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Okay, welcome to another episode of
The Crime Pays, But Bodany doesn't podcast.

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Today, we have a very special
guest. I'm very excited about this,

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and he's actually in China right now, so there might be a little

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bit of a delay. There might
be a little bit of a lag in

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the conversations. You're just gonna have
to deal with that, but it might.

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You know, normally I like conversations
where people interject each other that way,

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if I say something dumb, someone
can cut me off before I go

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too deep with it, go down
a wormhole. But we're just not going

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to have that that luxury todays anyway. My guest today is Jeff Ollerton,

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who is a pollination biologist and researcher
and basically studies pollination ecology, which is

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something that I've become extremely interested in
and it's gotten me into entomology and just

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noticing all these little relationships that ten
years ago I never would have paid attention

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to. So, Jeff, how
are you doing? Doing really well?

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Joey, Real pleasure to be to
be here with you. I'm a longtime

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fan of the videos. I think
anyone who brings botany to the mass has

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got to be celebrated. So yeah, it's a real privilege. Thanks for

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having me, well, thank you, yeah, thank you for coming on.

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Yeah, man, I just you
know, I've got a little bit

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different of a demographic audience than most
botany botany podcast I suppose, but I

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think there's a little bit in there
for everybody. So anyway, tell everybody

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where you are right now. You
are in Kunming, You're in u Nan,

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that's right. I'm in Kunming,
in Yunnan, in China, working

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at the kun Ming Institute of Botany
for three months. So I've got a

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visiting professorship here and I'll be working
here for three months this year and next

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year and the year after that twenty
twenty six, working with a great Chinese

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pollination. The college is called doctor
zonzing In. And we've got Brazilians over

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here as well working with us too, So it's a it's a real international

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science fest if you like. Yeah, no, it's great. It's great.

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And Kunming Institute of Botany, I
know you've spoken with Peter Bernhardt about

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it. I mean, it's just
it's an amazing center of research here.

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A lot of taxonomic research, but
you know, genomic research, a lot

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of stuff around evolutionary biology, and
you know, the pollination ecology is really

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taken off here. Who funds it
is it? Is it funded by the

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government or is it private or what? So? Funding from different governmental levels.

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Mostly it's it's yeah, So Kunming
Institute of Botany is part of the

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Chinese Academy of Sciences, so it's
funded at that level. But also the

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specific funding that brings me over here
is from the Yunnan government, the province

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of United That's so nice, yeah, because in the United States we're defunding

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all this stuff. So yeah,
exactly exactly, and China has long gone

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the other way and has always seen
the incredible value of botany, of plant

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science and so on. Actually,
the the Brazilian post docs who are over

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here at the moment are being funded
by Brazil, I think by their state

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their state government might be might be
South parallel, but you know Brazil,

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you know, okay, it had
a little bit of a blip recently,

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but they seem to be back on
track and they're willing to fund basic research

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in botany. Ye when I was
in men As, Jerias and we were

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in real too, I mean,
there's a guy, there's a wealth of

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great botanists at the universities there.
There's a lot of really cool people studying

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really cool subjects. You know.
Yeah, yeah, I had a sorry,

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I had a real privilege of teaching
a one week course on pollination ecology

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back in twenty thirteen at University of
Campenis and then did a bit of a

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tour around giving lectures at universities and
so on, and going to a symposium.

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And the post grads there were just
phenomenal, just so committed, so

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tuned in to their subjects, and
I think almost all are possibly all of

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the postgrads who I worked with them
now have now got permanent positions at Brazilian

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university universities. They were just phenomenal. I don't want to get off track

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here, but I got to ask, what is the opinion of the It's

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the opinion among I mean among people, scientists and other countries. Are the

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United States and the direction that we're
headed. I mean, surely they hear

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about this, like closing or bariums, defunding programs, you know, all

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this stuff. I mean, without
going into it too much, you know,

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I don't want to be a drag, but what do you what do

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you hear. I mean, it
seems really silly, what's going on in

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my country. There's a lot of
that sort of stuff, which you know,

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you talk to Chinese botanists, for
example, and they just don't understand.

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They say, why why is this
happening? European scientists as well,

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you know, just can't figure out. I mean, I mean, you

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know, we can talk about cultural
differences and so on, and you know,

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the Chinese may say, you know, why are they doing this?

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Is it something about the American culture? What is it that we don't Understanduropeans

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who hopefully, you know, kind
of culturally more similar to what's going on

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in America, they don't understand it
either. But then then again, you

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know, it's not just an American
phenomenon. You know, you probably know

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what's happening at Q at the moment. They've got this idea to move the

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herbarium collection out to a tank called
Reading, which is what one hundred miles

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away something like that from Q.
That herbarium has been there for the best

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part of two hundred years, and
I mean it's a center of excellence for

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taxonomy, it's part of Q Gardens, and yet what seems to be purely

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for financial reasons. They want to
move it out and put it in a

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god forsaken industrial warehouse sight in Reading, and if you've ever been to Reading,

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you probably what they're gonna do with
the spot where the iberium is.

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They're going to try like rent it
out for corporate events and weddings or something

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like. That's what would happened in
America. They get rid of the irbarium

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and they're like, sorry, we've
got to make this a revenue stream.

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We're going to rent it out for
you know, TACKI corporate events and private

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weddings. It could be that,
or it could be for apartments, or

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it could be you know, god
knows what they'll there'll be money making behind

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it. Uh you know, yeah, it's it's I think ultimately it's it's

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all about the money. Yeah.
Well, I think America leads the way

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and creating a society of dummies.
I think that. I think there's like

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it. I think there's very there's
a lot of intention behind it, because

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I think that's what our economy is
predicated on. Unfortunately. And meanwhile,

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yeah, countries like China, I
hear about the stuff they're doing over there,

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and I'm like, Wow, they're
they're funding these things. They're going

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to have all these smart people,
you know, and we're going to be

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eating water Burger and driving everywhere and
getting diabetes at age thirty five. So

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anyway, all right, well,
moving at the brighter subjects. I just

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I could go on a rent.
It's it's hard for me, but it's

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you know, I just anyway,
yeah, I know, so you actually

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can I sorry, Joey, can
I say just one other thing there?

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I think you know, I was
talking to somebody yesterday who uh has actually

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worked at Q for for a long
time, and we had a long conversation

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about this, and actually, you
know, one of the the big you

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know, macro things that I think
is driving this is the move towards seeing

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botany as purely, purely through a
molecular lens. So the idea that we

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we don't actually need people to go
out in the field and collect plants,

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we don't actually need people to study
specimens in a herbarium or a botanic garden.

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We can do it all through through
looking at DNA or an age you

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know, mix proteo, mix all
of these things. And it's in its

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show so short sighted and that's where
a lot of the lot of the funding

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has gone. That's where a lot
of the money is going. But it

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is just incredibly short sighted. Yeah, it's a you can't study ecology through

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DNA alone. I mean, you
can't study the relationships that exist. You

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can't study all these cool phenomena just
by looking at DNA codes. I mean

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it's you know, I've been hearing
that for years, like four or five

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years, all this focus on molecular
versus on doing actual field work, and

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I don't understand why. I mean, the field work is the fun part

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of botany stud going out there to
study and get dirty and get rained on

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and get stung and get sunburnt and
all that. That's the fun part of

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who wants to spend their whole life
in a lab. It's the nice part

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is you get to spend some time
in the lab and then you go out

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and you get all messed up and
come back with what you found, study

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it. You know, where do
you think that comes from? I think

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part of it is is the fact
that it's easier to attract money if you

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got a bright, shiny new laboratory
that you can show people around you.

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You show a bunch of fundas,
uh, you know, a wizzy new

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DNA sequencing machine, and they go, Wow, fantastic that you show fundas

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his Joey, he's just come back
from the field. He smells like shit,

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and he's got cactus spines in his
ass. It doesn't have the same

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kind of impact. I feel like
you know me over We've never met in

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person, but I feel like you
know me. Cactus spines in his ass,

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some blood on his yeah, yeah, yeah, man, I don't.

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My friend Martin Grant has been saying
that forever this focused on moleculary and

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I think, yeah, it's for
money making and and there's some you know,

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if you decode life then you can
figure out what to exploit from it.

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Maybe or you can I don't know. Anyway, it sounds really boring

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and that fun so well, okay, so but moving along. I want

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to get into this because I I
you know, it was Peter Bernard actually

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was one of the main guys,
and you because you know he's had us

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on email chains forever. Uh looking
who got me into looking deeper at all

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this stuff? I mean, I
especially you know he's done a lot of

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work with orchids. He's always mentioned
what elevation are you h and kunming.

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There's a lot of orchid diversity there
isn't there? Yeah, there is.

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I think we're just under two thousand
meters. Wow. Wow, I need

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to work that out. And the
feet. But it's yeah, it's like

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sixty five sixty six hundred or seven
thousand feet maybe, yeah, yeah,

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something like that. It's it's high
enough to you know, if you walk

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up a steep slope, you can
you can feel of the heaviness in your

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in your chest. It's high enough
for that. But but orchids, among

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I mean of any flower type of
orchids especially are the ones to really get

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you looking deeper and being you know, realizing, Wow, there's a lot

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of complexity here. This is a
puzzle, you know, in the way

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society used flowers historically has been there. They're pretty, and that doesn't mean

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anything to me. I don't mean
that doesn't mean anything. I think it.

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I think a Chase Bank on fire
is pretty. I think that guy

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that paints Wells Fargo, you know, on paints canvases of Wells Fargo,

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you know, on flames and a
strip mall, I think that's a lot

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of people wouldn't think that's attractive.
Attract you know, attractiveness is just subjective.

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What's interesting to me about flowers is
what's you know, these the the

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ecology, these evolutionary relationships that have
existed for in some cases millions of years.

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That that you know, the specialization, the specificity, the the fact

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that there's orchids that mimic you know, orchandsperencis that mimic insect pheromones to get

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you know, the male insects over
there to pollinate them that they don't have

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to produce nectar that entrepreneurs. There's
so much there, it's crazy. And

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I and when you look closely at
some of these like I didn't even know.

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I guess I did because I took
a photo of it, but it

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didn't really click with me. That
you know, melianthus for in sense that

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photo of mine you used in your
your book, which I want to talk

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to you about the birds and flowers
but produced black nectar. You know,

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I could tell they were bird pollinated, they were red, They've got the

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the opening of the corolla is perfect
for a bird to get its head in

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there. But you know, when
you look at these things, suddenly flowers

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aren't just these these kind of corny
ideas of beauty. They're these incredible evolutionary

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puzzles where each one represents a different
riddle, where it's like, what did

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this evolve with? What pollinates it? If it's long, white tubular,

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probably a moth. If it's white
but not very tubular, probably a bat

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you know, blooms at night.
Uh, you know it's it's so it's

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so wild, man, it's so
cool? Is that? How did you

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get into all this? Were you
a botanist first? Were you a biologist

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versus? Did you know you wanted
to study pollination biology first? Or what?

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Okay, there's a lot of questions
in there you could you could answer

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one or a few or whatever whatever
you feel like. Where's a casual podcast,

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that's it. Let's some pet of
this. I mean, yeah,

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obviously, I completely agree. I
mean there is a surface beauty to the

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flowers. But you know, frankly, even the ugly flowers, or the

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flowers that most people would consider to
be ugly, have a beauty. You

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know, don't over intellectualizes, which
you could say an intellectual beauty. Once

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you really understand what what what the
flowers are? How they have evolved how

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they manipulate pollinators. That's one of
the things that really really fascinates me.

