Red coral colonies survive a decade after being transplanted in the Medes Islands

Preventing the impact of climate change on transplanted coral

 News Release 18-Mar-2025

University of Barcelona

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The study confirms the success of some actions to restore corals seized from poaching — actions promoted by the UB and the ICM (CSIC) — which have allowed both the survival of the transplanted corals and the rapid recovery of the associated coral community.

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Credit: MedRecover Research Group

The red coral colonies that were transplanted a decade ago on the seabed of the Medes Islands have survived successfully. They are very similar to the original communities and have contributed to the recovery of the functioning of the coral reef, a habitat where species usually grow very slowly. Thus, these colonies, seized years ago from illegal fishing, have found a second chance to survive, thanks to the restoration actions of the University of Barcelona teams, in collaboration with the Institute of Marine Sciences (ICM - CSIC), to transplant seized corals and mitigate the impact of poaching.

These results are now presented in an article in the journal Science Advances. Its main authors are the experts Cristina Linares and Yanis Zentner, from the UB’s Faculty of Biology and the Biodiversity Research Institute (IRBio), and Joaquim Garrabou, from the ICM (of the Spanish National Research Centre, CSIC).

 

The findings indicate that actions to replant corals seized by the rural corps from poachers are effective not only in the short term — the first results were published after four years — but also in the long term, i.e. ten years after they have been initiated. Under the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021-2030) and the European Union’s Nature Restoration Act, the paper stands out as one of the few research studies that has evaluated the success of long-term restoration in the marine ecosystem.

Transplanted colonies surviving and helping to structure the coralligenous habitat

Red coral (Corallim rubrum) poaching has been a threat even in marine protected areas and, in addition, due to the slow growth of this species, populations are still far from pristine conditions. The team’s restoration work was carried out in the Montgrí, Medes Islands and Baix Ter Natural Park, “at a depth of around 18 metres, in a little-visited area where no poaching has been observed in recent years and which, for the moment, does not seem to be affected by climate change”, explains Cristina Linares, professor at the UB’s Department of Evolutionary Biology, Ecology and Environmental Sciences.

The results of this research study, which has received funding from both the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities and the European Union’s Next Generation funds, reveal the high survival of the transplanted red coral colonies after so many years. “The restored community — i.e. the set of organisms in the environment where the transplanted coral is found — has been completely transformed in just ten years”, says Linares. “The community has also assimilated the structure expected in natural red coral communities. This reinforces the key value of habitat-generating species such as red coral, and the benefits that can grow from targeting them for conservation and restoration actions”, he continues.

 

Preventing the impact of climate change on transplanted coral
​​​​​​​

Rising temperatures and heatwaves caused by global change are causing mortality in populations of red coral and 50 other species in the Mediterranean. In addition, the long tradition of coral fishing for the jewellery world also threatens its colonies, which have reduced presence and a decisive ecological role in areas of difficult access and high depths. “If there is no additional impact — such as climate change —, we expect to reach a well-developed community on a much faster timescale than we originally expected”, says Yanis Zentner (UB - IRBio), predoctoral researcher and first author of the paper.

“It is a biological community with a very slow dynamic, so being able to transplant coral colonies of a certain size means ‘gaining’ a lot of time in ecological restoration. However, while the rapid transformation observed in this study is encouraging, whether this system is capable of fully restoring the functionality of a pristine coral reef remains to be seen”, warns Zentner.

Regarding red coral, it only makes sense to apply this methodology in coralligenous habitats or in caves, which is the natural habitat of the species. “In addition, it is advisable to avoid the potential impact of climate change and to carry out these actions from a depth of 30 metres, where the effect of global change is less”, says the expert.

Assessing restoration with long-term timescales

Traditionally, the success of this marine restoration actions profile of is evaluated based on the short-term survival of the transplanted organisms. “This approach is limited, especially for long-lived species such as coral, which could reach a longevity of 50 to 100 years. Many target species need more time to recover than the monitoring period, which mostly focuses on the first few years after restoration. Similarly, it also does not allow for the assessment of ecosystem-scale changes, such as the recovery of functions and services”, say Linares and Zentner.

The new study is a first step towards working at relevant temporal and ecological scales, carrying out long-term monitoring through community-scale analyses, which allow inferring changes in the functions and services provided by the species present. “More specifically, dominance and functional diversity are indicators that allow us to quantify changes in the functional structure of the coralligenous habitat: in this case, we have been able to detect an increase in the structural complexity and resilience of the restored community”, note the experts.

