Buffaloes and Fish

I visited the Philippine Carabao Centre, which is trying to improve the milk production of carabao (water buffalo). Currently 99% of milk consumed in the Philippines is imported, so they are trying to become self-sufficient. They are doing this by cross-breeding the native buffaloes with ones from India, where the milk production is much higher.

They are also using IVF to improve the herd, and have been trying to clone the best animals for a while. So far they have not managed to have a live calf from the cloning, but they are very close, with several foetuses making it to 4 or 5 months of gestation. Again, I asked the question about public perception about cloning, given the hysteria in the UK in particular. The researcher said that there was no such concern here in the Philippines. It did not attract any more attention than IVF did.


My next stop was the Freshwater Aquatic Centre, where Afican fish called telapia are bred. I was introduced to a member of the first batch of telapia brought over from Africa some 16 years ago. He was so old that he wasn't used for breeding any more, but many of the thousands of telapia in Filipino fish farms today are his descendants. The breeding methods here are of the conventional type. They measure all the characteristcs of a batches of fish bred at the centre (length, weight, speed of maturation, etc) then they pick the best ones and use them to breed the next generation. In this way they have increased the average size of a telapia by 40% in the past 16 years. Like all the other centres that I visited, they have a gene bank and keep samples of fish eggs and sperm from every year of breeding.


Finally, I stopped to photograpah the old library of Central State Luzon University, which was destroyed in an earthquake in 1990. It demonstrates the contrasts at this university. On the one hand there is world-class research in zoonotic diseases and nutrition using advanced techniques like genetic modification and animal cloning. On the other hand, the dormitories only have running water at certain times of the day and mosquitoes at all times of the day, and no-one had quite gotten around to clearing up the rubble from the old library. It wasn't a monument, it just wasn't a priority either.