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There is an old chestnut orchard in the Santa Cruz mountains above Silicon Valley that has the Asian, European AND American chestnut species. American chestnut has the smallest nuts of the three, but they are the sweetest and best tasting.
This is exciting. The American Chestnut is an amazing tree that once grew with trunks as wide as a car. The article did not mention that once the blight was discovered, there was somewhat of a panic to harvest them, which rather reduced the genetic diversity and ruined the possibility of any natural resistance. The horrendous effect our species has on the diversity of life is incredibly sad, re: Dodos and Carrier Pig…
Interesting, because in Europe we have Cameraria ohridella [0] which wreak havoc on horse chestnuts. The moth replicates like crazy and the only recourse is collecting and burning fallen leaves every year. Luckily it looks worse than it is for the trees, they loose their leaves in August, but by then most of a years photosynthesis is done ( just losing like 17%) Anyhow American chestnuts are bad hosts for the moths,…
But, they seem to be really hard to combat. Efforts to do so (without blanket use of synthetic pesticides) are few, for whatever reason, and anecdotally of questionable efficacy (I managed to track down some pheremone-driven leaf-miner moth traps, which caught a lot of the buggers but didn't really solve anything).
Eventually I figured out that a combination of neem oil and spinosad (Captain Jack's Deadbug Brew) would kill the larval ones, but it didn't kill the eggs and so it would have to be applied every 4 days or so in order to make any progress. I. guess things like that are one of the reasons organic produce is more expensive – some of these things that nature throws at you are hard to combat without using broad-spectrum poison.
Very interesting article. I wonder about the second and third order effects of genetic engineering, but I would say I’m optimistic about a tree that’s engineered to survive a blight, whereas engineering crops so they can survive being soaked in cancer-causing poison that kills everything else in the field —- and then eating them —- seems far more concerning.
The issue isn't that it's cancer causing (there's next to no chance it is, the issues are with the surfactants). The real issue is that weeds are evolving to also have glyphosate resistance, as would be expected when such evolutionary pressure is applied.
I actually saw the last surviving American chestnut tree in Pennsylvania. It was a lone tree on a hillside for miles around. Those nuts too are still being harvest for biogenetic rework.
This is exciting. The American Chestnut is an amazing tree that once grew with trunks as wide as a car. The article did not mention that once the blight was discovered, there was somewhat of a panic to harvest them, which rather reduced the genetic diversity and ruined the possibility of any natural resistance. The horrendous effect our species has on the diversity of life is incredibly sad, re: Dodos and Carrier Pig…
Remember when Mao tried that with evil evil sparrows stealing seeds from the party and caused the greatest famine in human history? Fun times.
Very interesting article. I wonder about the second and third order effects of genetic engineering, but I would say I’m optimistic about a tree that’s engineered to survive a blight, whereas engineering crops so they can survive being soaked in cancer-causing poison that kills everything else in the field —- and then eating them —- seems far more concerning.