Tropical systems are the marine habitats where most coral restoration has been carried out, but its long-term success has often not been assessed, which is important given the increasing impact of climate change. In the Mediterranean, the research team has been involved in previous studies on the restoration of corals and gorgonians rescued from fishing nets and transplanted to protected deep sea beds.

Globally, restoration actions in the marine environment are still at an early stage. In particular, the first scientific methodologies are only just being tested, and most are aimed more at mitigating an impact than at restoring an entire ecosystem. At the same time, there is still a significant lack of best practice protocols for these actions.

“For restoration to be efficient, the source of stress that has degraded the system to be restored must be removed. In the case of the marine environment, due to global change, there is practically no corner of the world that is protected from human impacts. Therefore, before restoring, we must consider how to protect the sea effectively”, note the researchers. “On the other hand, — they add — we must manage to increase the scale at which we work, since, due to the impediments of working in the marine environment, many restoration actions (including this study) are carried out on a small local scale, and have a low return at the ecosystem scale”.

  

The study reveals the high survival of the transplanted red coral colonies after so many years

The red coral colonies that were transplanted a decade ago on the seabed.

These colonies, seized years ago from illegal fishing, have found a second chance to survive,

Credit

MedRecover Research Group

Journal

Science Advances

DOI

10.1126/sciadv.ado5249 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Active restoration of a long-lived octocoral drives rapid functional recovery in a temperate reef

 

To the brain, Esperanto and Klingon appear the same as English or Mandarin

A new study finds natural and invented languages elicit similar responses in the brain’s language-processing network.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Within the human brain, a network of regions has evolved to process language. These regions are consistently activated whenever people listen to their native language or any language in which they are proficient.

A new study by MIT researchers finds that this network also responds to languages that are completely invented, such as Esperanto, which was created in the late 1800s as a way to promote international communication, and even to languages made up for television shows such as “Star Trek” and “Game of Thrones.”

To study how the brain responds to these artificial languages, MIT neuroscientists convened nearly 50 speakers of these languages over a single weekend. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the researchers found that when participants listened to a constructed language in which they were proficient, the same brain regions lit up as those activated when they processed their native language.

“We find that constructed languages very much recruit the same system as natural languages, which suggests that the key feature that is necessary to engage the system may have to do with the kinds of meanings that both kinds of languages can express,” says Evelina Fedorenko, an associate professor of neuroscience at MIT, a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and the senior author of the study.

The findings help to define some of the key properties of language, the researchers say, and suggest that it’s not necessary for languages to have naturally evolved over a long period of time or to have a large number of speakers.

“It helps us narrow down this question of what a language is, and do it empirically, by testing how our brain responds to stimuli that might or might not be language-like,” says Saima Malik-Moraleda, an MIT postdoc and the lead author of the paper, which appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Convening the conlang community

Unlike natural languages, which evolve within communities and are shaped over time, constructed languages, or “conlangs,” are typically created by one person who decides what sounds will be used, how to label different concepts, and what the grammatical rules are.

Esperanto, the most widely spoken conlang, was created in 1887 by Ludwik Zamenhok, who intended it to be used as a universal language for international communication. Currently, it is estimated that around 60,000 people worldwide are proficient in Esperanto.

In previous work, Fedorenko and her students have found that computer programming languages, such as Python — another type of invented language — do not activate the brain network that is used to process natural language. Instead, people who read computer code rely on the so-called multiple demand network, a brain system that is often recruited for difficult cognitive tasks.

Fedorenko and others have also investigated how the brain responds to other stimuli that share features with language, including music and nonverbal communication such as gestures and facial expressions.

“We spent a lot of time looking at all these various kinds of stimuli, finding again and again that none of them engage the language-processing mechanisms,” Fedorenko says. “So then the question becomes, what is it that natural languages have that none of those other systems do?”

That led the researchers to wonder if artificial languages like Esperanto would be processed more like programming languages or more like natural languages. Similar to programming languages, constructed languages are created by an individual for a specific purpose, without natural evolution within a community. However, unlike programming languages, both conlangs and natural languages can be used to convey meanings about the state of the external world or the speaker’s internal state.

To explore how the brain processes conlangs, the researchers invited speakers of Esperanto and several other constructed languages to MIT for a weekend conference in November 2022. The other languages included Klingon (from “Star Trek”), Na’vi (from “Avatar”), and two languages from “Game of Thrones” (High Valyrian and Dothraki). For all of these languages, there are texts available for people who want to learn the language, and for Esperanto, Klingon, and High Valyrian, there is even a Duolingo app available.

