Macadamias as rare as the Wollemi pine get new national recovery plan

January 13, 2024 4:30 AM

Macadamias as rare as the Wollemi pine get new national recovery plan. A plan of action is adopted to help save the world's only wild macadamia plants from extinction. Among other reasons, preserving wild macadamias is important in case pathogens like viruses or fungi wipe out the genetic monoculture that is commercially-cultivated macadamias.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries (1 comment total)

I like a macadamia although it's quite the exotic where I live, so they are 2x the price of walnuts and 3x the price of almonds in Tesco. TIL that there are 4 different species of macadamia Macadamia jansenii, M. integrifolia, M. ternifolia,  M. tetraphylla. That's a fund of biodiversity and disease resistance whc will be gone for ever.

In The West all the bananas you have ever eaten are genetically identical clones of a cultivar called Cavendish. Up until WWII, a different variety Gros Michel was king. But ' Panama disease' a novel fungal pathogen Fusarium oxysporum ripped through the banana plantations about that time and shook Dole, Geest, Fyffes and Chiquita's shareholders to the core.

In 1976 I spent a Summer in NL giving a dose of late blight Phytophthora infestans [and noting the consequences] to unsuspecting cultivars of potato which my Institute had gone and gathered during a field trip to the Andes and back-crossed to known commercial varieties that had the yield, colour, texture and chippability that European farmers and consumers liked. Hope was to develop new varieties that would shrug off the cause of the Great Hunger of 1845-7 as well as pink rot; black rot; dry rot; brown rot, powdery scab etc. etc.

Trees: common ash Fraxinus excelsior is damned as we know and love it because of ash die-back Hymenoscyphus fraxineus. Related ash species are resistant to this fungus.
posted by BobTheScientist at 5:23 AM on January 14 [2 favorites]