Honorverse ramblings and musings

stewart wrote:Why "domesticate" purple thorn when the 'cats have already shown a preference for celery.
The extra-Sphinxian colonies can take Sphinx-strain celery. It will likely be easier to grow on Earth-terra-formed planets that can support other terran foods.
It also avoids introducing a non-native species plant (purple thorn) onto other planets.

-- Stewart

As fallsfromtrees noted, Sphinxian Celery might be just regular celery when not grown on Sphinx.

Domesticate Purple Thorn to provide a supply of the "natural" supplement for study and extraction; The Celery version is slightly different and there may be some benefit to the Purple Thorn version not yet known.

Also, despite a preference for Celery, Purple Thorn can be grown without greenhouses. If a greenhouse full of celery should fail, the entire crop would be lost. Increasing the supply and accessibility of Purple Thorn would be a reasonable hedge against celery crop failure.

Weird Harold wrote:

stewart wrote:Why "domesticate" purple thorn when the 'cats have already shown a preference for celery.
The extra-Sphinxian colonies can take Sphinx-strain celery. It will likely be easier to grow on Earth-terra-formed planets that can support other terran foods.
It also avoids introducing a non-native species plant (purple thorn) onto other planets.

-- Stewart

As fallsfromtrees noted, Sphinxian Celery might be just regular celery when not grown on Sphinx.

Domesticate Purple Thorn to provide a supply of the "natural" supplement for study and extraction; The Celery version is slightly different and there may be some benefit to the Purple Thorn version not yet known.

Also, despite a preference for Celery, Purple Thorn can be grown without greenhouses. If a greenhouse full of celery should fail, the entire crop would be lost. Increasing the supply and accessibility of Purple Thorn would be a reasonable hedge against celery crop failure.

I think that is like trying to get kids to prefer buttermilk over ice-cream for high calorie dairy. My guess is that given a choice, the 'cats will always go for the celery patch.

SharkHunter wrote:I think that is like trying to get kids to prefer buttermilk over ice-cream for high calorie dairy. My guess is that given a choice, the 'cats will always go for the celery patch.

The idea is to give them a choice.

More specifically domestication would be for the scientists to study purple thorn and the natural supplement, because it is different. Then a source for the supplement can be designed for each extra-sphinxian colony and/or the supplement can be extracted and shipped in tablet or potion form to maintain the telempathic senses of 'Cats assigned as bodyguards.

Weird Harold wrote:

stewart wrote:Why "domesticate" purple thorn when the 'cats have already shown a preference for celery.
The extra-Sphinxian colonies can take Sphinx-strain celery. It will likely be easier to grow on Earth-terra-formed planets that can support other terran foods.
It also avoids introducing a non-native species plant (purple thorn) onto other planets.

-- Stewart

As fallsfromtrees noted, Sphinxian Celery might be just regular celery when not grown on Sphinx.

Domesticate Purple Thorn to provide a supply of the "natural" supplement for study and extraction; The Celery version is slightly different and there may be some benefit to the Purple Thorn version not yet known.

Also, despite a preference for Celery, Purple Thorn can be grown without greenhouses. If a greenhouse full of celery should fail, the entire crop would be lost. Increasing the supply and accessibility of Purple Thorn would be a reasonable hedge against celery crop failure.

The bold is exactly what my MD friends are saying. They also say that there may be benefits from the more natural Purple Thorn that the cats may begin to lose and suffer a deficiency of a much needed supplement.

Weird Harold wrote:

SharkHunter wrote:I think that is like trying to get kids to prefer buttermilk over ice-cream for high calorie dairy. My guess is that given a choice, the 'cats will always go for the celery patch.

The idea is to give them a choice.

More specifically domestication would be for the scientists to study purple thorn and the natural supplement, because it is different. Then a source for the supplement can be designed for each extra-sphinxian colony and/or the supplement can be extracted and shipped in tablet or potion form to maintain the telempathic senses of 'Cats assigned as bodyguards.

Personal preference only here but dehydrated celery? Blecch!! But likely the 'cats would go "yumm, mind brightening jelly beans!"

Weird Harold wrote:

stewart wrote:Why "domesticate" purple thorn when the 'cats have already shown a preference for celery.
The extra-Sphinxian colonies can take Sphinx-strain celery. It will likely be easier to grow on Earth-terra-formed planets that can support other terran foods.
It also avoids introducing a non-native species plant (purple thorn) onto other planets.

