert Hijmans is there and he sent me the link to the flickr site of one of the participants, Ratoza Harinjaka, who’s got some photos of the meeting up. Including this one of Robert.
Ratoza has kindly given his permission for us to use the photo. He has blogged about the workshop. Thanks for the use of the pic, Ratoza. If either you or Robert would like to write something for us on the meeting, you’re most welcome to do so. It sounds like the recommendations will be on the Foko website in due course. But it’s always nice to get it from the horse’s mouth.