“It was a really fun event where all the communities came to participate, and over a weekend, we collected all the data,” says Malik-Moraleda, who co-led the data collection effort with former MIT postbac Maya Taliaferro, now a PhD student at New York University.

During that event, which also featured talks from several of the conlang creators, the researchers used fMRI to scan 44 conlang speakers as they listened to sentences from the constructed language in which they were proficient. The creators of these languages — who are co-authors on the paper — helped construct the sentences that were presented to the participants.

While in the scanner, the participants also either listened to or read sentences in their native language, and performed some nonlinguistic tasks for comparison. The researchers found that when people listened to a conlang, the same language regions in the brain were activated as when they listened to their native language.

Common features

The findings help to identify some of the key features that are necessary to recruit the brain’s language processing areas, the researchers say. One of the main characteristics driving language responses seems to be the ability to convey meanings about the interior and exterior world — a trait that is shared by natural and constructed languages, but not programming languages.

“All of the languages, both natural and constructed, express meanings related to inner and outer worlds. They refer to objects in the world, to properties of objects, to events,” Fedorenko says. “Whereas programming languages are much more similar to math. A programming language is a symbolic generative system that allows you to express complex meanings, but it’s a self-contained system: The meanings are highly abstract and mostly relational, and not connected to the real world that we experience.”

Some other characteristics of natural languages, which are not shared by constructed languages, don’t seem to be necessary to generate a response in the language network.

“It doesn’t matter whether the language is created and shaped over time by a community of speakers, because these constructed languages are not,” Malik-Moraleda says. “It doesn’t matter how old they are, because conlangs that are just a decade old engage the same brain regions as natural languages that have been around for many hundreds of years.”

To further refine the features of language that activate the brain’s language network, Fedorenko’s lab is now planning to study how the brain responds to a conlang called Lojban, which was created by the Logical Language Group in the 1990s and was designed to prevent ambiguity of meanings and promote more efficient communication.

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The research was funded by MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department, the Simons Center for the Social Brain, the Frederick A. and Carole J. Middleton Career Development Professorship, and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

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Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2313473122 

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Constructed languages are processed by the same brain mechanisms as natural languages

Article Publication Date

17-Mar-2025

 

Unveiling the mysterious “sprite fireworks” over the Himalayas

Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences

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The photo, titled Cosmic Fireworks, won the Skyscapes category of the 2023 Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition, hosted by the Royal Observatory Greenwich. This breathtaking image not only showcases the awe-inspiring beauty of sprite discharges but also sparks public interest in extreme weather phenomena and their scientific significance.

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Credit: Angel An

Have you ever heard of—or even seen—red lightning? These are not animated characters but real atmospheric phenomena known as electrical discharges that occur high above thunderstorms. Scientists refer to them as "red sprites", named for their jellyfish-like appearance and vivid red flashes. Now, imagine witnessing these mesmerizing displays over the world's highest mountain range—the Himalayas!

On the night of May 19, 2022, two Chinese astrophotographers, Angel An and Shuchang Dong, captured a spectacular display of over one hundred red sprites over the Himalayas. The observation site, located on the southern Tibetan Plateau near Pumoyongcuo Lake—one of the region's three sacred lakes—revealed a breathtaking celestial event. Among the phenomena captured were dancing sprites, rare secondary jets, and the first-ever recorded case in Asia of green airglow at the base of the nighttime ionosphere, dubbed “ghost sprites”. This extraordinary event attracted global attention and was widely covered by major media outlets.

A recent study published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences by Professor Gaopeng Lu and his team at the University of Science and Technology of China sheds light on the driving force behind this grand “sprite fireworks”—lightning and thunderstorms.

“This event was truly remarkable,” said Professor Gaopeng Lu. “By analyzing the parent lightning discharges, we discovered that the sprites were triggered by high-peak current positive cloud-to-ground lightning strikes within a massive mesoscale convective system. This suggests that thunderstorms in the Himalayan region have the potential to produce some of the most complex and intense upper-atmospheric electrical discharges on Earth.”

Lacking precise timestamps for detailed analysis, the research team developed an innovative method to synchronize video time using satellite trajectories and star field analysis. This innovative approach allowed them to determine the exact occurrence times of the sprites and link them to their parent lightning discharges. One of the anonymous reviewers praised the technique, highlighting its potential as a reliable timing tool for citizen scientists contributing to scientific observations.

