The Mother of All Apples Is DisappearingBy John Wenz | June 8, 2017 9:49 am
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2017/06/08/original-wild-apple-going-extinct
You probably haven’t eaten this fruit before, but you may have one of its descendants in your house right now. (Credit:
petrOlly/Flickr)[/size]
In the wilds of Kazakhstan, there’s an unassuming tree that bears an unassuming fruit. Like many plant species, development encroaches on its usual territory while climate change makes it harder for the tree to thrive and bear healthy yields of fruit.
You probably haven’t eaten this fruit before, but you may have one of its descendants in your house right now. After all, its children have more than 7,500 varieties in an assortment of colors and tastes and textures.
This plant is
Malus sieversii. It’s one of the last truly wild apples. But development encroaches on its territory in Kazakhstan, while a hiatus on coal energy has led some Kazakhs to begin burning wood charcoal again — going after the wood of the tree, leaving old growth dead. Too many attempts at re-hybridizing it with other varieties are weakening its genetic heritage. Agricultural expansion is razing the untamed land the apple thrived on. Animals picking at the fruit are leaving the trees barren. And of course, there’s the ever-looming threat of becoming another climate casualty.
The Garden of Eden...
Others have referred to the territory containing
M. sieversii as an “Eden of Apples.” This area covers several other former Soviet republics — Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekhistan — and a narrow area of China. But according to the IUCN, the wild apple has declined by 70 percent over the last 30 years.
That means that, like some agricultural animals, we may soon only have the more domestic apple as
M. sieversii loses territory and is hybridized out of existence.
...
The Secret HistorySo how did we get from the wilds of the Kazakh apple to the dreaded red delicious?
...
In the end, Cornille and her coauthors came to the conclusion that the biggest genetic contribution came from Malus sylvestris. Unlike
M. sierversii,
M. sylvestris is far from palatable.
“You have two varieties, the Caucusus and the European one, and these two are very little apples,” Cornille says. “The European one is one to two centimeters, and I can tell you, if you try to eat them, the next day they’re not very crunchy. They’re not very tasty. Some people make a marmalade, where they add a lot of sugar, but you cannot eat them. Mainly it’s the deer that eat them in the wild.”
Somehow though, around 3,000 to 4,000 years ago, the European crab apple and the wild Kazakh apple began their agricultural courtship and created the cultivated apple you have in your lunchbox today. When looking at
M. sierversii, it’s obvious that it’s the progenitor.
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He was tasting the apple at a Cornell University plantation in upstate New York devoted to saving
M. sierversii and cross breeding it to be a little more palatable. The program is also essential to keeping our modern apple alive by introducing pest resistant qualities only available in
M. sierversii.
Cornille says efforts are already underway in Iran to preserve seeds of these apples, similar to the Cornell effort. You can even
buy the plant (or its seeds at times) online. Some of those come directly from the New York State Agriculture Experiment Station.
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Excerpt. Read more at
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2017/06/08/original-wild-apple-going-extinct
