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A rare coconut described

Coconut-hunter Roland Bourdeix does it again:

Here is the first description with pictures of one of the rarest coconut varieties from French Polynesia.

This is a Compact Red Dwarf, producing big round fruit of red-orange color; the young fruits show inside the husk a typical pink color, like the pink color found in the Pilipog Green Dwarf from the Philipinnes. This dwarf seems to be mainly allogamous. Its stem and leaves are quite similar to those of the Niu Leka Dwarf from Fiji.

This kind of dwarf will be very precious in the future, especially for production of hybrid seednuts. If you plant in geographical isolation this red dwarf mixed together with a green variety (dwarf or tall); then you will obtain seednuts s recognizable in the nursery. Seednuts with green sprouts will be the green variety, seednut with red sprouts will be the red dwarf, and seednuts with brown sprouts will be natural hybrids between the red dwarf and the green variety. Both conservation of the two varieties and production of hybrid seednuts are done in a single location. In this process, no need to make costly emasculation, because the red dwarf is allogamous. No need also to plant this seedgarden in a research institute: such a design can be easily managed by farmers in farmer’s fields, as geographical isolation is available.

So in the future, even in a small Pacific country, we could imagine 20 farmers producing locally 20 differents kinds of hybrids using their own varieties as male parents… This idea needs to be refined, but this could lead to a complete change in the policies of coconut seednut production at world level. An illustration of a quite similar process of seed production is given here for Samoa.

A question is about the genetic origin of this Compact Red Dwarf: is it a late progeny of Marechal hybrids? Or is it the progeny of a natural cross between Niu leka and a red dwarf such as Haari Papua? We will do soon some DNA analysis to study this point.

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Andean products on display

The Fifth Potato Festival is underway in the Surco district of Lima, Peru. It sounds like fun, but all the information about it online at the moment is in Spanish only. If you don’t read the language, and can’t be bothered fighting with the results of Google Translate, you can read a short piece on last year’s event in English. It’s actually about much more than just the potato. There are stands on a whole range of new Andean products:

…black quinoa, royal quinoa, red quinoa, quinoa sajama, maca, instant amaranth, instant cañihua, wheat, red corn, corn chullpi, bean mashco, barley mashco, black potato, white potato flour, etc.

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Selling seed of orphan crops in Kenya

The latest episode of BBC’s Horizon programme deals with a number of things we’ve blogged about here before, for example soil mapping in Africa and biochar. But the payoff for us here is the last segment, which is on a Kenyan seed company called Leldet, which…

…now offers farmers the opportunity to buy different varieties of previously forgotten under-utilised seeds, more suitable for the area. They supply them in smaller quantities so farmers aren’t over reliant on one crop.

Watch it quick, because I don’t know how long it will stay on the site.

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Wallow Fire (may) threaten (some) wild beans. Maybe.

There’s a really bad fire spreading in Arizona. 1

You can donwload all kinds of stuff about it, and even post your experiences of it on Facebook. But can you find out whether any crop wild relatives are threatened by it? Well, sure: all you have to do is go off to GBIF, and choose a likely genus (Phaseolus, say), and download the records, and mash them up in Google Earth with the latest fire perimeter data or whatever. 2 Like I’ve done here:

Coming in closer, and using the NASA GeoTIFF instead of the normal Google Earth imagery, you can put yourself in the position of being able to make some reasonably intelligent guesses about what might be happening to some of these populations, and the genepool as a whole in the area:

But what I really meant is that there ought to be a way to do this automagically, or something. Anyway, it is sobering to reflect that while all hell is breaking loose in Arizona, not that far away to the northeast, in the peaceful surroundings of the Denver Botanical Garden, Anasazi beans are enjoying their day in the sun, utterly oblivious of the mortal threat faced by some of their wild cousins. It’s a cruel world. And there’s a point in all this about the need for complementary conservation strategies that’s just waiting to be made. Isn’t there?

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Breathing life into research

We who are stuck at headquarters, trying to inject a little life into our organisation’s activities, envy the scientists whose activities they are. What adventures they must have! What people they must meet, whose lives they touch and whose lives touch them! What material they must be storing for their anecdotage! What stories they could tell!

Except that they can’t. Because they are researchers. Doing research.

Kenya's favourite beer It’s not that they don’t have the skills. Some of them can tell great stories over a Tusker, baridi sana, and many take wonderful photos and even videos. It’s that they don’t have time when they’re in the field, precisely because they are doing the activities we are trying so hard to breathe life into. And when they get back here, there’s more work to be done. But what if there’s someone tagging along whose de facto job is not to do the stuff but to record the stuff others are doing? You get a rich set of impressions that can really help to bring a project to life, often unintentionally.

Bioversity’s recent field visit to some of its nutrition research in Kenya benefitted from just such a presence, resulting in a fascinating report from “the unofficial video guy”. What’s so nice about it is the immediacy of the impressions. The people were welcoming and gracious. There’s something called “African rice” that is “split and processed” maize. Muù, a “strange fruit that tasted like bittersweet marzipan”. The bus breaking down across both lanes of the road home, giving everyone a chance to learn a grain grinding song, all caught on video.

This is not a plea for jolly outings. It is a plea to recognize two things. That much of the time researchers have more important things to do than think about how to gussy up their work for wider consumption. And that someone whose job it is to do such gussying may stand a better chance of bringing a body of work to life.