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Yeah, when when I was teaching
at universities and teaching on field courses and

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so on, one of the things
I used to enjoy doing was was showing

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students how just that, how,
how how flowers can manipulate pollinated behavior,

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but also pointing out that the flowers
themselves show behavior. Plants have behavior,

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yes, And for a lot of
these students who have been very you know,

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have been drawn to ecology or biology
because they want to study monkeys or

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birds or whales or sharks or whatever, suddenly to have their eyes opened about

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how plants can can can have behavior, can do things which are in their

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interest and not in the pollinators interest, you know, is mind opening for

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some of these these students. And
it's i it's a long standing debate about,

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you know, whether plants really do
have behavior. And I think for

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a lot of zoologists they like to
define behavior on animal terms. And if

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you define behavior in animal terms,
then by definition, plants and fungi don't

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have behavior. But if you have
a wider definition of what behavior is,

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then yeah, there's no reason to
say, the plumpstone. I'm glad you

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mentioned behavior because that I think plants
absolutely do have behavior. I mean,

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that's something that I just I just
started saying that. I mean, at

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some court, at some point over
the course the last four or five years,

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I just started saying, how does
it behave? You know, how

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does it behave? In an ecosystem? How does this thing behave? And

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I mentioned that in this book that
I just finished putting together, which was

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a total nightmare getting all this.
It was really stressful. It was like

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an emotionally traumatic experience. I'm sure
you've written a few books. I'm sure

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you know, but but I mentioned
that in the book, like how does

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it behave? You know, to
to think of a plant behaving? Many

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people don't because they think it's split
second time. They think in meediate,

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you know, in terms of immediate
time, if you zoom out in terms

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of you know, I guess like
temporally too, think more long term instead

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of you know, instant plant's not
going to wave a little leaf at you,

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you know, hi, not like
that. It's like a plant.

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The way it behaves in any system. It's relationship with pollinators, with fungi,

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with microbes with dispersers all that it's
it absolutely behaves. And there have

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been so many minutes, so many
moments when I've I've been in the field

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looking at something or encountering a new
plant and just perplexed by a flower and

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then suddenly it clicks, or or
pets perplexed by a trade about a plant,

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and then suddenly it clicks, and
I'm like, oh my god,

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that's incredible, and that I get
this shot of dopamine and serotonin, and

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that's what keeps me coming back.
Like you, you realize what it's doing,

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you know, whether it's it's getting
a moth to pollinator, or whether

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it's like a cactus that stops producing
a certain kind of spine at nine feet

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like BROWNINGI it does, and because
it evolved with herbivores eating on it and

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herbivores can't reach over nine feet anyway, or whether you're You're New Zealand you

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see all the heteroblasty among leaves,
juvenile leaves and adult leaves, and you

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know all this these traits occurring,
and it just, man, it feels

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so incredibly good. I don't know, I guess, like you, wow,

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this is I'm putting it together.
This is incredible. Yeah. Yeah,

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yeah, no, it's a kind
of a yeah, it's a it's

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a drug for the soul in a
sense. It does give you a just

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a yeah. I don only get
too hippy about it, but kind of

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a connection. You can get a
little it's fine, it's fine, we

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do that here. Get loose,
you know. Yeah, it's give you

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a good example. For about oh
got sixteen years, I think every year

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I took a field course to Tenerif
in the Canary Islands, which has got

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the most fabulous endemic flora. It
was the island that Charles Darwin really wanted

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to visit when when he first set
foot on the Beagle, set sail on

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the Beagle and they weren't allowed to
visit because of the outbreak of a cholera

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back in Britain, have to quarantine
the ship and so on. It's it's

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a well known story, but in
many ways the Canary Islands are a sort

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of an Atlantic version of the Galapaicus
Islands. You've got the same sort of

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radiation of species within there, and
so for you know, for about fifteen

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sixteen years, I took a field
course there every spring with some undergraduate students

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and just introduced them to the flora
and fauna of the islands. And one

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of the plants that we studied there
was a species of arisimum in brassicasi the

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cabbage family, where the flowers open
are very pure white on the first day,

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and by the second day they've started
to darken to a sort of a

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light maaw of color, and by
the time you get to sort of ten

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days, these things are a vivid
purple color. And you end up with

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an inflorescence with maybe ten or twelve
flowers on it, which from a distance

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looks purple, and when you get
in close you see white flower on the

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top and the rest of them are
purple. And so I got the students

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to do things like measuring nectar in
the flowers and looking at rates of bee

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visitation to the flowers because it's bee
pollinated. And what we found is that

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when the flowers first open, the
white flowers, they're full of nectar,

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and then as the flowers get a
little bit older, they gradually have less

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and less nectar. So by the
time the flowers are eight nine days old,

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they've completely ceased to produce nectar.
And what you find is that all

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of the visits by the bees are
to the white flowers because the bees learn

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that that's where they can find the
nectar. And of course, from the

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plant point of view, that's a
that's an advantage because they know they don't

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want the plants don't want the bees
to visit the old flowers that have already

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been pollinated. They want them to
visit the new flowers. So the plants

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are manipulating the behavior of these bees. Pavlov's dog kind of associate of learning

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thing going on here. But then
we wondered, you, so, why

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are they the plants keeping these purple
flowers. And so we did a whole

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set of experiments where we stripped off
all of the purple flowers or you know,

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made inflorescences of all white flowers.
And what we found was that the

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purple flowers are a long distance attraction
to the to the bees. They see

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them from a distance, and then
when they come in then they focus on

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the white flowers. It's like it's
still serving a purpose. Exactly. Wow,

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is echium is on the Canary Islands, right, isn't there? It

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is? Yeah, yeah, there's
been a radiation of echiums. So the

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famous one is is Echium wild prettii, which they it's called Tower of Jewels,

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which is this big monocarpic red flowered
species which occurs just on I think

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there's the main populations just on the
top of ten a Reef. I think

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there might be a population on one
of the other islands. But yeah,

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it's pretty much endemic. Now,
that's that's absolutely spectacular. Tell people what

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echiem is because I've only encountered it
in California, where sometimes it's invasive.

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But that's a hell of an invasive
plant, I'll be honest. I mean,

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even I see and I'm like Jesus
Christ, these are cool, these

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huge cones right of hundreds, if
not thousands of flowers. It's in varagnasi,

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so it's got this kind of like
hispid, those stiff hairs. But

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how many different species, I mean, it's just the when you say radiation.

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How many species are the time on
the Canary Islands. I think you're

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probably talking twenty something like that,
And each island seems to have its own

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endemic species or a couple of endemic
species, some of which are like these

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kind of monocarpic you know, mass
flaring things will grow for a couple of

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years and then they'll fire off their
inflorescence. Others are much more like you

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know, what we might expect.
In Europe we call them but blosses vipers,

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but losses is the famous one in
Britain, which are more smaller,

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kind of more herbatious things. And
then you've got others that are sort of

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woody shrubs with sometimes monocarpy stems flowering
stems on there. So it's yeah,

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it's it's a it's a pretty cool
genus. What is so what is your

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I guess with all the all the
cases you've studied, I mean, I

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guess I want to talk about bird
pollination too, But first I mean,

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just in terms of extremely specialized relationships, what is one of your favorite to

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highlight, you know, when you're
explaining to people how cool and specific these

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relationships can be between pollinators and plants. Yeah, so you mentioned or kids,

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but you know, with all due
respect to Peter, you know,

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orchids, smoke kids. It's it's
a it's a great it's a great family.

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But there are so many people who
who who've been studying studying or kids.

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It's it's it's not a family that
I've that I've really worked on.

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I'm much more interested in family of
possen ac and particularly the milkweeds within within

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a poss and ace. Uh And
you know, I know that when North

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Americans hear the word milkweed, they
think a sleepiers and they think monk applies

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and so on. But actually that
that subfamily of a possanace a Sclepio deidy,

315
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which used to be family A Sclepia
daisy, is worldwide, mainly centered

316
00:24:40,640 --> 00:24:44,440
in in the tropics, but also
in sort of dry subtropical areas, particularly

317
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in Africa and uh uh and the
Americas, and just has some absolutely fascinating,

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00:24:51,920 --> 00:24:56,799
highly specialized interactions but also a lot
of very generalized interactions as well.

319
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I mean, it's you know,
sleepier is being being a good example.

320
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So if I had to choose an
example, I probably talk about Syrupeggia,

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which there's at least one species that's
commonly grown as a houseplant, Serrupeggia woody

322
00:25:11,720 --> 00:25:17,039
I, sometimes called string of hearts
or hearts on a on a vine,

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which produces these these mottled, heart
shaped, slightly succulent leaves, but also

324
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these these really cool flask shaped flowers, and in fact, the name Cirrupeggia,

325
00:25:34,880 --> 00:25:41,160
if I remember rightly, translates as
wax fountain, and that's that's a

326
00:25:41,279 --> 00:25:48,640
pretty apt name for for those flowers. And they have a trapping system for

327
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the pollinators. They temporarily trap always
very small flies, I mean a millimeters

328
00:25:55,839 --> 00:26:02,799
two millimeters in length, within within
the flowers and they trap them for twenty

329
00:26:02,839 --> 00:26:08,160
four hours. The flies, can
you know, hunter infinectar, deposit pollen

330
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area that are on the mouth part, or pick up the pollen area that

331
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are within the flower, and then
they're released. And it's only in the

332
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last few years that we've begun to
realize just how complex the relationships are between

333
00:26:26,440 --> 00:26:33,440
these flowers and those flies. And
some of that work by a German woman

334
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called Anne Marie Heyduk who's worked with
some South African and some Chinese species,

335
00:26:38,440 --> 00:26:45,400
and what she discovered was that the
flowers she studied produce a scent which mimics

336
00:26:45,920 --> 00:26:52,640
the smell that is given off by
insects when they're being attacked by spiders.

337
00:26:53,200 --> 00:26:59,000
Yeah, yeah, that's crazy.
I just read at something that epipact does

338
00:26:59,599 --> 00:27:02,839
with that to that's crazy. So
how do these because I can see how

339
00:27:02,920 --> 00:27:04,680
someone could go down a wormhole,
you know, and you hear this with

340
00:27:04,799 --> 00:27:08,000
that creationists they're like, oh,
look the plant knows it's it's proof of

341
00:27:08,519 --> 00:27:11,279
Well, no, it's not.
Really. Turns out, these these chemical

342
00:27:11,319 --> 00:27:15,400
compounds are kind of they're not that
hard, you know, like the wiring

343
00:27:15,559 --> 00:27:18,039
is kind of already there, like
it's there. It's not that hard to

344
00:27:18,240 --> 00:27:22,720
end up there through natural selection.
Is that correct? Yeah, yeah,

345
00:27:22,839 --> 00:27:26,599
yeah, that's that's correct. So, so you know, the the flowers

346
00:27:26,640 --> 00:27:30,000
are attracting the flies, the group
of flies called jackal flies, which would

347
00:27:30,119 --> 00:27:36,880
normally be attracted to the the the
struggling insects in a in a in a

348
00:27:37,000 --> 00:27:41,519
spider's jaws, which which often you
know, will produce fluids from the body,

349
00:27:41,559 --> 00:27:45,000
and these jackal flies feed on those
fluids. So the plants are effectively

350
00:27:45,039 --> 00:27:52,880
they're mimicking the the the the the
insect that's been caught by the by the

351
00:27:52,000 --> 00:27:59,799
spider. I think, you know, the answer to to the creationist is

352
00:28:00,440 --> 00:28:04,039
there is that again, it's about
time scales. You know, we don't,

353
00:28:04,559 --> 00:28:07,480
as we said earlier, with plant
behavior, we don't have a good

354
00:28:10,160 --> 00:28:15,759
understanding, a good feeling for the
kinds of time scales that's involved here.