-- Stewart

As fallsfromtrees noted, Sphinxian Celery might be just regular celery when not grown on Sphinx.

Domesticate Purple Thorn to provide a supply of the "natural" supplement for study and extraction; The Celery version is slightly different and there may be some benefit to the Purple Thorn version not yet known.

Also, despite a preference for Celery, Purple Thorn can be grown without greenhouses. If a greenhouse full of celery should fail, the entire crop would be lost. Increasing the supply and accessibility of Purple Thorn would be a reasonable hedge against celery crop failure.

SharkHunter wrote:I think that is like trying to get kids to prefer buttermilk over ice-cream for high calorie dairy. My guess is that given a choice, the 'cats will always go for the celery patch.

Nice comparison. But the kids can always have their dessert (celery) but not until they've had their dinner (Purple Thorn). And again, the native plant can be augmented for taste.

My friends worry that human meddling could end up hurting the cats in the long run by robbing them of nutrients that nature intended the cats to have. Sounds like a flavor of the Prime Directive to me.

They also say, that certain metals and nutrients introduced into the cats diet from Purple Thorn and living on Sphinx may act in tandem to produce other hidden benefits that the cats need. The cats not being native to any other planet might be for a reason. And Purple Thorn could be properly cultivated on Sphinx and shipped to Grayson, etc.

SharkHunter wrote:Personal preference only here but dehydrated celery? Blecch!! But likely the 'cats would go "yumm, mind brightening jelly beans!"

Perhaps there's a market for "Bright Mind Rabbit Rub" and other other Sphinxian celery spice mixes for cooking.

Forgot to mention that their discussion also includes possible long term effects of cats living on a much lower gravity planet. They say that that is a relatively new area of study even today.

-email snippet-
"Remember your movie "First Contact," Jodie Foster? The doctor said that the Russians loaned him the space station to stunt the cancerous assault on his cells. A severe change in gravity, either way, can have unforeseen effects on a physiology."

Cats born and raised on Grayson may begin to show negative development as a result of their non-Sphinxian environment. Pair that with the lost of Purple Thorn and native Sphinxian metals and ... ?

Weird Harold wrote:

stewart wrote:Why "domesticate" purple thorn when the 'cats have already shown a preference for celery.
The extra-Sphinxian colonies can take Sphinx-strain celery. It will likely be easier to grow on Earth-terra-formed planets that can support other terran foods.
It also avoids introducing a non-native species plant (purple thorn) onto other planets.

-- Stewart

As fallsfromtrees noted, Sphinxian Celery might be just regular celery when not grown on Sphinx.

Domesticate Purple Thorn to provide a supply of the "natural" supplement for study and extraction; The Celery version is slightly different and there may be some benefit to the Purple Thorn version not yet known.

Also, despite a preference for Celery, Purple Thorn can be grown without greenhouses. If a greenhouse full of celery should fail, the entire crop would be lost. Increasing the supply and accessibility of Purple Thorn would be a reasonable hedge against celery crop failure.

Sphinxian celery is regular celery that was genetically modified by Dr. Marjorie Harrington so that it would grow on Sphinx.

A Beautiful Friendship, Chapter 3 wrote:Celery was one of the terrestrial plants which hadn’t adapted well to the local planetary environment, and Stephanie’s mom had taken over the project trying to do something about that. She’d had to restart it almost from zero, unfortunately, because the geneticist who’d originally started it had been one of victims of the Plague’s final resurgence. In the end, she’d come up with an entirely new approach that was in the field test stage now, and the farmers’ reports she was reading to assess its effectiveness were where she’d first heard about the mysterious thefts. None of the thefts had been very big, and they had been scattered pretty widely.

The text is taken from the novel, not the novella in More Than Honor (this is one of the differences that came out when the novella was expanded into the novel).

Vince wrote:Sphinxian celery is regular celery that was genetically modified by Dr. Marjorie Harrington so that it would grow on Sphinx.

Right. Sphinxian celery does not need to be grown in a greenhouse. Marjorie Harrington had hers in a greenhouse because that was where she grew all her experimental crops, especially through the winter.