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Enclavism

This has very little to do with agrobiodiversity, but I couldn’t resist mentioning it. I got an email from my friend Robert Hijmans at IRRI pointing me to this little-known fact:

West Bengal has many small exclaves within the Rajshahi division of Bangladesh, and vice versa. According to Brendan Whyte’s thesis, there are 106 of them. For the height of complexity, a part of Dahala Khagrabari, India is surrounded by Bangladeshi territory (part of Upanchowki Bhajni, Bangladesh), which is itself surrounded by Balapara Khagrabari, India, which in turn is surrounded by Bangladesh. This is the world’s only counter-counter-enclave.

Robert and his team are trying to map this in GADM, not without a little difficulty. GADM is part of the BioGeoMancer project, about which I blogged way back.

GADM is a database of the location of the world’s administrative areas (boundaries). Administrative areas in this database are countries and lower level subdivisions such as provinces, departments, bibhag, bundeslander, daerah istimewa, fivondronana, krong, landsvæðun, opština, sous-préfectures, counties, and thana. GADM describes where these administrative areas are (the “spatial features”), and for each area it provides some attributes, foremost being the name and variant names.

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A bit of cash for biodiversity

This looks potentially rather interesting.

The National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the U.S. Department of Energy invite applications for the establishment or continuation of “International Cooperative Biodiversity Groups” (ICBG) to address the interdependence of biodiversity exploration for potential applications in health, agriculture and energy, with investments in research capacity that support sustainable use of these resources, the knowledge to conserve them, and equitable partnership frameworks among research and development organizations in the U.S. and low and middle income countries.

That’s from the announcement of about US$3-4 million of new funding available in the US. It’s hard to know exactly what it might cover, but it is nice to see agriculture in there explicitly, along with health and, somewhat less appealing, energy. I found it at the University of Madison-Wisconsin, but you can go straight to the government source. And, hey, let us know if anyone lands a big grant.

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Roman antibiotics

Also from Tangled Bank comes news of a study looking at the evidence for various infectious diseases from the skeletons of people killed at Herculaneum by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. ((That’s the one that also destroyed Pompeii, though in a somewhat different way.)) Among the diseases was brucellosis, evidence for which was also gleaned from the carbonized cheeses found at the site. Herculaneum was apparently famous for its goat cheeses, which seem, however, to have been badly infected. Which is all amazing enough. But one of the commenters on the article points to another paper which adds a twist to the story.

It seems the inhabitants of Herculaneum, despite their brucellosis and tuberculosis, were relatively free of non-specific bone inflammations. And that may be because:

Pomegranates and figs, consumed by the population, were mainly dried and invariably contaminated by Streptomyces, a bacterium that produces natural tetracycline, an antibiotic.

Is there similar evidence from contemporary populations of the protection conferred by natural antibiotics?