355
00:28:15,200 --> 00:28:18,839
We can talk about a million years
of evolution, ten million years of evolution,

356
00:28:19,400 --> 00:28:22,160
but we can't. We don't feel
that in our gut. You know.

357
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We might, you know, halfway
through the month, we might say,

358
00:28:26,160 --> 00:28:30,640
okay, another two weeks before I
get my next paycheck. We have

359
00:28:30,720 --> 00:28:36,000
a feeling for that, but we
don't have a failing for what are ten

360
00:28:36,119 --> 00:28:40,960
thousand years is or a million years
or a ten million years. We're unable

361
00:28:41,039 --> 00:28:42,680
to zoom out. Yeah, We're
unable to zoom out. And for me,

362
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the comparison al Wes make is,
look at what humans have done with

363
00:28:48,480 --> 00:28:52,480
human selection, human breeding, whether
it's dogs breeds, different breeds of dogs,

364
00:28:52,519 --> 00:28:56,440
all the same species, Brassica called
Robbie, you know, broccoli or

365
00:28:56,640 --> 00:29:00,480
broccoli, cauliflower, all the same
speed. She's of brassica, you know.

366
00:29:00,599 --> 00:29:03,279
And now imagine that if humans can
do that in ten thousand years,

367
00:29:03,279 --> 00:29:07,319
imagine what the environment can do in
millions. It's it's boom. It's easy

368
00:29:07,559 --> 00:29:11,680
to think about it, but it
takes out though, you know, yeah,

369
00:29:11,799 --> 00:29:19,799
yeah, exactly just after I arrived
here in Kunming, at the how

370
00:29:19,839 --> 00:29:23,079
long have I been here? In
five weeks? I had a two around

371
00:29:23,240 --> 00:29:30,200
the seed bank here they've got an
amazing seed banking facility and we had a

372
00:29:30,279 --> 00:29:32,880
we had a two around and one
of the things that they showed us was

373
00:29:33,000 --> 00:29:38,559
this set of test tubes and four
of them had soybean varieties in them,

374
00:29:38,799 --> 00:29:45,759
and the fifth test tube had the
wild progenitor of soybean in it. And

375
00:29:45,880 --> 00:29:52,920
the wild seeds are absolutely tiny,
you know, in comparison to to the

376
00:29:52,039 --> 00:29:56,200
varieties that. Yeah, as you
said, we've selected over centuries, possibly

377
00:29:56,279 --> 00:30:00,799
possibly thousands of years. There's there's
actually folk atograph. I took of that

378
00:30:00,920 --> 00:30:06,400
set of test chibs on my website, on my blog on my website if

379
00:30:06,480 --> 00:30:07,640
people want to, yeah, what
is that, let's give a shout out

380
00:30:07,640 --> 00:30:14,799
to that really quick. So if
you go to www dot Jeff Ollerton dot

381
00:30:14,960 --> 00:30:19,480
co dot uk and you'll see that
the blog is highlighted on they have I've

382
00:30:19,480 --> 00:30:23,599
got I'm doing a sort of a
China is a diary at the moment,

383
00:30:23,880 --> 00:30:27,680
and I think that particular blog post
is like the second or third that I

384
00:30:27,759 --> 00:30:30,720
put up there. But it's just
and it is, you know, it's

385
00:30:32,000 --> 00:30:34,839
I think I'll call it seeds have
a power beyond their side, and it's

386
00:30:34,920 --> 00:30:41,039
just, yeah, that the power
of human selection that we can do over

387
00:30:41,119 --> 00:30:47,319
the course of yeah, decades of
centuries. Imagine what natural selection can do

388
00:30:47,559 --> 00:30:51,759
over millions of years. Yeah yeah, Well I'm looking at you. I'm

389
00:30:51,799 --> 00:30:55,400
looking at at your book, at
this photo of these echia man, Jesus

390
00:30:55,559 --> 00:30:57,920
Christ. So the Canary Islands are
mostly volcanic, right, that's what it

391
00:30:57,960 --> 00:31:00,920
looks like. Yeah, yeah,
they're ovo coming here. I got these

392
00:31:02,000 --> 00:31:04,200
cones. Yeah, they look like
Hawaiian silver swords. They're just huge,

393
00:31:04,319 --> 00:31:08,200
man, this red species. So
okay, I just want to get let's

394
00:31:08,240 --> 00:31:12,119
just talk about birds and pollinators really
quick, our birds and flowers really quick,

395
00:31:12,119 --> 00:31:17,359
because I we can go back.
But that's something that I'm always always

396
00:31:17,400 --> 00:31:19,440
emphasizing in videos. I mean,
when you see a bird pollinated flower,

397
00:31:19,519 --> 00:31:22,519
boom, it's so easy to figure
out what it is, whether it's a

398
00:31:22,640 --> 00:31:27,119
cactus or whether it's you know,
melianthus, or whether it's you know,

399
00:31:27,200 --> 00:31:32,880
a night shade or and lots of
I mean I was just looking at photos

400
00:31:32,880 --> 00:31:37,039
of dori Anthe's Palmerii, which is
fucking amazing. This is you know you're

401
00:31:37,079 --> 00:31:41,039
familiar with that probably right. It's
a monocop from Australia that's bird pollinated.

402
00:31:41,640 --> 00:31:45,960
Uh, I think if I saw
a photo, I don't recognize the name.

403
00:31:45,000 --> 00:31:48,000
If I saw a photograph of it, it's really obscure. I only

404
00:31:48,079 --> 00:31:52,440
know it because I used to.
I used to just lurk endlessly in the

405
00:31:52,599 --> 00:31:55,920
UC Berkeley Botanic Garden, which it
was like going to church or go like

406
00:31:56,000 --> 00:32:00,200
three times a week, you know, And I would and I sometimes take

407
00:32:00,279 --> 00:32:04,240
seeds from them, but then I
what I would grow, I would give

408
00:32:04,319 --> 00:32:07,759
back to them to selling their plant
sales or whatever. So anyway, but

409
00:32:07,240 --> 00:32:10,359
so I was there a lot,
and it was it was instrumental in helping

410
00:32:10,440 --> 00:32:14,920
me learn botany. And I always
tell people lurk at the botanic garden you

411
00:32:14,920 --> 00:32:17,039
want to learn bonny look at.
And so that place I always hold that

412
00:32:17,160 --> 00:32:21,640
up is like the the A plus
standard of what a botanic garden should be,

413
00:32:22,240 --> 00:32:23,519
you know, for science, not
for you know, the lawn and

414
00:32:23,599 --> 00:32:29,079
the nice place that it looks nice
with one hundred one hundred individuals of the

415
00:32:29,119 --> 00:32:30,920
same plant planted a neat uniform rows. Fuck all that. No, and

416
00:32:31,039 --> 00:32:36,000
this is this is a specimen garden
for science. And so they had a

417
00:32:36,160 --> 00:32:39,720
dori Anthe's palmeri ized seedling plant there
looks like a four mem or like in

418
00:32:39,759 --> 00:32:46,039
agave gets huge seven foot tall rosette
leaves and then it sends up this inflorescence,

419
00:32:46,119 --> 00:32:51,799
this spiral with these huge red bird
pollinated flowers. And I mean I

420
00:32:51,960 --> 00:32:54,039
was looking at that yesterday. I
would just go there and take photos of

421
00:32:54,079 --> 00:32:58,559
everything. I was studying everything hands
on. It was really great. And

422
00:32:58,799 --> 00:33:01,160
uh and seeing that, I was
like, oh, this is obviously bird

423
00:33:01,240 --> 00:33:04,880
pollinated. I mean, this is
I mean, I'm sure bees probably hit

424
00:33:04,960 --> 00:33:08,400
it too, but this thing evolved
with birds selecting for it. So I

425
00:33:08,440 --> 00:33:15,720
guess let's talk about that for people. I mean birds, birds pollinators affect

426
00:33:15,759 --> 00:33:20,400
the evolutionary trajectory of a plant species
because they are selecting for it the same

427
00:33:20,440 --> 00:33:24,400
way that humans do with our crops. Birds, for instance, select for

428
00:33:24,599 --> 00:33:28,920
that the flowers that are more conspicuous
to them and produce more nectar are the

429
00:33:28,960 --> 00:33:31,920
ones that are going to get pollinated
by them. And what I guess what

430
00:33:32,519 --> 00:33:37,000
causes that? Like what causes a
bird specially or a plant to to for

431
00:33:37,079 --> 00:33:42,160
a bird to specialize on a plant
more so than a bee? Like is

432
00:33:42,200 --> 00:33:46,400
it elevational stuff? Like why are
some plants more adapted to bird pollination than

433
00:33:46,480 --> 00:33:52,640
insects? It's a really good question. And again there's a hell of a

434
00:33:52,720 --> 00:33:54,559
tompock on that. I mean,
well, I'm going to quote myself from

435
00:33:54,599 --> 00:34:00,119
the book. Actually, there's there's
a there might be two points in in

436
00:34:00,200 --> 00:34:08,599
that book where I say something like
it's often easy to tell that a that

437
00:34:08,679 --> 00:34:14,480
a flower is bird pollinated, but
you often can't say that it isn't bird

438
00:34:14,599 --> 00:34:17,880
pollinated. And there's a really good
example in there in one of the plates,

439
00:34:17,920 --> 00:34:23,440
which is a cactus species from Argentina, which is studied by a colleague

440
00:34:23,440 --> 00:34:29,440
of mine, Pablo Grastiage, which
has got white tubular flowers, and it

441
00:34:29,639 --> 00:34:32,440
looks you know, we're talking about
here is pollination syndromes, and what it

442
00:34:32,599 --> 00:34:37,400
looks like is that it you know, it ought to be moth pollinated.

443
00:34:37,800 --> 00:34:42,079
But he spent hours and hours and
seasons and seasons in the field studying this

444
00:34:42,239 --> 00:34:46,760
thing and found no moth visits at
all. What he found was visited by

445
00:34:47,639 --> 00:34:52,039
by birds, by non non specialist
birds. They weren't there weren't hummingbirds,

446
00:34:52,599 --> 00:34:55,679
I think canagers. I remember,
rightly, I haven't got the book in

447
00:34:55,679 --> 00:35:01,119
front of it. Is this econapsis
Luken that you're talking about Lucanther? Yeah,

448
00:35:01,280 --> 00:35:05,679
yeah, the white the white flower
Econopsis, and it's bird pollinated,

449
00:35:05,960 --> 00:35:07,880
but it doesn't look as if if
it is so. So you've got I

450
00:35:07,920 --> 00:35:12,559
think you've got two things going on
here. You've got you've got birds driving

451
00:35:13,440 --> 00:35:21,239
flower you know, color size,
morphology, nectar characteristics in a very kind

452
00:35:21,280 --> 00:35:24,159
of obvious way. You read tubular
flowers, and you know all of all

453
00:35:24,159 --> 00:35:28,079
of this sort of stuff. But
you've also got a bunch of flowers that

454
00:35:28,440 --> 00:35:34,519
are using birds and exploiting birds,
either either solely or you know, sometimes

455
00:35:34,639 --> 00:35:40,000
together with things like these or butterflies, which don't conform to those sort of

456
00:35:40,039 --> 00:35:45,400
syndromes. And that's one of the
reasons why I wrote that. I wrote

457
00:35:45,400 --> 00:35:49,840
the book to show that, you
know, it's it's much more complex than

458
00:35:50,159 --> 00:35:55,079
than perhaps a lot of the textbooks
would would suggest. But also the range

459
00:35:55,159 --> 00:36:00,840
of different birds that actually can act
as pollinate, which you know, my

460
00:36:02,320 --> 00:36:08,840
calculation in the book is something like
seventy four of bird families across eleven different

461
00:36:09,079 --> 00:36:17,280
orders of birds have either been confirmed
or a suspective of being pollinators. And

462
00:36:17,360 --> 00:36:21,119
so humming birds, you know,
one family in one order, you know,

463
00:36:21,199 --> 00:36:24,480
there's another seventy three families and another
ten orders there. So it's much

464
00:36:24,559 --> 00:36:30,000
more than just humming birds, and
it's much more than just this these kind

465
00:36:30,000 --> 00:36:39,599
of stereotypical flowers, and it's important
for the birds. You know, obviously,

466
00:36:39,679 --> 00:36:44,440
things like hummingbirds specialize on nectar,
but they don't just eat nectar.

