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Marco Polo Sheep on the brink

A rare sheep found in Central Asia is under threat from over-hunting.

Rick Herscher, owner and operator of Alaska Hunting Safaris in Anchorage, AK, describes hunting for the Marco Polo sheep as an adventure and joyful experience. The company runs hunts in the Kyrgyz Republic and Tajikistan for a fee of US$35,000 and Herscher said in a telephone conversation that authorities in Central Asian states can be notoriously corrupt where the issuing of a license for hunting can be a gold mine.

Ovis ammon polii numbers about 10,000 individuals and is apparently much prized by European and American trophy hunters. It is found in the Khunjerab National Park. It was described by Marco Polo, after whom it is named, and is a subspecies of the argali. It’s separate from the main line domesticated sheep evolution, but still.

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The Bioscience Behind Secure Harvests ignores conservation

The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) invests £78m (€80m) in plant and crop research at universities and institutes across the UK, sometimes in the form of international partnerships. They have a pamphlet out called The Bioscience Behind Secure Harvests, highlighting “key BBSRC-supported research into achieving global food security.” There’s a lot on breeding, in particular as a way of adapting to climate change, and a section on “Harnessing natural diversity.” 1 There are even a couple of — albeit brief — references to the use of wild relatives in wheat breeding. But nothing at all on the conservation side of things. I guess the BBSRC figures that funding the long-term availability of the raw materials of all this breeding it is supporting is someone else’s problem.

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This is not a pistic

Luigi’s Nibble this morning prompted me to look again for one of the seminal papers in the Italian use of wild agrobiodiversity: Pistic, traditional food from Western Friuli, N.E. Italy. 2 The abstract says:

Western Friuli, Italy, there is a small area near the town of Pordenone where an ancient rite of spring is still carried out. This is the preparation of a special dish, known as “pistic,” a collection of 56 wild herbaceous meadow and wood plants which are boiled and then sautéed together. This practice is still alive in a few areas of Friuli today and possibly goes back to pre-Roman Celtic cultures in this part of Friuli. The number of herbaceous plants used in this dish is extraordinarily high (56), especially when compared to the low number normally used in other conventional dishes. “Pistic” is therefore important, not only because it represents a quantitatively high use of wild herbs in the diet of the rural population, but also because it reflects environmental awareness, in that the archaic method of naming, identifying and using these plants still exists today. Similar rural practices include the use of “pot herbs” in Great Britain and in France the cooking of “mesclun.”

So many questions. This was more than 10 years ago; are the people of western Friuli still making pistic? What if you can only find 55 of the species? How do people remember the names of the plants? Are there any other dishes that use more species? What would it matter if some of the species could no longer be found in the wild?

Of course, the Italians, let alone the Friulians, are not alone in their use of wild plants, especially in spring. But they do seem to take wild plants more seriously than anyone else in the Mediterranean.

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Revising the US Plant Hardiness Zone Map

“All gardeners are in zone denial.”

The zones in question are the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Plant Hardiness Zones, which show where different garden species are supposed to do well. Gardeners, of course, think they know better, and will always try to push that envelope.

Anyway, the current version of the Plant Hardiness Zone Map was done way back in 1990, and needed updating. So there’s a new one coming soon. It’s bound to be different, in places very different. A whole new set of recommendations for gardeners to go into denial about.

USDA is not describing what the new map will show, but outside experts say that the trend is for zones to shift northward. “Some places have definitely warmed, although others haven’t changed at all,” says Tony Avent, owner of North Carolina-based Plant Delights Nursery and an advisor for the revision.

You can’t do much with the current map online, but the next version will be downloadable to your GIS. It will also be more sophisticated, with better data, better interpolation and better resolution (800m):

The revised map draws on 30 years of data and uses a complex algorithm to factor in other variables that affect local temperatures, such as altitude and the presence of water bodies.

Will some of the USDA’s clonal repositories (field genebanks) find themselves in the wrong zone?