The study revealed that the parent lightning discharges occurred within stratiform precipitation regions of a mesoscale convective complex stretching from the Ganges Plain to the southern foothills of the Tibetan Plateau. This event recorded the highest number of sprites during a single thunderstorm in South Asia, suggesting that thunderstorms in this region possess upper-atmospheric discharge capabilities comparable to those in the U.S. Great Plains and offshore European storms. Moreover, the findings indicate that these storms may generate even more complex discharge structures, potentially influencing atmospheric coupling processes with significant physical and chemical effects.

Red Sprites [VIDEO] | 

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Journal

Advances in Atmospheric Sciences

DOI

10.1007/s00376-024-4143-5 

Article Title

Massive Outbreak of Red Sprites in South Asia Observed from the Tibetan Plateau

Article Publication Date

17-Mar-2025

See you in the funny papers: How superhero comics tell the story of Jewish America

A five-story replica of a stamp of Superman in 1998 in Cleveland, home of the superhero’s creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. 

AP Photo/Tony Dejak, File Miriam Eve Mora, University of Michigan

The Conversation

March 16, 2025

Nearly a hundred years ago, a hastily crafted spaceship crash-landed in Smallville, Kansas. Inside was an infant – the sole survivor of a planet destroyed by old age. Discovering he possessed superhuman strength and abilities, the boy committed to channeling his power to benefit humankind and champion the oppressed.

This is the story of Superman: one of the most recognizable characters in history, who first reached audiences in the pages of Action Comics in 1938 – what many fans consider the most important single comic in history.

As a historian of American immigration and ethnicity – and a lifelong comics fan – I read this well-known bit of fiction as an allegory about immigration and the American dream. It is, at its core, the ultimate story of an immigrant in the early 20th century, when many people saw the United States as a land with open gates, providing such orphans of the world an opportunity to reach their fullest potential.

Taken in and raised by a rural family under the name Clark Kent, the baby was imbued with the best qualities of America. But, like all immigrant stories, Kent’s is a two-parter. There is also the emigrant story: the story of how Kal-El – Superman’s name at birth – was driven from his home on Planet Krypton to embrace a new land.

That origin story reflects the heritage of Superman’s creators: two of the many Jewish American writers and artists who ushered in the Golden Age of comic books.
Jewish history…

A card from 1909, found in the Jewish Museum of New York, depicts Jewish Americans welcoming Jews emigrating from Russia.Heritage Images/Hulton Archive via Getty Images

The American comics industry was largely started by the children of Jewish immigrants. Like most publishing in the early 20th century, it was centered in New York City, home to the country’s largest Jewish population. Though they were still a very small minority, immigration had swelled the United States’ Jewish population more than a thousandfold: from roughly 3,000 in 1820 to roughly 3,500,000 in 1920.

Comic books had not yet been devised, but strip comics in newspapers were a regular feature. They began in the late 19th century with popular stories featuring recurring characters, such as Richard F. Outcault’s “Yellow Kid” and “the Little Bears” by Jimmy Swinnerton.

A few Jewish creators were able to break into the industry, such as Harry Hershfield and his comic “Abie the Agent.” Hershfield’s success was exceptional in three ways: He broke into mainstream newspaper comics, his titular character was also Jewish, and he never adopted an anglicized pen name – as many other Jewish creators felt they must.

Shoppers and vendors outside of haberdasheries on Hester Street in a Jewish neighborhood of New York’s Lower East Side around 1900.Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Generally, however, Jews were barred from the more prestigious jobs in newspaper cartooning. A more accessible alternative was the cheaper, second-tier business of reprinting previously published works.

In 1933, second-generation Jewish New Yorker Max Gaines – born Maxwell Ginzburg – began a new publication, “Funnies on Parade.” “Funnies” pulled together preexisting comic strips, reproducing them in saddle-stitched pamphlets that became the standard for the American comics industry. He went on to found All-American Comics and Educational Comics.

Another publisher, Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, founded National Allied Publications in 1934 and published the first comic book to feature entirely new material, rather than reprints of newspaper strips. He joined forces with two Jewish immigrants, Harry Donenfeld and Jack Leibowitz. At National, they created and distributed Detective and Action Comics – the precursors to DC, which would become one of the two largest comics distributors in history.

It was at Action Comics that Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, two second-generation immigrants from a Jewish neighborhood in Cleveland, found a home for Superman. It would also be where two Jewish kids from the Bronx, Bob Kane and Bill Finger – born Robert Kahn and Milton Finger – found a home for their character, Batman, in 1939.

Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, creators of Superman, pictured in the 1940s.New Yorker/Wikimedia Commons

The success of these characters inspired another prominent second-generation Jewish New Yorker, pulp magazine publisher Moses “Martin” Goodman, to enter comics production with his line, “Timely Comics.” The 1939 debut featured what would become two of the early industry’s most well-known superheroes: the Sub-Mariner and the Human Torch. These characters would be mainstays of Goodman’s company, even when it became better known as Marvel Comics.

Thus were born the “big two,” Marvel and DC, from humble Jewish origins.
…and Jewish stories

The creation and popularization of superhero comics isn’t Jewish just because of its history. The content was, too, reflecting the values and priorities of Jewish America at the time: a community influenced by its origins and traditions, as well as the American mainstream.

Some of the most foundational early comics echo Jewish history and texts, such as Superman’s story, which parallels the Jewish hero Moses. The biblical prophet was born in Egypt, where the Israelites were enslaved, and soon after Pharaoh ordered the murder of all their newborn sons. Similarly, Superman’s people, the Kryptonians, faced an existential threat: the destruction of their planet.

Moses’ life is saved when his mother floats him down the Nile in a hastily constructed and tarred basket. Kal-El, too, is sent away to safety in a hastily constructed craft. Both boys are raised by strangers in a strange land and destined to become heroes to their people.

Comics also reflected the feelings and fears of Jews in a moment in time. For example, in the wake of Kristallnacht – the 1938 night of widespread organized attacks on German Jews and their property, which many historians see as a turning point toward the Holocaust – Finger and Kane debuted Batman’s Gotham City. The city is a dark contrast to Superman’s shining metropolis, a place where villains lurked around every corner and reflected the darkest sides of modern humanity.

Some comic artists and writers used their platform to make political statements. Jack Kirby – born Kurtzberg – and Hymie “Joe” Simon, creators of Captain America, explained that they “knew what was going on over in Europe. World events gave us the perfect comic-book villain, Adolf Hitler, with his ranting, goose-stepping and ridiculous moustache. So we decided to create the perfect hero who would be his foil.” The comic debut of Captain America in 1941 featured a brightly colored cover with the brand-new hero punching Adolf Hitler in the face.

In later generations, characters penned by Jewish authors continued to grapple with issues of outsider status, hiding aspects of their identity, and maintaining their determination to better the world in spite of rejection from it. Think of Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four and X-Men. All of these were created by Stan Lee – another Jewish creator, born Stanley Martin Lieber – who was hired into Timely Comics at just 17 years old.

With so many of the most popular comics written by New York Jews, and centered in the city, much of New York’s Yiddish-tinged, recognizably Jewish language made its way onto the pages. Lee’s Spider-Man, for example, frequently exclaims “oy!” or calls bad guys “putz” or “shmuck.”

In later years, Jewish authors such as Chris Claremont and Brian Michael Bendis introduced or took over mainstream characters who were overtly Jewish – reflecting an emerging comfort with a more public Jewish ethnic identity in America. In X-Men, for example, Kitty Pryde recounts her encounters with contemporary antisemitism. Magneto, who is at times friend but often foe of the X-Men, developed a backstory as a Holocaust survivor.

History is never solely about retelling; it’s about gaining a better understanding of complex narratives. Trends in comics history, particularly in the superhero genre, offer insight into the ways that Jewish American anxieties, ambitions, patriotism and sense of place in the U.S. continually changed over the 20th century. To me, this understanding makes the retelling of these classic stories even more meaningful and entertaining.

Miriam Eve Mora, Managing Director of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute, University of Michigan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How an unexpected observation, a 10th-century recipe and an explorer’s encounter with a cabbage thief upend what we know about collard greens’ journey to the American South

Photo by Ronan Furuta on Unsplash

The Conversation

March 16, 2025

For generations, collard greens have formed an important part of African and African-diaspora diets around the world.

The leafy vegetable is a quintessential part of African American, Southern and “soul” foods in the United States. Collards are also important in some regions of Africa: In Kenya, where they are called sukuma wiki, they are one of the most commonly consumed vegetables.

Until now, the consensus scholarly view has held that collards came to the Americas early in the 16th century with Spanish, Portuguese or English Europeans, who introduced collards as a garden plant that was then taken up by enslaved Africans.

But our discovery of collards growing in southern Moroccan oases gardens put us on a quest to better understand the path collards took to arrive in the American South. Our new research suggests that they arrived in Morocco with early Muslim traders, adding the potential of a stop in North Africa hundreds of years before they journeyed to North America.