467
00:36:44,639 --> 00:36:46,920
This is one of the great myths
about hummingbirds that they only feed on nectar,

468
00:36:47,280 --> 00:36:52,559
but actually humming birds will eat lots
of insects, spiders, occasionally,

469
00:36:52,639 --> 00:36:58,000
fruit juices and so on, and
the invertebrates are a really important part of

470
00:36:58,039 --> 00:37:02,280
their diet because you can't make bones
and you can't make eggshells from nectar,

471
00:37:02,360 --> 00:37:06,960
which is mainly sugar and water and
a few amino acids, so they have

472
00:37:07,079 --> 00:37:09,559
to have to have that. But
then you've got a whole bunch of things,

473
00:37:09,679 --> 00:37:16,239
like you know, New World warblers, which often migrate from from North

474
00:37:16,280 --> 00:37:22,840
America down into central or northern South
America, and when they're down there in

475
00:37:22,039 --> 00:37:28,639
the in the tropics and subtropics that
they're often feeding on flowers there just to

476
00:37:29,400 --> 00:37:32,280
increase the amount of energy that they've
got to make the return the return flight.

477
00:37:34,440 --> 00:37:38,480
There's a there's a great citizen science
project being run at the moment by

478
00:37:38,480 --> 00:37:45,920
a woman called Carol and Coil where
she's asking bird banders to swab the birds

479
00:37:45,000 --> 00:37:50,280
as they're migrating northwards, to take
the pollen offs and send it to her

480
00:37:50,320 --> 00:37:55,360
so she can identify the flowers that
are important for this migration. And that's

481
00:37:55,400 --> 00:37:59,960
the other time to think go ahead, Sorry, no, no, was

482
00:38:00,239 --> 00:38:01,480
say so. So part of it
is about, you know, the way

483
00:38:01,480 --> 00:38:07,360
in which the birds can dry.
Floral evolution and the reason why flowers might

484
00:38:07,440 --> 00:38:10,679
switch from insects to birds is a
bit of a mystery, to be honest,

485
00:38:10,719 --> 00:38:13,719
And that's one of the things,
like I discussed in the book.

486
00:38:14,079 --> 00:38:15,559
But the other, the other factor
is that you know, even if the

487
00:38:15,719 --> 00:38:22,519
birds are not pollinating the flowers,
the flowers are incredibly important for those for

488
00:38:22,639 --> 00:38:27,719
those birds. And you say this, you see the same thing with migratory

489
00:38:27,800 --> 00:38:32,559
warblers and tits and so on in
in Europe, which are going down into

490
00:38:32,800 --> 00:38:37,480
into Africa feeding on flowers there and
then coming back, often with the pollen

491
00:38:37,760 --> 00:38:40,760
still on their bodies. Yeah,
I was, I was going to say.

492
00:38:40,800 --> 00:38:45,599
I mean, if if birds fly
extremely long distances, much longer than

493
00:38:45,679 --> 00:38:50,840
bees, and if they're bringing pollen
with them, they can essentially be linking

494
00:38:52,280 --> 00:38:55,880
you know, plant populations, whether
the same species or just con genders,

495
00:38:57,840 --> 00:39:02,400
you know, similar related enough species
in a genus to be creating, you

496
00:39:02,480 --> 00:39:07,960
know, either hybrids or just linking
them, linking those populations, you know,

497
00:39:08,599 --> 00:39:13,639
genetically, which is wild to think
about. I mean, across mountain

498
00:39:13,719 --> 00:39:16,000
ranges, whatever there was. When
I used to live in Oakland, California,

499
00:39:16,079 --> 00:39:21,039
I had a one of those carantho
Forremacha hybrids. You know, it's

500
00:39:21,039 --> 00:39:25,159
a hybrid between the caranthodendron which grows
in the Wahakan cloud forest at like nine

501
00:39:25,199 --> 00:39:30,280
thousand feet wonderful fucking tree, and
a hybrid between that and then fermentto dendron,

502
00:39:30,320 --> 00:39:35,079
the native California flannel bush and this
thing. They grow fast, they

503
00:39:35,159 --> 00:39:37,719
need full sun. They take over
there. They're really it. They're a

504
00:39:37,840 --> 00:39:42,039
hybrid tree. They're not natural,
but they're an epic tree and a living

505
00:39:42,119 --> 00:39:45,320
bird feeder. I mean, these
these baseball sized flowers would fill with nectar.

506
00:39:45,920 --> 00:39:51,119
And I had these California scrub jays, which are a hilarious bird.

507
00:39:51,159 --> 00:39:55,119
They're corvids. They're super obnoxious in
the most wonderful way. I can relate

508
00:39:55,159 --> 00:39:59,880
to them and you can get them
to feed. They take well to human

509
00:40:00,000 --> 00:40:01,440
You can get them to eat peanuts
out of your hand and stuff. And

510
00:40:01,559 --> 00:40:05,960
I would do that and this thing
would come to my window, my second

511
00:40:05,960 --> 00:40:08,159
story window, every day, you
know, letting me know. It was

512
00:40:08,239 --> 00:40:13,159
there, very angrily demanding peanuts,
and I give it peanuts. And it

513
00:40:13,239 --> 00:40:17,599
had pollen all over its face from
the the and that was what was cool

514
00:40:17,679 --> 00:40:22,920
too, is the the I guess
it was an andro forror. I'm not

515
00:40:22,039 --> 00:40:25,000
sure what the I have to look
up the technical turn. But on you

516
00:40:25,039 --> 00:40:29,639
know front for Mancia and on these
Carantha formacha flowers, it's like it looks

517
00:40:29,679 --> 00:40:31,800
like a hand. It's like a
fusion. It's a fusion of the sexual

518
00:40:31,880 --> 00:40:35,599
parts. Andrew seem the guy that
you see on the same structure, and

519
00:40:35,719 --> 00:40:38,920
it looks like a hand and it's
just perfect shape for a bird's head to

520
00:40:39,039 --> 00:40:43,159
dust their head with pollen. And
then the style is there too. And

521
00:40:43,239 --> 00:40:45,880
so this thing would come to my
it'd eat out of my hand. That

522
00:40:45,000 --> 00:40:50,519
always had yellow pollen all over its
head. It was hilarious. It's so

523
00:40:50,639 --> 00:40:53,880
it was drinking this neck. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll have to

524
00:40:54,000 --> 00:40:57,719
check that planet. I'm not familiar
with that plant. I'll have to check

525
00:40:57,719 --> 00:41:00,159
it. Out. But but but
what you've ident to fight there actually is

526
00:41:00,320 --> 00:41:06,920
one of the real contradictions in bird
in bird pollination, and something that we

527
00:41:07,039 --> 00:41:10,559
still don't understand. So yes,
what you what you said earlier about birds

528
00:41:10,599 --> 00:41:21,039
flying longer distances and linking together isolated
populations of the same plant or possibly congenerates

529
00:41:21,760 --> 00:41:25,960
con generics is absolutely right, and
that's thought to be one of the advantages

530
00:41:27,000 --> 00:41:30,559
of bird pollination. But at the
same time, and there is there is

531
00:41:30,639 --> 00:41:34,960
some evidence for that, there's genetic
evidence for for that. But at the

532
00:41:35,079 --> 00:41:42,760
same time, you've there's an argument
that bird pollination increases the rate of speciation

533
00:41:43,719 --> 00:41:47,320
amongst plants, particularly in the andes. So those those and those two statements

534
00:41:47,360 --> 00:41:51,880
seem contradictory to me. You can't
have it both ways, you can't.

535
00:41:52,119 --> 00:41:54,880
You know. One of the one
of the reasons we get increased rates of

536
00:41:54,920 --> 00:42:00,599
speciation is because of genetic isolation,
and isolation if you've got I got a

537
00:42:01,480 --> 00:42:07,159
long distances, yeah, yeah,
yeah, So I unpacked that a little

538
00:42:07,159 --> 00:42:10,199
bit in the book. And and
but basically I'm shugging my shouvelersn't waving my

539
00:42:10,239 --> 00:42:15,079
hands and saying there's still a hell
of lot we don't understand about what drives

540
00:42:15,159 --> 00:42:19,639
birds as pollinators, you know,
particuarly when you consider, you know,

541
00:42:19,760 --> 00:42:24,280
the insects got there, you know, maybe one hundred eighty to one hundred

542
00:42:24,360 --> 00:42:30,599
million years before the birds got got
there. The subtitle to my book An

543
00:42:30,639 --> 00:42:37,039
Intimate fifty million year Relationship refers to
the fact that the earliest fossils that we

544
00:42:37,239 --> 00:42:44,679
have which indicate perhaps bird pollination about
fifty million years. Oh, you know,

545
00:42:44,840 --> 00:42:47,440
chrise birds. I couldn't the dynostay
it took the dinosaurs get knocked out

546
00:42:47,920 --> 00:42:52,280
for the birds to really have their
heyday. But what I want to know

547
00:42:52,760 --> 00:42:55,239
is, God, the just the
change in Earth's flora after the k T

548
00:42:55,440 --> 00:42:59,199
extinction too is nice, you know, kind of first starting to drop out

549
00:42:59,719 --> 00:43:01,920
talk to a guy that studied that. I mean, just pale o'banna's just

550
00:43:02,000 --> 00:43:06,039
wild stuff. But the thing I
want to know is what was going on?

551
00:43:07,199 --> 00:43:09,079
You know, Like this is kind
of I don't want to change the

552
00:43:09,119 --> 00:43:12,679
topic too much, but I want
to ask you. We'll come back,

553
00:43:13,199 --> 00:43:19,519
like during the Jurassic like what was
why did insect pollination not evolve at least

554
00:43:19,760 --> 00:43:23,840
from what we know to such a
large scale during the Jurassic because you look

555
00:43:23,840 --> 00:43:28,599
at most conifers and things like that, their wind pollinated. Maybe there was,

556
00:43:28,880 --> 00:43:34,440
maybe there was beetle pollination on psychads
or psychad like plants like the Benetta

557
00:43:34,440 --> 00:43:37,239
I always mess up that Benetta Tailey's
or bennettailor whatever, you know, those

558
00:43:37,280 --> 00:43:40,320
cyciclat what But what was what was
going on? I mean, do you

559
00:43:40,400 --> 00:43:45,400
know why why beatles were pollinating things
or what was going on back then?

