Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Tai Haku drops a bombshell:
[The] Eden [Project] is almost exclusively crops – it relates to human/plant interdependence. There were cocoa, cork oak, bamboo, amaranth, coffees and any number of others when I was there. Relatively few “wild†plants.
Anyone else care to comment?
Gosh, it’s difficult to keep track of this stuff. There’s been an explosion of “one hundred most important questions facing X” initiatives in the past couple of years. These are the ones I was able to track down, listed in no particular order, but there may be others out there, in which case let us know.
I think the only one we actually blogged about here was the plant science one.
Anyway, I bring all this up because I’ve just heard that Professor Jules Pretty from Essex University is now spearheading an effort to summarize the world’s agricultural challenges down to the top 100 priority questions. Of course, the most interesting thing about these lists will be the intersection among them. Talk about bang for your buck.
Well, not quite. But some of their DNA is. A paper just out in PLoS ONE has found two mitochondrial DNA haplogroups (the ones labelled R and P in the diagram below) which apparently got into Italian local breeds from “European aurochsen [haplogroup E] as the result of sporadic interbreeding events with domestic herds grazing in the wild.” Some of these breeds are rare and marginalized, though, so even the last remnants of the aurochs might be in danger.
“Eeyew. What’s wrong with that chicken?”
We were sitting on the shaded verandah of Nico, a lovely man who, after training as an architect in the US, chucked it all in to live off the grid and as sustainably as possible in a converted hovel in the west of Crete. No electricity, no running water, a wild garden and wilder chickens foraging through it.
Naturally I peered at the chicken, and there it was: naked-necked as I live and breathe.
“Golly, a naked-necked chicken, here on Crete.”
Nico, meanwhile, was answering my friend, and explaining that it was that way naturally and didn’t seem to be any different from the other chickens in his flock.
I waded in with information about the naked-necked chickens of Transylvania and elsewhere, citing the very latest thoughts on the subject, to-whit:
The use of single or combined dominant genes for feather restriction (Na) and feathering structure (F), as well as the sex-linked recessive gene for reduced body size (dw), has been found to be particularly relevant for the tropics (Horst, 1989; Haaren-Kiso et al., 1995). Research into the effects of these genes on economic factors has been undertaken in Malaysia (Khadijah, 1988; Mathur and Horst, 1989). For example, the feather restriction (Na) or Naked Neck gene results in 40 percent less feather coverage overall, with the lower neck appearing almost “nakedâ€. This considerably reduces the need for dietary nutrition to supply protein input for feather production, and protein is a limiting factor in many scavenger feed resource bases. Barua et al., (1998) has reviewed the available information on the performance of indigenous Naked Neck fowl in the hope that it will draw the attention of scientists worldwide to its interesting characteristics and facilitate future research.
I asked Nico whether the naked-necked birds were more efficient egg layers, or suffered less in the heat, but he didn’t know. I said I’d be happy to return to conduct a thorough investigation, but I haven’t had a reply yet.
The photo took some doing too, the birds treating me as an overlarge predator definitely up to no good. Which they should.
Our mate Danny weighs in on CWRs and protected areas:
Maybe what is required is a more dynamic approach to CWR conservation… A more holistic approach to increasingly mobile target areas.
And yes, he has some details.