- Past rapid spread of introduced livestock coincided with vegetation clearance on Madagascar. Ancient sheep, goat and cattle bones show livestock racing across the island about 1,200 years ago, in step with forest clearance and the loss of elephant birds and pygmy hippos. People had arrived long before, so hunting alone is an insufficient culprit. Also I can’t imagine pygmy hippos being all that nice to eat.
- Paleogenomic insight into the collapse, recovery, and management of American bison. 115 ancient and 45 modern genomes show that past bison populations were widely connected, which means that today’s herds, while more fragmented, retain more diversity than was feared. Also, many modern bison lack the cattle ancestry long assumed to be ubiquitous, but wood bison do carry plains bison ancestry from 1920s translocations. So, swings and roundabouts.
- Whole-genome resequencing reveals genetic diversity, population structure, and selection signatures in tibetan yak. Three recently recognised Xizang populations (Chawula, Jila and Niangya) prove genetically richer than many others and cluster with Yushu and wild yak. Selection signals turn up at coat colour genes such as MC1R and at candidates for meat production. Has anyone done selection signals in bison?
- Selection of a phenotypic and functional core set for South Korean silkworm genetic resources, Bombyx mori (Lepidoptera: Bombycidae). A core set is distilled from a larger collection on multiple morphological, physiological and quality criteria, a manageable shortlist so the genebank’s holdings can be more easily used rather than merely admired. What would a core collection for the bison look like, I wonder?
- Impact of genomic selection on genetic diversity in 5 local European cattle breeds. Genomic selection uses DNA information from across an animal’s genome to predict its breeding value, allowing breeders to select animals likely to pass desirable traits to their offspring earlier and more accurately than relying on observed characteristics or pedigree alone. But can it be bad for genetic diversity if applied to a small local breed? Well, it shortened sire generation intervals and evened out top-sire contributions, but inbreeding rose in two breeds and fell in three. Genetic management mattered more than genomic selection, so the lesson is to monitor, and adjust as needed. Possibly relevant to the bison?
- Adoption of support tools for biodiversity conservation: a mixed-methods analysis of ecosystem services awareness among Slovenian cattle farmers. Livestock farmers who are younger and with more positive attitudes to biodiversity and the European Green Deal are more likely to adopt biodiversity-supporting practices. Knowing this could have saved many pigmy hippos 1,200 years ago in Madagascar.
- A national fish pond dataset for Nigeria generated using automated detection and segmentation. A segmentation model run over imagery, with a Random Forest classifier filtering the candidates, yields an openly released map of aquaculture production that was previously hard to see, let alone manage.
- Pathways to recover Asian wild pigs from African swine fever. Since 2018 the virus has caused huge mortality in naive wild pig populations, and the authors set out eight priority actions, with early-warning surveillance, captive breeding and emergency financing the ones that can’t wait. Free-ranging domestic pigs and thin biosecurity at the wildlife-livestock interface keep kind of bring us back to where we began on Madagascar.
Getting to the hub of seed saving
It seems every new website these days is a hub or an academy. The latest example that has come across my desk is the Seed Knowledge Hub developed by the Erasmus+ project Seeds of Growth: Strengthening Community Seed Banks and Sustainable Seed-Saving Practices in Europe.
The Hub brings together guides, technical manuals, case studies and policy materials on seed saving and cultivated diversity. What was included into it was decided on the basis of a capacity gap analysis that reached 868 people across Europe and collected 140 responses from seed savers, community seed bank managers and seed librarians.
You can subscribe to keep up to date.
Plant Cuttings regrows
We used to link quite a bit to Plant Cuttings, Nigel Chaffey’s monthly column in the international scientific journal Annals of Botany. It was also shared on Botany One, a weblog run by the publisher of the journal. Here’s an example of one of our shoutouts, from 16 years ago no less.
Dr Chaffey always had something interesting to say, and following his column was a great pleasure. So I thought it was a real pity when it came to an end in 2019, after about a decade.
It turns out, though, that Plant Cuttings continues. A random post on social media linking to Dr Chaffey’s latest piece, a review of what sounds like an excellent book on basketry, led me to the current incarnation. You can subscribe to it, which I have done, and of course explore the archive of the column at Botany One.
A seven-course meal of neglected crops
Good news for those who want to learn more about opportunity crops, aka neglected and underutilized species:
This seven-course series curriculum equips participants with competences required to transform Neglected and Underutilized Species (NUS) into sustainable careers, commercial enterprises, and resilient food systems. Developed by African university experts and global partners, and hosted asynchronously on the RUFORUM e-Learning Platform (REP), each self-paced course awards its own certificate of completion and offers flexible adoption options for higher education institutions, whether deployed as standalone credentials, embedded into degree programmes, or used as core supplementary resources.
You do have to register, but I’ve tried it and it’s fairly painless.
I can’t say I like those images much, but the contents of the courses themselves do not betray use of AI. Here are the topics that are treated by each:
- Climate and biodiversity
- Nutrition and health
- Business development
- Postharvest and processing
- Production and agronomy
- Foundations and systems
- Policy and food systems
The gourd, the bred and the citrus
Jeremy’s latest newsletter includes a link to a piece on the domestication of cucurbits1 that reminded him of a classic of evolutionary biology and reminded me that I meant to link to The Botanist in the Kitchen’s own autumnal foray into Halloween pumpkins et al. It also alerted me to what promises to be a phenomenal eight-part exploration of citrus diversity in Sicily by Erik Grouger.