560
00:43:46,440 --> 00:43:53,360
Well, if you look into the
the the paleo ecological literature that's that's come

561
00:43:53,400 --> 00:44:00,119
out in the last decade or a
bit more, what we're seeing is whole

562
00:44:00,239 --> 00:44:06,760
groups of insects which seem to have
adaptations for nectar feeding, you know,

563
00:44:06,920 --> 00:44:12,559
long long tubular mouthparts, but which
belong to families and sometimes orders that are

564
00:44:12,679 --> 00:44:21,199
that are now extinct or which are
incredibly rare now and sometimes carrying pollend that

565
00:44:21,400 --> 00:44:27,559
belonged to some of these extinct groups
of gymnast ferms, things like psychedophytes and

566
00:44:27,800 --> 00:44:31,719
Benetta tailies and so on. So
actually, I think there's been a kind

567
00:44:31,719 --> 00:44:37,039
of a shift in our understanding there
that we now think that in fact,

568
00:44:37,239 --> 00:44:45,519
most of those gymnast ferms were in
fact insect pollinated and the evolution of wind

569
00:44:45,639 --> 00:44:51,679
pollination is possibly a later development.
I mean, the conifers themselves don't have

570
00:44:52,119 --> 00:44:57,159
you know, the modern conifers,
many of them don't have a deeper evolutionary

571
00:44:57,320 --> 00:45:01,119
history, and so the wind pollination
aspect of it. So my kind of

572
00:45:01,159 --> 00:45:08,840
back of the envelope calculation, I
think about forty percent of the extant gymnasperms

573
00:45:09,159 --> 00:45:13,480
things like the psychads that you mentioned, but things like well, well witchier,

574
00:45:14,039 --> 00:45:16,960
which I know you've you've seen in
Namibia right right, yeah, yeah,

575
00:45:17,159 --> 00:45:23,199
yeah, and things like a fedra
as well. They are they are

576
00:45:23,239 --> 00:45:28,679
all insect pollinated. So maybe forty
percent of the extant sperms well witch here

577
00:45:28,840 --> 00:45:31,840
is insect palinating. I thought there
was still yesterday about that. Yeah,

578
00:45:34,599 --> 00:45:37,360
you see insects crawling all over the
if. I've seen it in Namibia as

579
00:45:37,400 --> 00:45:43,119
well. You see insects there often. I mean, okay, it might

580
00:45:43,199 --> 00:45:50,639
be ambophalous. So a combination of
insect and wind pollination, which is much

581
00:45:50,800 --> 00:45:54,400
more common than we than we previously
realize. I assumed that things and well

582
00:45:54,400 --> 00:45:58,920
witchia were pollinating it too, but
then someone else said, now they're just

583
00:45:59,119 --> 00:46:01,360
feeding on it. They just live
and they were witchy of bugs, they

584
00:46:01,519 --> 00:46:06,440
just you know, but if they've
got to be exchanging power in a little

585
00:46:06,440 --> 00:46:08,519
bit, if they're flying, because
these things are mobbing up on these things,

586
00:46:08,719 --> 00:46:12,159
you know, on the plants.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's

587
00:46:12,199 --> 00:46:15,159
right. And they move between the
plants as as well. I've seen them

588
00:46:15,199 --> 00:46:19,239
too, and there's a little bit
a bit that's been published on them.

589
00:46:19,280 --> 00:46:22,760
But yeah, I think there's there's
very good evidence, substantial evidence that will

590
00:46:22,800 --> 00:46:25,840
which is insect pollinated. But again, if you go back into the fossil

591
00:46:25,920 --> 00:46:30,880
record, you know, all of
these extinct groups, a lot of them

592
00:46:30,920 --> 00:46:37,000
look as if they they're insect pollinated. So the you know, the evolution

593
00:46:37,079 --> 00:46:42,440
of the flowering plants and the late
Jurassic early Cretaceous, they were evolving within

594
00:46:42,519 --> 00:46:46,719
a millieare of insect pollination that was
already happening. They just happened to do

595
00:46:46,880 --> 00:46:53,920
it better than any other groups.
There were incredibly successful for a whole bunch

596
00:46:53,920 --> 00:46:59,400
of reason. It's not just the
insect pollination. But then certainly maybe you

597
00:46:59,480 --> 00:47:02,559
know, eighteen million years years later, say about fifty million years ago,

598
00:47:04,760 --> 00:47:10,840
suddenly some of these start switching over
to bird pollination and probably back pollination or

599
00:47:10,840 --> 00:47:15,199
at the same time that we don't
have good fossil evidence for that. Do

600
00:47:15,320 --> 00:47:20,559
you think, why did they just
get bored with insects? You know,

601
00:47:21,079 --> 00:47:22,679
well, I think for some of
them, especially in the Andes, I

602
00:47:23,320 --> 00:47:27,360
know, you know, at higher
elevations, it seems like birds are certainly

603
00:47:27,480 --> 00:47:32,079
more active in those chili temperatures than
bees and maybe some flies, and so

604
00:47:32,199 --> 00:47:36,199
maybe bird you know, that might
be a reason why, I mean,

605
00:47:36,199 --> 00:47:38,719
at least why you see it in
the Andes. And there's so much freaking

606
00:47:38,800 --> 00:47:44,000
humming bird diversity in the Andes.
Man, it's wild. But and I

607
00:47:44,079 --> 00:47:46,400
mean this is a worldwide thing obviously, like you see it everywhere. You

608
00:47:46,519 --> 00:47:52,440
see bird pollination very common in South
Africa and Australia. So what are they

609
00:47:52,519 --> 00:47:55,039
going for? I mean, is
there a change in the kind of nectar

610
00:47:55,119 --> 00:47:59,320
that a bird would go for versus
the kind of nectar that an insect would

611
00:47:59,360 --> 00:48:02,920
go for? Certainly in the amount, right, but in the is it

612
00:48:04,039 --> 00:48:07,199
starchy or is it a different kind
of sugar and bird pollinated flowers or what?

613
00:48:08,320 --> 00:48:12,000
It depends on the birds, and
it depends on the flowers, and

614
00:48:12,079 --> 00:48:15,840
it depends on the part of the
world. It's it's kind of complex.

615
00:48:15,880 --> 00:48:24,280
I mean, some of the archetypical
bird pollinated flowers tend to have relatively large

616
00:48:24,360 --> 00:48:32,079
volumes of nectar, as you suggest, but with relatively low sugar concentrations,

617
00:48:34,159 --> 00:48:37,840
and that might be a strategy to
dissuade bees from visiting. For example,

618
00:48:37,880 --> 00:48:45,400
that bees tend to go for nectars
with higher sugar concentrations, so the comparison

619
00:48:45,440 --> 00:48:49,400
will be, you know, maybe
something around ten to fifteen percent sugar in

620
00:48:49,519 --> 00:48:54,000
the nectar for a bird pollinated plant
versus thirty to forty four bee pollinated plant.

621
00:48:54,239 --> 00:48:59,719
But there are exceptions to all of
that, and the main thing is

622
00:49:00,119 --> 00:49:06,599
is, you know, it's about
the intake of energy per per unit time.

623
00:49:07,159 --> 00:49:12,559
So if a humming bird can visit
you know, ten very small flowers

624
00:49:12,960 --> 00:49:15,119
in a minute and get the same
amount of energy, then they come from

625
00:49:15,239 --> 00:49:20,519
visiting one very large flower, I
mean, and they often visit the ten

626
00:49:20,639 --> 00:49:23,840
small flowers, and you know,
you know yourself, humming birds will visit

627
00:49:24,199 --> 00:49:30,280
pretty much anything, you know,
including artificial humming bird leaders. There is

628
00:49:30,480 --> 00:49:37,119
there is thought to be a switch
in the types of sugars going from sucrose

629
00:49:37,199 --> 00:49:50,599
dominated sugars through to hexo's sugar dominated
sugar nectars from as you go from specialized

630
00:49:50,599 --> 00:49:57,440
to more generalized bird pollinators. But
again there are exceptions to all of just

631
00:49:57,519 --> 00:50:00,360
a longer chaine sugar or something is
like a more comp like sugar. No

632
00:50:00,719 --> 00:50:07,719
no, no, you split sucrows
into two hexos sugars, glucose and fructose.

633
00:50:08,000 --> 00:50:13,800
So so it's yes, it's an
endomatic reaction that that splits the sucrose

634
00:50:13,840 --> 00:50:19,320
into into the two hexos sugars.
But but you know, one of the

635
00:50:19,360 --> 00:50:22,920
things we're doing here in yunan Is
is looking at the range of of birds

636
00:50:23,480 --> 00:50:30,119
which are visiting flowers in and around
Kunming, in the urban center here and

637
00:50:30,119 --> 00:50:34,159
also in the botanical garden, and
we're finding that, you know, sunbirds

638
00:50:34,199 --> 00:50:37,880
are visiting all kinds of different flowers
that that you wouldn't necessarily expect them to

639
00:50:38,000 --> 00:50:42,599
visit. But also there's a there's
a group of birds called the white eyes

640
00:50:44,000 --> 00:50:51,599
zosterops Is. The is the genus
which again have a huge dependency on on

641
00:50:51,800 --> 00:50:58,400
nectar, particularly in the winter here. So a lot of the plants winter

642
00:50:58,519 --> 00:51:01,920
flowering cherries and so on that are
being visited in that are flowering in the

643
00:51:01,960 --> 00:51:07,639
winter are being visited by birds because
it's an important source of energy for them.

644
00:51:07,960 --> 00:51:10,920
In the winter, and without those
flowers they probably wouldn't get through the

645
00:51:13,400 --> 00:51:17,159
winter months. Yeah, the diversity
of is nuts to. I mean there's

646
00:51:17,159 --> 00:51:22,199
a there's a gave polyanthe flora,
a little dwarf the gave that's hummingbird pollinated.

647
00:51:22,280 --> 00:51:27,679
It makes these little pink and red
flowers. There's you talk about PuYas

648
00:51:27,800 --> 00:51:30,639
in the Andes. You know these
Puya ramandi i, which I was able

649
00:51:30,719 --> 00:51:34,480
to see they had that at UC
Berkeley for I think they've still got one.

650
00:51:34,480 --> 00:51:37,639
I don't know when it's gonna bloom. But Puya is especially kind of

651
00:51:37,679 --> 00:51:44,159
nuts because this there's a clade in
that genus, there's a subgenus or a

652
00:51:44,199 --> 00:51:47,960
section or what, but a clade
that's created its own little perches for birds

653
00:51:49,400 --> 00:51:52,960
to pollinate them. I mean,
it produces these sterile branches to the otherwise

654
00:51:53,119 --> 00:52:00,679
fertile inflorescence. And these these sterile
branches act like a perch for for birds

655
00:52:00,760 --> 00:52:04,920
to hang out and stick their face
and the flowers to pollinate them. It's

656
00:52:05,159 --> 00:52:09,480
so cool to Puya calensis and Puya
remandie and Puya what's the Birderoniana or or

657
00:52:09,519 --> 00:52:14,719
Pestris whatever it's called. Now,
So, did you have you seen those

658
00:52:15,199 --> 00:52:19,000
studied them or yeah, yeah,
I have been up in the Andes doing

659
00:52:19,079 --> 00:52:22,079
some work quite a few years ago
now and I did see pooyas up there

660
00:52:22,960 --> 00:52:29,559
again. You know, it's one
of these, uh the stereotypes of bird

661
00:52:29,639 --> 00:52:35,960
pollination is that humming birds hover at
flowers, whereas sunbirds and honey eaters and

662
00:52:36,599 --> 00:52:40,440
other thing that's the flower visiting birds
perch to visit the flowers. Well,

663
00:52:40,480 --> 00:52:45,800
actually, humming birds, if they
can perch, they will perch and feed

664
00:52:45,840 --> 00:52:50,559
the flower. I mean you see
you see it on neck on artificial nectar

665
00:52:50,599 --> 00:52:54,039
feeders in the USA, if you
if you give them the humming birds and

666
00:52:54,199 --> 00:52:58,519
nectar feeder that has a perch on
it, they will sit there and feed

667
00:52:58,880 --> 00:53:05,159
the lazy little beast. Yeah relaxed, Yeah exactly, will yeah, exactly.

