Relearning traditional knowledge to achieve sustainability: honey gathering in the miombo woodlands of northern Mozambique

Mozambique’s Niassa Reserve contains Africa’s best preserved miombo woodlands. Half of the households there gather wild honey from natural hives for consumption and income. However, most collectors used destructive techniques: setting fire to the grasses under the hive tree to create smoke and then felling the tree. Cutting trees to obtain honey was the principal source of tree mortality. Trees grow very slowly, about 0.25 cm diameter [dbh]/yr, meaning an average hive tree was nearly 200 years old. Furthermore, of the trees > 20 cm dbh of species important for nectar and hives, only about 15% had cavities. Although fire is intrinsic to miombo woodlands, the increased frequency resulting from anthropogenic sources impedes regeneration of some tree species as well as affecting bees, other wildlife and villages. A few people in the reserve had learned from earlier generations how to gather honey in a nondestructive way, using certain plant species to keep bees from stinging and climbing the trees using ropes to take the honey combs out of the hives. Traditional practices included leaving the larval combs behind so the colony continued to grow. Previously, the older men who had this knowledge had not been willing to share it with younger men. The project arranged for one of the traditional honey hunters to participate in an international conference on honey collection with other indigenous collectors from around the world. This helped him recognize the value of his knowledge. The project team then arranged for him to demonstrate these traditional techniques to groups of honey hunters in nine communities within the Reserve. A yearlater, monitoring revealed that many collectors had adopted these nondestructive techniques. They found them less time consuming, and appreciated that they allowed collectors to return to the same trees repeatedly to obtain honey. Sharing traditional knowledge made honey hunting compatible with the conservation of miombo woodlands

Survival and life history responses of Simocephalus vetulus (Müller, 1776) genotypes exposed to sodium chloride: does environmental context matter?

Cladocerans are typically viewed as freshwater organisms with importance as regulators of primary production. However, populations of these filter-feeders can be found in brackish ecosystems, facing regular or sporadic inputs of seawater. According to climate change predictions, saline intrusion may affect vulnerable freshwater habitats. Nonetheless, populations adapt to local conditions and this may confound our ability to assess noxious effects of salinity. Bearing this in mind, our goal was to analyze the halotolerance of different genotypes of Simocephalus vetulus differing in their original environmental context (brackish versus freshwater populations). Clonal lineages were established from three extant populations: one from a brackish lagoon and two from freshwater systems. To assess short-time sensitivity of 23 genotypes to NaCl, they were exposed to a range of concentrations from 2 to 5gL−1 in standard 48-h acute assays and to a fixed concentration of 6 g L−1 in 12-h survival time (ST) trials. Life-history responses were analyzed in extreme genotypes, whose fitness was compared along a gradient of growing NaCl concentrations. While EC50 values demonstrated an overlap of the sensitivity of genotypes to NaCl, ST supported the idea of population differentiation. All tolerant genotypes (in terms of ST) to high levels of NaCl, except one, originated from the brackish population. On the contrary, life-history assays of extreme genotypes showed that fitness under saline stress was overall unrelated to environmental context. Furthermore, lifehistory experiments showed that tolerance to salinity is present in freshwater populations, thus demonstrating their potential to adapt to salinity increases.publishe

Pasture production under different irrigation depths

ABSTRACT This study aimed to evaluate the production of two pasture species, Brachiaria brizantha cv. BRS Piatã and Panicum maximum cv. Mombaça, under different irrigation depths. The experiment was carried out from May to December 2014, at the State University of Maringá, in the municipality of Cidade Gaúcha-PR, Brazil. The experiment was set out in a strip-plot design, with four replicates, six irrigation depths in the plot and two pasture species in the subplot. Irrigation depths were represented by a percentage of reference evapotranspiration (ET0), which was estimated by the Penman-Monteith equation. Four pasture cuts were performed during the studied period and there were no differences between the yields of both evaluated pasture species; however, irrigation depths caused a quadratic response on pasture yield. The maximum values of dry matter yield of the pastures under irrigated conditions were 52.1, 41.6, 26.2 and 25.1% higher than under non-irrigated conditions, for the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th cuts, respectively. Irrigation depths that applied water volumes close to ET0 promoted considerable increases in pasture yield

Relearning traditional knowledge for sustainability: honey gathering in the Miombo Woodland of Northern Mozambique

Mozambique's Niassa Reserve contains Africa's best preserved miombo woodlands. Half of the households there gather wild honey from natural hives for consumption and income. However, most collectors used destructive techniques: setting fire to the grasses under the hive tree to create smoke and then felling the tree. Cutting trees to obtain honey was the principal source of tree mortality. Trees grow very slowly, about 0.25 cm diameter at breast hight [dbh] per year, meaning an average hive tree was nearly 200 years old. Furthermore, of the trees > 20 cm dbh of species important for nectar and hives, only about 15% had cavities. Although fire is intrinsic to miombo woodlands, the increased frequency resulting from anthropogenic sources impedes regeneration of some tree species as well as affecting bees, other wildlife and villages. A few people in the reserve had learned from earlier generations how to gather honey in a nondestructive way, using certain plant species to keep bees from stinging and climbing the trees using ropes to take the honeycombs out of the hives. Traditional practices included leaving the larval combs behind so the colony continued to grow. Previously, the older men who had this knowledge had not been willing to share it with younger men. The project arranged for one of the traditional honey hunters to participate in an international conference on honey collection with other indigenous collectors from around the world. This helped him recognise the value of his knowledge. The project team then arranged for him to demonstrate these traditional techniques to groups of honey hunters in nine communities within the reserve. A year later, monitoring revealed that many collectors had adopted these nondestructive techniques. They found them less time consuming, and appreciated that they allowed collectors to return to the same trees repeatedly to obtain honey. Sharing traditional knowledge made honey hunting compatible with the conservation of miombo woodlands