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Welcome to the world, Kurt

What can you do about inbreeding in a small population of a species that nearly went extinct? Well, if the species is Przewalski’s horse, one thing you can do is inject some new diversity into the genepool by cloning a genetically very distinct stallion whose cells you happened to put in liquid nitrogen forty years ago. The whole amazing story is on the website of the Revive & Restore project.

The new foal’s name is Kurt. Why?

Kurt is named in honor of Dr. Kurt Benirshke, a geneticist at the San Diego Zoo who in 1975 had a prescient idea. Dr. Benirshke began what is now the Frozen Zoo, collecting and cryopreserving the cell lines of endangered species and safely storing away genetic diversity before it was lost. At the time the collection was a bet on cloning and reproductive technologies that did not yet exist. Nearly fifty years later, with the partnership of San Diego Zoo Global Frozen Zoo, Revive & Restore, and ViaGen Pets and Equine, Dr. Benirschke’s plans are quite literally coming to life.

h/t Beth Shapiro.

LATER: A bit more background on Przewalski’s horse just out.

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Genesys learns taxonomy

Eh? Yep, you heard me.

With the recent adoption of the taxonomic backbone provided by GRIN Taxonomy, a search of Genesys for Solanum lycopersicum, which is the currently accepted name for the tomato in GRIN Taxonomy, will also return accessions documented as Lycopersicon esculentum, and indeed other synonyms.

Read all about it on the Genesys news page. And test it out.

Whether you like how it works, or not, leave comments below. I promise I’ll pass them on to the people in charge.

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Brainfood: Millet yields, Millet review, Taro genome, Salty sunflower, WorldVeg network, Phylorelatives, Bovine domestication, Diet quality, Nutrition metrics, Aztec diets, Complementary conservation, Post-2020, Climate change breeding

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Biodiversity loss in experiments and in real life

A large body of research shows that biodiversity loss can reduce ecosystem functioning.

You don’t say. Several years ago we half-heartedly attempted to summarize the literature here a couple of times. We’ve sort of given up on that of late: there’s just too much of it. But there is a fundamental problem with this literature…

…much of the evidence for this relationship is drawn from biodiversity–ecosystem functioning experiments in which biodiversity loss is simulated by randomly assembling communities of varying species diversity, and ecosystem functions are measured.

Fear not, though, help is at hand. The two quotes above are from the abstract of a paper bearing the following title.

The results of biodiversity–ecosystem functioning experiments are realistic.

Phew.

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Erasing Native fires

You might remember a couple of entries in a Brainfood from back in February.

I only vaguely did, but enough to ring a bell when I happened across a full-throated take-down of that first article a few days ago. The question is to what extent Indigenous Peoples used fire to manage landscapes before European colonization of what is now New England.

If the answer is “not much” — as that first paper suggests, but the second denies — then conservation interventions involving “chainsaws, cattle and sheep grazing, and hay production, rather than fire” might be justified. So it’s not just an argument about the past, but also about what’s best today. The recent rebuttal suggests that the methods used to arrive at that “not much” conclusion were deeply flawed, and resulted in what amounts to “erasure” of Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous Peoples.

Most problematically, they ignore Indigenous sources that describe modifications of the environment, including but not limited to burning, in and near Native settlements and agricultural fields and along the interlaced trails and travel corridors where people sustained economic relationships and kinship networks.

I imagine the fiery debate will continue.