668
00:53:05,480 --> 00:53:09,480
And actually there's there's a picture in
one of the plates in my Birds

669
00:53:09,519 --> 00:53:14,719
and Flowers book. I think it's
one of the early ones of a humming

670
00:53:14,800 --> 00:53:21,079
bird, high altitude humming bird in
the Andes visiting a gentianella there and these

671
00:53:21,199 --> 00:53:25,199
humming birds walk around between the flowers. Some work has been done by a

672
00:53:25,320 --> 00:53:30,079
Danish colleague of mine. Yes,
persone, these humming birds just walk between

673
00:53:30,079 --> 00:53:34,880
the between the flowers, and that
again that makes perfect sense because of the

674
00:53:35,199 --> 00:53:39,239
high altitude, high elevation, should
I say, you know, low oxygen

675
00:53:39,639 --> 00:53:46,039
levels, it uses far less energy
to walk. But the flip that's cool,

676
00:53:46,199 --> 00:53:51,159
this is this is relatively low growing
flora here. This is how high

677
00:53:51,239 --> 00:53:55,159
up is this? This looks high
elevation nothing here, I think it is.

678
00:53:55,400 --> 00:53:59,280
I think it's yeah, I think
it's kind of four thousand meters plers.

679
00:53:59,320 --> 00:54:04,679
I mean it's it's so that's like
thirteen five hundred feet fourteen thousand feet

680
00:54:04,679 --> 00:54:08,559
maybe, yeah, Jesus Christ something
like that. But the but the flip

681
00:54:08,679 --> 00:54:17,280
side of that is that there are
plants in Africa that are forcing humming birds

682
00:54:17,320 --> 00:54:22,039
to hover. And we know that
humming birds can hover quite effectively, at

683
00:54:22,079 --> 00:54:25,920
least for short short periods. They're
not as as good as hovering as hummingbirds,

684
00:54:27,480 --> 00:54:30,559
but they will hova to visit some
of those flowers. So again,

685
00:54:30,639 --> 00:54:36,840
these stereotypes of what what we sort
of expect from from flower visiting birds and

686
00:54:36,920 --> 00:54:42,760
what we expect from flowers that are
pollinated by birds, we're sort of exploding

687
00:54:42,880 --> 00:54:47,400
that with with new research. There
are surprises around every corner. So okay,

688
00:54:47,679 --> 00:54:52,840
what's up with withks Because this is
a cool genus for anybody who doesn't

689
00:54:52,920 --> 00:54:58,639
know. Banks is a fucking epic
genus in Proteaca, which is a relatively

690
00:54:58,719 --> 00:55:02,159
old lineage of plants that's got that
cold gondwan In affiliate. You know,

691
00:55:02,440 --> 00:55:07,679
mostly Southern Hemisphere, South Africa,
South America, A lot a lot of

692
00:55:07,880 --> 00:55:14,119
diversity in Australia and maybe maybe it
goes up into Australasia, but I don't

693
00:55:14,119 --> 00:55:15,000
know. Anyway, it's a really
cool family. I love it. It's

694
00:55:15,079 --> 00:55:19,639
just so unique. A lot of
the ones in Australia are fire adapted.

695
00:55:20,039 --> 00:55:25,559
Banksia especially, you know, really
diverse genus, really fucking just incredible inflorescences

696
00:55:25,639 --> 00:55:30,360
and it produces these woody cones,
these infractessences, a compound fruit that looks

697
00:55:30,400 --> 00:55:34,360
like a woody cone. But I
didn't know that some of them are bird

698
00:55:34,679 --> 00:55:37,199
pollinated, and but it makes sense. It looks like this foot tall pom

699
00:55:37,320 --> 00:55:40,039
pom that these birds are sticking their
faces and what are they going for?

700
00:55:40,119 --> 00:55:45,599
I mean, is are there that
many Banksias that have adapted to bird pollination?

701
00:55:46,239 --> 00:55:49,920
Yeah, yeah, there's quite there's
quite a few that are bird pollinated,

702
00:55:50,480 --> 00:55:54,320
and they're pollinated by various things.
Honey eaters is one group that are

703
00:55:54,760 --> 00:56:01,000
Banksier visitors, but also lots of
of parrots and parakeet as well. And

704
00:56:01,239 --> 00:56:06,800
one suggestion for I mean, you
mentioned the woody cones of Banksia, but

705
00:56:06,920 --> 00:56:13,639
if you hold a banks inflorescence in
your hand, that the sexual parts are

706
00:56:13,760 --> 00:56:22,079
really really stiff. In fact,
pre colonial Aboriginal people, possibly post colonial

707
00:56:22,119 --> 00:56:30,360
Aboriginal people see that you can use
them as hair brushes. I was going

708
00:56:30,440 --> 00:56:32,440
to say, like if they feel
like like, you know, teeth of

709
00:56:32,480 --> 00:56:37,880
a comb some of them, Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And

710
00:56:37,239 --> 00:56:46,559
and that stiffness and that robustness may
well be an adaptation to the pollination by

711
00:56:47,400 --> 00:56:52,800
by parrots in particular, this can
be incredibly dis The fucking birds in Australia

712
00:56:53,400 --> 00:56:57,880
got a lot of attitude. Man, there are some wild bastards down there.

713
00:56:57,960 --> 00:57:00,880
Man, those cockatoos, they're the
bin chickens too. Not to mention,

714
00:57:01,000 --> 00:57:05,039
I know it's gonna do the plants, they rate garbage bins. But

715
00:57:05,599 --> 00:57:08,559
still there's what about what do cockatoos
do? Because those things, you know,

716
00:57:08,599 --> 00:57:13,000
when I was in when I was
in Tasmania, even when I was

717
00:57:13,039 --> 00:57:15,679
in Western Australia, maybe that was
a Western Austraia. The were coctile I

718
00:57:15,679 --> 00:57:17,199
can remember anyway, but they were, they were everywhere. I mean,

719
00:57:17,280 --> 00:57:23,440
these things are just making these incredible
noises in the forest canopy and they're so

720
00:57:23,719 --> 00:57:28,199
cool. What are they What is
their interaction with any of the plants that

721
00:57:28,280 --> 00:57:34,079
you know of? Yeah, yeah, they will visit banks heres, will

722
00:57:34,119 --> 00:57:37,400
visit some of the some of the
plants, some of the eucalyptus down there

723
00:57:37,440 --> 00:57:39,599
as well that I think, if
I think, I'm not saying they tend

724
00:57:39,639 --> 00:57:46,280
to be more destructive on eucalyptus because
the flowers a less robust, but certainly

725
00:57:46,320 --> 00:57:52,719
on banks here they can they can
move pollen around and really really effectively.

726
00:57:52,360 --> 00:57:55,880
But they're also seed eaters as well. Of course. You know, if

727
00:57:55,920 --> 00:58:00,599
you look at the beaks of the
cocoa two and some of the other pirates

728
00:58:00,639 --> 00:58:06,920
and parakeets, they're they're incredibly tough. You would not want to stick your

729
00:58:06,960 --> 00:58:12,960
finger, Yeah, champ and open
chomping, open guard plant material. Yeah

730
00:58:13,800 --> 00:58:17,199
yeah yeah. But but they can
be effective pollinators as as well. There's

731
00:58:17,239 --> 00:58:21,519
a fantastic book, I don't know
if you know it called Where Song Began

732
00:58:22,679 --> 00:58:27,760
by an Australian bile just called called
Tim Lowe, which is all about the

733
00:58:27,840 --> 00:58:34,280
you know, the fact that the
passer rhymes the songbird claye almost certainly evolved

734
00:58:34,679 --> 00:58:39,199
originally in Australasia and then diversified out
throughout throughout the world. And that's that

735
00:58:39,360 --> 00:58:47,639
encompasses about sixty percent of the of
the total current bird diversity, And Where

736
00:58:47,679 --> 00:58:55,519
Songbird Began just just talks about that
evolution, but also points out that birds

737
00:58:55,800 --> 00:59:04,559
in Australia are much more aggress of, much more territorial, much more noisy

738
00:59:05,159 --> 00:59:07,960
than birds in many other parts of
parts of the world. And one of

739
00:59:08,000 --> 00:59:14,079
the arguments is because of the low
productivity of the soils in Australia, because

740
00:59:14,119 --> 00:59:17,880
it's just an ancient continent, this
has driven this this sort of territoriality,

741
00:59:19,000 --> 00:59:25,639
this aggressiveness to defend these resources.
It's a really really fascinating book Where song

742
00:59:25,760 --> 00:59:29,960
Began. Yeah, yeah, I
remember, I think I downloaded it in

743
00:59:30,159 --> 00:59:34,320
PDF format a few years ago,
and yeah, it was really cool.

744
00:59:34,360 --> 00:59:36,800
I made it like thirty pages in
and then I was I read I remember

745
00:59:36,840 --> 00:59:38,840
reading on the plane back from there. It was really really cool stuff.

