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Diversity on air

I’ve been listening to a radio programme about diversity in action. Called The Evolution Boomerang, from Soundprint, it examines three cases where diversity is important to agriculture and the environment. There’s a segment on GMO cotton and insect resistance, a segment on the need for genetic diversity at salmon hatcheries, and a segment on selecting bacteria to degrade a chemical that had never existed on Earth before humans manufactured it.

All good stuff, if you have half an hour to spare. You will need Real Player to listen.

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Mapping Ugandan wetlands to protect them

Want to know where Ugandans can make the most money from harvesting papyrus? Here you go:

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This map is one of a whole series on Ugandan wetlands — their potential and the threats they face — that has just been published by the World Resources Institute 1 under the title Mapping a Better Future: How Spatial Analysis Can Benefit Wetlands and Reduce Poverty in Uganda.

One of the co-authors, Paul Mafabi , commissioner of the Wetlands Management Department in Uganda’s Ministry of Water and Environment, had this to say at the launch:

These maps and analysis enable us to identify and place an economic value on the nation’s wetlands. They show where wetland management can have the greatest impacts on reducing poverty.

There are probably some wild rice relatives lurking in these wetlands too, let’s not forget.

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The giant pumpkin story

Jules Janick, professor of horticulture at Purdue, wrote a wonderfully informative and entertaining brief history of giant pumpkins in last September’s Chronica Horticulturae (it starts on page 16). Regular competitions have been going on in the US since 1900, arising from state agricultural fairs.

The giant round orange phenotypes of C. maxima appear to be in a narrow gene pool out of “Atlantic Giant” (oblong phenotypes are called “Dill’s Atlantic Giant” developed by William Dill, a Canadian from Nova Scotia, Canada)… “Atlantic Giant” and related huge show pumpkins trace their origin to the cultivar “Mammoth,” recorded in the seed trade as far back as 1834…

Despite this narrow genepool, the genetic gains have been phenomenal (although of course cultural practices play a part too), as this graph of world records of pumpkin fruit weight from 1857 to 2007 shows:

pumpkin

The current mark stands at almost 800 kg. Seed of top specimens changes hands at huge prices (up to $850 for a single seed). Prof. Janick suggests that horticultural science has ignored this record of success.

Someone has accused academics in the agricultural arena of merely proving that the practices achieved by the best growers are correct. I suggest the academic and scientific community cooperate on this engaging problem for the delight of the public everywhere.

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Penis pepper finally reveals its identity

A weird, comma-shaped fruit is often to be seen “floating over the soldiers marching off to be sacrificed or flying priests” in the artwork of the Moche, an agricultural people that frequented the coastal plain of northern Peru from A.D. 100 to 800. That’s been recognized since the 1930’s, when archaeologists gave it the name ulluchu — meaning “penis pepper” because of its shape — but without actually been able to say what the fruit was. Modern-day Peruvians just don’t recognize it, and botanists need more to go on for a scientific identification.

They got it recently when the actual remains of a fruit were found during excavation of the the tombs of Dos Cabezas in the ancient Moche city of Sipan. Ethnobotanists Rainer Bussmann and Douglas Sharon had been asking around for ulluchu for years:

“We would go to these markets and people would say, ‘We think we know what that is, but it’s not being sold here,'” said Sharon, the retired director of the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California-Berkley. “Well, one of the reasons it wasn’t being used is because the Ulluchu seems to show up during sacrifices. And no one is being sacrificed anymore.”

But armed with the physical specimens, desiccated as they were, Bussman, who works at the Missouri Botanical Gardens, eventually homed in on the genus Guarea, which is in the mahogany family, not the pepper.

“Rainer is a first-rate taxonomist,” Sharon said. “He studied every physical characteristic of these plants until he was absolutely certain we had it.”

Guarea seeds contain hallucinogenics and chemicals which raise blood pressure. Both would have been useful in sacrifices.

Bussmann, director of the garden’s William L. Brown Center for Plant Genetic Resources, plans to further study the plant’s chemistry and suspects it might have applications as a blood pressure and erectile dysfunction treatment.

The sacrificial soldiers in Moche artwork over which ulluchu fruits float often appear to have erections. Expect huge plantations to spring up in the Peruvian lowlands.