SIRGEALC ended on Friday with a call for the establishment of a Latin American Society for Genetic Resources. Similar things have been suggested before, to no avail. The SAT21 conference recommended that an international society be set up, for example. That was seven years ago and I don´t think there´s been much talk about it since. What do you think? Do we need another scientific society?
Credit where credit is due
The latest Oekologie carnival is up over at 10,000 birds, and I’m here to state that although I submitted the article featured, I did not, as Mike suggests, write it. That was Jacob van Etten, and I hope he’ll submit another guest post soon.
The Oekologie carnival has its usual fascinating bunch of links to stories of potential interest. One in particular that took my fancy was an account of water wars in the south. The south of the United States, that is, where you would think that they would be better prepared. They’re not. As Jennifer at The Infinite Sphere writes:
As a result of the merging of a bad drought, a population explosion in the Atlanta metro area, a lack of planning to accompany said population explosion, lack of any kind of plan to deal with a severe drought, and pretty much no water conservation incentives at a state or local level. As a result, Alabama, Tennessee, and Florida are now duking it out over a watershed (Chattahoochee/ Flint/ Apalachicola Rivers) spread over the three states. It’s gotten so bad that the Georgia aquarium, home to the largest aquarium tank in the country, has drained several aquariums to save water (I would assume the water is now being used for some beneficial purpose).
Phew! There’s not a whole heap in there directly about farming, but it does indicate just how complex water management can be.
Making cassava stronger in the Amazon
I had a chance to roam through the extensive exhibition of posters at SIRGEALC yesterday, and, although many of them were attractive and interesting, one in particular stood out. Actually, Dr Fabio de Oliveira Freitas of the Brasilian plant genetic resources programme (CENARGEN) had two posters up. That’s him in the photo below. One seems to be an update of his thesis work on DNA fingerprinting of archaeological maize remains, which you can read about online. That was interesting enough, but the second poster was even better.
It told a great story from Dr Freitas’ work with a group of Amazonian indians. He’d been visiting a remote area right in the middle of the Amazon for about ten years when he noticed something he hadn’t seen before. In one village, one family had the habit of planting one stake of each of their cassava varieties all together on one mound. Later he found another family in another village doing the same thing. This is apparently an old custom that was more widespread in the past, and that for some reason is declining, although it is supposed to “make the cassava stronger.” Normally, people plant one or more stakes of a single variety in a given mound. But these two families built one somewhat larger, special mound in their field, and planted a specimen of each of their dozen or so varieties in it, so that they grew all together in close proximity, their spindly branches intertwining. That means more crossing among varieties, and more hybrid seedlings on the ground around the mound, for the people to select and nurture new varieties from.
It’s unclear why this agrobiodiversity-friendly ritual is disappearing, and what can be done to stop this happening. But my money is on Dr Freitas to find out and tell us about it soon.
Breadfruit proceedings
Great news from Diane Ragone. The proceedings of the I International Symposium on Breadfruit Research and Development are out!
Cows and ants interact in Argentina
A paper just out in the Journal of Applied Ecology is a really great illustration of the interactions among different components of agrobiodiversity that we’re always on about here. ((TADEY, MARIANA & FARJI-BRENER, ALEJANDRO G. Indirect effects of exotic grazers: livestock decreases the nutrient content of refuse dumps of leaf-cutting ants through vegetation impoverishment. Journal of Applied Ecology 44:1209-1218.)) The Argentinian researchers found that putting more cattle to graze on the steppe vegetation of the Monte Desert in Patagonia resulted in a progressive decrease in plant cover and species diversity. So what, right? Well, this affected the diet of leaf-cutting ants. And that meant that the ants’ refuse dumps were less rich in nutrients. Which meant lower soil nutrient avalability. And perhaps eventually less healthy and productive cows. As well as further changes in the vegetation. It just takes a slight reduction in stocking rate (the number of cows per hectare) to restore the ants’ diet and the fertility of the soil.