746
00:59:38,880 --> 00:59:43,679
But Australia, I means so much. It seems like such a stressful place

747
00:59:43,760 --> 00:59:46,559
in so many ways, and that's
why you've gotten all this crazy stuff down

748
00:59:46,599 --> 00:59:51,480
there. I mean, plants that
have gimmicks to get around the low nutrient

749
00:59:51,639 --> 00:59:55,079
soil. You know, lots of
parasitism. You've got proteoid roots and prote

750
00:59:55,079 --> 01:00:01,239
ac lots of micro rhizal stuff in
the eucalyptus and martesi, lots of carnivorous

751
01:00:01,280 --> 01:00:06,679
plants. It's just the and then
yeah, the snake thing too. I

752
01:00:06,760 --> 01:00:10,119
mean there there's been so much pressure
on there it's nuts. And then you

753
01:00:10,159 --> 01:00:14,800
go to New Zealand and it's like, you know, just mellow and birds,

754
01:00:14,920 --> 01:00:20,119
but birds have directed the evolutionary trajectory
of a lot of New Zealand plants

755
01:00:20,119 --> 01:00:22,280
because there weren't any mammals except for
best. Do you know much about you

756
01:00:22,360 --> 01:00:27,800
know, birds and plants on New
Zealand or what, Yeah, a little,

757
01:00:27,840 --> 01:00:34,559
a little bit. I know.
That's things like some of the ground

758
01:00:34,639 --> 01:00:42,079
dwelling parate relatives Taca pose and so
on, some of those probably acting as

759
01:00:42,800 --> 01:00:46,400
acting as as bird as pollinators.
But you've got things like white eyes as

760
01:00:46,440 --> 01:00:52,639
well, species of honey eaters as
well. I do talk about New Zealand

761
01:00:52,679 --> 01:00:53,840
a little bit in the in the
book Okay, do you think you know

762
01:00:53,880 --> 01:00:58,000
about divaricating plants there? Right?
What's your take? Do you think it

763
01:00:58,159 --> 01:01:00,960
was a climate response? It was
MOA's right, come on, you know

764
01:01:01,039 --> 01:01:06,480
it was MOA's doing it. Yeah, almost certainly, Yeah, yeah,

765
01:01:07,039 --> 01:01:09,920
yeah, almost certainly. I think
you know, what we see now in

766
01:01:10,039 --> 01:01:15,880
New Zealand is just a fraction of
the of the diversity, of fraction of

767
01:01:16,039 --> 01:01:24,280
the fascinatingly different ecology that was originally
happening before before humans arrived. Yeah,

768
01:01:24,480 --> 01:01:30,039
the moas and these giant eagles and
so on must have been just an incredibly

769
01:01:30,599 --> 01:01:36,400
stunning landscape there. God, that's
that was one of the coolest things I've

770
01:01:36,480 --> 01:01:38,639
seen. Talk about it. Oh
wow, I get in a moment is

771
01:01:38,719 --> 01:01:43,599
looking at these plants and being like, why the hell would anything grow like

772
01:01:43,719 --> 01:01:47,039
this? Like why would you make
branches that do this? Like why would

773
01:01:47,119 --> 01:01:52,760
you make these zig zag with these
long nodes between you know, long difference

774
01:01:52,800 --> 01:01:57,440
between nodes and tiny leaves, fascicled
leaves, and it's it's such an otherwise

775
01:01:57,519 --> 01:02:00,599
mellow place to grow. It's a
fucking temperate rainfalls, man, Like,

776
01:02:00,239 --> 01:02:05,440
why would you do this unless there
was a lot of pressure on you from

777
01:02:05,599 --> 01:02:07,480
something, you know, what is
that. It's so cool to see that

778
01:02:07,519 --> 01:02:10,480
and be like, Okay, there
was something here. I can see the

779
01:02:10,559 --> 01:02:15,440
clues in like forty different unrelated plant
species. It's fucking insane. Yeah,

780
01:02:15,920 --> 01:02:21,719
and they're basically creating so this.
Yeah. So this is one of the

781
01:02:21,880 --> 01:02:25,039
things that again I emphasize in Birds
and Flows, and I also talk about

782
01:02:25,079 --> 01:02:30,159
the bit my previous book, Pollinators
and Pollination that you know, when we

783
01:02:30,320 --> 01:02:36,760
lose species, we don't just lose
a taxon. We lose the interactions between

784
01:02:36,840 --> 01:02:40,599
that taxon and other taxa. So
in this case, we lose the interactions

785
01:02:40,639 --> 01:02:45,679
between the moas and those plants.
You know, for pollinator goes extinct,

786
01:02:46,400 --> 01:02:52,239
Okay, that that species is going
to extinct, we allso the interactions with

787
01:02:52,400 --> 01:02:55,599
the other species have gone extinct as
well. Are You're seeing this in Hawaii

788
01:02:55,760 --> 01:03:00,199
at the moment, you know,
where a whole family of fly visiting birds

789
01:03:00,239 --> 01:03:06,559
has gone has gone extinct, but
the flowers that they visited, many of

790
01:03:06,639 --> 01:03:10,880
them are still are still extant,
and in some cases the pollination has been

791
01:03:10,920 --> 01:03:16,440
taken over by introduced birds. And
I introduced being what family of birds went

792
01:03:16,519 --> 01:03:22,280
extinct? And WHI I am not
familiar. Uh, it's the I always

793
01:03:22,320 --> 01:03:24,719
get these two mixed up. There's
the honey eaters and the honey creepers,

794
01:03:25,480 --> 01:03:31,159
uh in Hawaii. And yeah,
and you know, I spent two years

795
01:03:31,239 --> 01:03:37,639
writing this fucking book and I still
get mixed up those two two groups.

796
01:03:38,559 --> 01:03:43,119
My my wife is looking at me
at the moment because I promised I wouldn't

797
01:03:43,119 --> 01:03:45,639
swear on this podcast, but yeah, leave it to me. I tried.

798
01:03:45,920 --> 01:03:47,440
I listened to of the last podcasts
they did, and I was like,

799
01:03:47,559 --> 01:03:52,119
God, I drive so many f
bombs. I gotta stop, man,

800
01:03:52,199 --> 01:03:54,840
you know. And I called my
friend Christy. She's this She's a

801
01:03:55,159 --> 01:03:59,000
you know, old the lady who
grows a ton of cool plants, really

802
01:03:59,039 --> 01:04:00,840
cool naturalist down here. Is like, man, I just did this podcast

803
01:04:00,880 --> 01:04:03,400
with Earnest that curse too much.
He's like, well, it's fucking easy

804
01:04:03,480 --> 01:04:08,280
to do. And I'm like,
god, you know, but yeah,

805
01:04:09,079 --> 01:04:12,000
that's the last time I squear.
But yeah, So it's one of the

806
01:04:12,199 --> 01:04:15,079
I think it's I think it's the
the Hawaiian honey eaters, which which are

807
01:04:15,119 --> 01:04:18,800
not no, No, it's the
Hawaiian honey creepers, which which went I'm

808
01:04:19,480 --> 01:04:26,119
the Mahoed family. The entire family
is now extinct. Yeah, honey eaters,

809
01:04:26,199 --> 01:04:28,960
yeah, okay, that's the one. Honey eaters right, okay,

810
01:04:29,039 --> 01:04:32,360
which were not honey eaters. They
look a lot like honey eaters, but

811
01:04:32,599 --> 01:04:35,079
but are not honey eaters at all. So the whole, the whole family

812
01:04:35,119 --> 01:04:41,239
went extinct. And so we had
we had species which went extinct when people

813
01:04:41,360 --> 01:04:48,039
first arrived in in Hawaii and the
the indigenous people there were hunting them mainly

814
01:04:48,119 --> 01:04:53,199
for the feathers to create these incredible
capes and headdressers and so on. And

815
01:04:53,360 --> 01:04:58,119
then after you know, Captain Cook
arrived and post colonial period more more of

816
01:04:58,159 --> 01:05:02,199
them went extinct. Remember the last
one when it extincts, I mean as

817
01:05:02,480 --> 01:05:09,840
late as the nineteen eighties or nineteen
nineties. That's that's real. Yeah,

818
01:05:10,119 --> 01:05:14,480
yeah, yeah, And so you're
left with all of these plants which which

819
01:05:14,599 --> 01:05:18,239
no longer have their polemies. But
you know, I'm making it sound really

820
01:05:19,360 --> 01:05:24,800
really depressing, but actually the last
chapter of Birds and Flowers it's called the

821
01:05:24,880 --> 01:05:30,440
Restoration of Hope. I didn't want
to leave the book on a downer because

822
01:05:30,760 --> 01:05:35,920
there is, you know, some
incredible restoration projects and species reintroduction projects happening

823
01:05:35,960 --> 01:05:44,840
all over the world for birds,
for reintroducing birds, storing habitats for them

824
01:05:45,039 --> 01:05:51,199
as well, some plant reintroductions too, So there is at all sorts of

825
01:05:51,280 --> 01:05:58,239
levels, you know, governmental level
businesses, and some of this work local

826
01:05:58,679 --> 01:06:02,920
NGOs, nongvernmental organizations and charities and
individuals. I've got hope. Yeah,

827
01:06:03,119 --> 01:06:08,000
I think I've got hope too because
I think, especially I think the amount

828
01:06:08,079 --> 01:06:14,320
of resurgence of people caring about this
and just becoming naturalists. I don't even

829
01:06:14,360 --> 01:06:15,599
really like that world. Just I
don't know what you call it, just

830
01:06:15,719 --> 01:06:20,760
people that appreciate life and have a
reverence for life and see humanity's placed in

831
01:06:20,840 --> 01:06:26,159
it, not as this dominator and
conqueror and controller, but as a steward

832
01:06:26,599 --> 01:06:29,440
and a part of this and having
love for it. I see a lot

833
01:06:29,519 --> 01:06:31,800
of people coming around, and how
could they not because the world that we've

834
01:06:31,880 --> 01:06:36,119
created, especially in the US,
which is kind of like a third world

835
01:06:36,199 --> 01:06:41,480
country with the Gucci belt. The
world we've created is so depressing and just

836
01:06:41,760 --> 01:06:44,719
fucked. I mean it's you know, where I live, It's like there's

837
01:06:44,719 --> 01:06:46,760
streets with no sidewalks, you're stuck
in a car, you're farmed as a

838
01:06:46,800 --> 01:06:51,000
consumer. It's just lowest common denominator
all the habitat's been destroyed. So people

839
01:06:51,039 --> 01:06:55,320
are coming around and they realize,
oh wow, this this stuff feels so

840
01:06:55,519 --> 01:06:59,159
good to be around. It fills
a hole within me, whereas all this

841
01:06:59,440 --> 01:07:03,719
makes me feel terrible. So I
have, you know, a long it's

842
01:07:03,800 --> 01:07:09,159
a long project, but still I
think it. You know, anyway,

843
01:07:09,199 --> 01:07:13,039
I want to so with that the
did you have some you want to say?

844
01:07:14,679 --> 01:07:15,320
Yeah, I was so, I
was gonna I was just going to

845
01:07:15,360 --> 01:07:20,320
say. An interesting development in China
in the last ten to twenty years has

846
01:07:20,320 --> 01:07:27,440
been the increase in interest in bird
watching, which was never a thing in

847
01:07:27,679 --> 01:07:30,599
China, or at least it was
a very niche thing. But now suddenly

848
01:07:30,800 --> 01:07:39,239
all of the parks and public gardens
that you see around around China are full

849
01:07:39,320 --> 01:07:44,880
of people with big telephoto lenses or
you know, binoculars and so on looking

850
01:07:44,920 --> 01:07:47,840
for birds, photographing birds, taking
an interest in them. And that's a

851
01:07:48,159 --> 01:07:56,719
relatively recent development, and it's partly
being driven by technology and social media and

852
01:07:56,800 --> 01:08:00,920
so on, because people want to
share their amazing photographs of the latest birds

853
01:08:00,960 --> 01:08:08,079
that they've they've seen. But I
think also it's it's generally part of a

854
01:08:08,199 --> 01:08:12,559
sort of a broader reverence and interest
in in nature, and that's that's got

855
01:08:12,599 --> 01:08:14,760
to be a good thing. You
know. The more people we get out

856
01:08:14,800 --> 01:08:17,000
there looking at these things, it's
going to be a good thing. Yeah,

857
01:08:17,079 --> 01:08:20,239
this I mean to me, it's
almost become my religion. This is

858
01:08:20,359 --> 01:08:23,640
my thing. I mean, I'm
not not so about it. I'm not,

859
01:08:23,800 --> 01:08:27,600
you know, out there standing on
a street corner with the sign telling

860
01:08:27,680 --> 01:08:30,720
people who don't believe what I believe
that they're going to hell. But maybe

861
01:08:30,760 --> 01:08:32,920
I should. But you know,
but it's almost like it's this is something

862
01:08:33,000 --> 01:08:38,920
that you know, I'm I'm just
thinking about at all moments of my day

863
01:08:38,960 --> 01:08:43,319
and explaining to people and trying to
get people excited about and because it's just

864
01:08:43,479 --> 01:08:47,640
it's everything, you know, it's
the it's the fabric of life around us.