Moreover, the similarity in recipes from Morocco and the American South supports the idea that Moroccan oases may have been a stop in the journey collards took to America.
A green path

Collard greens belong to the species Brassica oleracea, which also includes broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kohlrabi and Brussels sprouts. The huge genetic diversity within the species has complicated research into where collards were first domesticated and how they moved around the world.

Evidence suggests collards were likely domesticated in the Mediterranean, from wild relatives also found on coastlines around the Mediterranean. Their path from the Mediterranean to the American South remains unclear.
A new theory sprouts

As ethnobiologists and researchers interested in traditional foodways, we have been studying leafy vegetables across Morocco for 20-plus years. Yet we had never seen collards growing in any of the other areas across north and central Morocco we had worked in.

While working in date palm oases in southern Morocco, we were, therefore, surprised to find collard greens in the gardens of African diaspora communities that are descended from enslaved people brought across the Sahara.

Suspecting that the presence of collards in an important ancient trade hub might shed new light on the history of the plant and its journey to the Americas, we began collecting stories, proverbs and recipes from the African diaspora communities and searching for potential links to other places where collards are culturally important.

Tracking down information was complicated: Leafy vegetables rarely show up in the archaeological record, and historical texts use the same words to refer to heading cabbage – what most people call “cabbage” today – and nonheading cabbages such as collards and kale, which were more common than heading varieties until fairly recently.

Historical texts in English refer to both as “cabbage” or “cole.” In Spanish, both are called “cole”; and “couve” is used similarly in Portuguese. Arabic texts use “kornub” to refer to both. However, this was one important clue to the ancient Arabic origins of collards in Morocco. In Moroccan Arabic, cabbage is called “mkouwer” or “melfouf,” and cauliflower is usually called “chou-fleur” – a word derived from the French. Moroccans only rarely use “kurunb,” from classical Arabic, to refer to cauliflower.

The communities that grow collards in Morocco call it by the ancient Arabic name “kornub.”

As we searched, we were astonished to find a recipe in a 10th-century cookbook from Baghdad that was almost identical to how people in Morocco cook collards. Moreover, the cookbook describes in detail a variety of cabbage with smooth leaves called “kurunb Nabati,” or “Nabatean cabbage,” where only the leaves are eaten. That, and the fact that the preparation description refers clearly to leaves rather than heads, offered further evidence that this was referencing collard greens.

We pieced together a possible historical route from Baghdad to Morocco from the rare cases when historical documents included specific descriptions of the plant.

One report from a British explorer who traveled through Algeria in 1860 included notes about finding various types of “cabbage” and about a man who had stolen cabbage and had it concealed under his shirt – suggesting flat leaves rather than heads.

Moreover, a colleague at the Oman Botanic Garden told us that collards are grown in oases gardens in the Hajar mountains of Oman.
Middle East to American South

After piecing it all together, our research suggests that collards arrived in Morocco from Iraq and Oman with early Kharijite Muslim traders in the eighth century. These are the same people who founded the great city of Sijilmasa and ran the early trade routes that carried gold and enslaved humans across the Sahara.

The presence of collards in Moroccan oases also necessitates a reconsideration of the currently held assumption of how the vegetable arrived in the Americas.

We couldn’t find concrete evidence of connections between Morocco and the arrival of collards in the Americas, so it’s impossible to say that the consensus scholarly view on collards’ journey is wrong. Still, the currently held assumption that collards arrived in the Americas with settlers and were adopted by Africans who used them as a substitute in leafy green recipes from Africa needs revisiting.

Indeed, unlike common collards recipes, most leafy vegetable recipes from West and Central Africa include fish, ground nuts or peanuts and palm oil. Compared with leafy vegetable recipes from West Africa, the collard recipes used in the United States today are strikingly similar to those from Morocco and 10th-century Baghdad. The similarity in recipes from Morocco and the American South suggests that Moroccan oases may have been a stop in the journey collards took to America.

The story of collards in the Moroccan oases is an opportunity to consider the ways the transatlantic trade systems were entangled with the trade routes and systems before them, especially the trans-Saharan trade routes, and what these entanglements mean for the foodways of Africans and African diasporas around the world.

Bronwen Powell, Associate Professor of Geography, African Studies and Anthropology, Penn State and Abderrahim Ouarghidi, Assistant Teaching Professor of African Studies and Anthropology, Penn State

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.