865
01:08:48,279 --> 01:08:51,199
It's so I mean, it's such
a nice hand. We're part of

866
01:08:51,279 --> 01:08:56,600
it, Like, yeah, we're
part of it. We're not We're not

867
01:08:56,760 --> 01:09:00,439
separate right at all? You know. And yeah, and if and it's

868
01:09:00,520 --> 01:09:02,479
you know, it's it's like a
house. You don't look after a house,

869
01:09:02,520 --> 01:09:06,000
it'll fall around it will fall down
around you. If we don't look

870
01:09:06,039 --> 01:09:11,239
after nature, it'll it'll collapse.
And it just feels so it just feels

871
01:09:11,239 --> 01:09:15,960
so good too. I mean I
literally get dopamine dopamine shots when I look

872
01:09:15,039 --> 01:09:19,000
at native plant gardens or when I'm
out in the field and I realize something,

873
01:09:19,600 --> 01:09:23,479
you know, like what pollinates something, or why a plant evolved to

874
01:09:23,520 --> 01:09:27,720
be a certain way, or how
it's its seedlings are germinating half underground like

875
01:09:27,800 --> 01:09:30,840
some of the cact i saw in
Brazil and those sand habitats or whatever.

876
01:09:30,600 --> 01:09:33,600
So cool. So okay, well, anyway, we'll get back to plants.

877
01:09:33,640 --> 01:09:38,800
I what's up with lobilia because a
lot of Lobilia species. First off,

878
01:09:38,840 --> 01:09:43,520
Lobilia, which is in Companio lacy
and the order of astoraelis the order

879
01:09:43,560 --> 01:09:46,760
of sunflowers, So it's does its
secondary pollen presentation. It's got kind of

880
01:09:46,840 --> 01:09:53,039
a similar to sunflowers. It's got
a fused anther tube with inward facing anthers

881
01:09:53,039 --> 01:09:56,520
and the style comes out and pushes
the pollen out, and then that style

882
01:09:56,720 --> 01:10:00,600
later becomes facultative. It becomes fact
female, so it's you know, they're

883
01:10:00,800 --> 01:10:05,479
protandrus male first then becomes female.
But Lobilia is all over the world.

884
01:10:05,560 --> 01:10:09,800
I mean that lobilia is all over
the world. Is that just because it's

885
01:10:09,840 --> 01:10:12,640
got they've mostly got tiny seeds.
I mean, you've got some in Kenya

886
01:10:12,720 --> 01:10:16,840
that get ten feet tall. I
saw fistulosa and Brazil fifteen feet tall,

887
01:10:17,000 --> 01:10:20,520
fifteen foot tall. Abilia you get
ones here in South Texas where I am

888
01:10:20,640 --> 01:10:24,720
now that are eight inches tall.
I mean, what the fuck, man,

889
01:10:24,800 --> 01:10:27,680
It's crazy. And a lot of
them are bird pollinated too, are

890
01:10:27,720 --> 01:10:33,399
they not? Yeah? Yeah,
some of the b pollination seems too to

891
01:10:33,520 --> 01:10:40,840
be the dominant pollination system within within
Lobelia's or lobillioid at least. But yeah,

892
01:10:40,920 --> 01:10:44,720
certainly some of those are bird pollinated
as well. Yeah, I think

893
01:10:44,800 --> 01:10:51,479
seed size probably plays a plays a
big role when when you have relatively small

894
01:10:51,600 --> 01:11:00,279
seeds, they can get attached to
bird feathers, bird feet and so on

895
01:11:00,079 --> 01:11:05,039
and be moved moved around. I
think there's a lot of mysteries in in

896
01:11:05,439 --> 01:11:09,960
in dispersal of plants around the world. I mean, you know, we

897
01:11:10,680 --> 01:11:15,960
there's this this this apparently native species
of cactus which occurs in in Africa,

898
01:11:16,199 --> 01:11:20,520
all of the East coast of Africa
and on Madagascar, as well as a

899
01:11:20,560 --> 01:11:25,960
ripsalas species. Yeah, I've seen
it in South Africa. I've seen it

900
01:11:26,039 --> 01:11:33,760
in Tanzania as well, which has
you know, fleshy fruit and sticky seeds

901
01:11:33,800 --> 01:11:40,279
and so the so the assumption is
that at some point birds you came across

902
01:11:40,319 --> 01:11:45,640
the Atlantic and ooped in in Africa
and you end up with this this,

903
01:11:45,239 --> 01:11:49,840
this cactus there. And I learned
recently actually there's a Bromelia seat which is

904
01:11:50,119 --> 01:11:56,920
thought to be native to to Africa
as well. I appreciated that it was.

905
01:11:57,000 --> 01:12:00,560
So there was something obviously probably making
a transatlantic flight, and I thought,

906
01:12:00,760 --> 01:12:04,560
Mypshire, Yeah at some point so
again again yeah, yeah again.

907
01:12:04,720 --> 01:12:09,000
It's about time scales, isn't it. You know, given enough time,

908
01:12:11,279 --> 01:12:15,359
crazy things like this will will happen. M But but I guess I brought

909
01:12:15,399 --> 01:12:20,600
up libilia because with the Hawaiian honey
eaters they were I guess that was one

910
01:12:20,600 --> 01:12:26,000
of their favorite plants. Was I
know a lot I know Hawaiian, the

911
01:12:26,039 --> 01:12:30,720
Hawaiian libilia is, it's like a
famous clade, and a lot of them

912
01:12:30,800 --> 01:12:33,319
were I guess pollinated by birds.
And then a lot of the higher elevation

913
01:12:33,479 --> 01:12:38,840
ones seemed to be pollinated by birds
too, Like there's some of the really

914
01:12:39,000 --> 01:12:45,279
weird ones in the equatorial high elevations. Do you know anything about those?

915
01:12:45,359 --> 01:12:49,079
Like the Kenyon ones or yeah,
there's there's someone man Kenya, isn't there

916
01:12:49,079 --> 01:12:56,359
which a bird pollinated? I actually
had an opportunity to see those at the

917
01:12:57,159 --> 01:13:01,880
In August twenty twenty two. I
was teaching on a field course in Keny

918
01:13:01,920 --> 01:13:08,520
who had been run by the Tropical
Biology Association, which is sort of a

919
01:13:08,720 --> 01:13:15,119
European and African equivalent of the OTS
organization with tropical studies, isn't it,

920
01:13:15,600 --> 01:13:19,520
And they run these field courses in
Africa, and the way it works with

921
01:13:19,520 --> 01:13:28,479
the Tropical Biology Association is there are
typically thirty students on a field course,

922
01:13:29,079 --> 01:13:33,479
half of them are African, half
of them are European. Europeans pay for

923
01:13:33,800 --> 01:13:39,760
the full of amount. The Africans
get adversaries for attending, and they're just

924
01:13:39,880 --> 01:13:45,319
incredible. They're alsort of Masters of
PhD level level students and they're just amazing

925
01:13:45,239 --> 01:13:51,520
students. The year that I was
teaching there in Kenya twenty twenty two,

926
01:13:53,840 --> 01:14:00,000
there were four hundred applications for places
from African students for fifteen place. I

927
01:14:00,079 --> 01:14:05,920
mean, she's incredibly oversubscribed and such
such keen students so good, wanting to

928
01:14:06,039 --> 01:14:11,119
know more about their their own flora
and fauna, so so I cut a

929
01:14:11,159 --> 01:14:15,680
long story shoot. I talked on
the course there for for a Kenya.

930
01:14:15,079 --> 01:14:21,119
We've been there about a week and
about a third of us on the field

931
01:14:21,199 --> 01:14:28,319
course called covid Uh, and it
just flowed us. We were so ill.

932
01:14:28,840 --> 01:14:31,239
So I had a chance to kind
of walk walk up part of Mount

933
01:14:31,279 --> 01:14:35,840
Kenya to see these libelias in in
man Kenya, and I just couldn't do

934
01:14:35,920 --> 01:14:43,159
it physically. That would be right
there and You're just like, yeah,

935
01:14:44,079 --> 01:14:48,960
just let me die here. And
so that was. But but yeah,

936
01:14:49,159 --> 01:14:54,520
you've got these things there and which
again pollinated by some odd groups of birds

937
01:14:56,239 --> 01:15:00,000
which you know, not not the
typical hummingbirds at all. So yeah,

938
01:15:00,119 --> 01:15:04,319
surprises around every corner. Can we
can we talk about math math pollination for

939
01:15:04,439 --> 01:15:08,359
a minute? I mean, do
you see do you where do you see

940
01:15:08,399 --> 01:15:13,640
the most moth pollination in tropical areas
or what is what are some of the

941
01:15:13,840 --> 01:15:16,079
advantages of that? I mean,
just bloom at Nike is too hot during

942
01:15:16,119 --> 01:15:20,960
the day. I don't know if
it's bloom at night because too hot during

943
01:15:21,000 --> 01:15:26,800
the day. I think a lot
of it is about a niche or should

944
01:15:26,840 --> 01:15:32,920
I say niche differentiation, But where
you've got high diversity of species within a

945
01:15:34,159 --> 01:15:40,399
within a plant high diversity of plant
species within a community. Plants evolved to

946
01:15:40,479 --> 01:15:45,920
be different to their neighbors, and
so so they evolve into different kind of

947
01:15:45,960 --> 01:15:51,760
pollination niches, and moth pollination is
part of that, but it seems to

948
01:15:51,800 --> 01:15:56,920
be particularly common in some families.
So so you know the dog bin and

949
01:15:57,000 --> 01:16:00,640
milkweed family Apostle and Ac, which
I've been studying for over thirty years now,

950
01:16:01,039 --> 01:16:05,119
there's quite a high Yeah, a
lot of moth pollinated speacies in there.

951
01:16:05,520 --> 01:16:11,560
Actually we're in the botanic garden here
in Kunming. We're looking at a

952
01:16:11,680 --> 01:16:17,640
species of Ravulfia which is common in
Asia, Ravulfia the ticolata, which has

953
01:16:17,720 --> 01:16:25,640
a medicinal properties and has been widely
using sort of traditional Indian medicine Chinese medicine

954
01:16:25,800 --> 01:16:30,640
as well, which looks as if
it ought to be moth pollinated, white

955
01:16:30,680 --> 01:16:33,720
tubular flowers, lots of nectar,
but that actually opens in the day on

956
01:16:33,800 --> 01:16:38,079
the night, and they've got a
very very slight scent, I mean it's

957
01:16:38,079 --> 01:16:43,239
almost imperceptible. Somebody like I know
you had Rob and the podcast a while

958
01:16:43,239 --> 01:16:46,359
ago. Somebody like him with a
very highly tuned nose could probably work out

959
01:16:46,359 --> 01:16:55,199
what the scent is. Yeah,
he like tells you that he breaks down

960
01:16:55,239 --> 01:17:00,920
the chemical makeup of a cent.
Oh my god, he's he's incredible.

961
01:17:00,159 --> 01:17:05,560
But but this this flower looks like
it should be moth pollinated. But we're

962
01:17:05,560 --> 01:17:11,000
seeing bumble bees, endemic bumble beees
visiting all the time. We have done

963
01:17:11,039 --> 01:17:15,000
some night observations and we see moths
flying around, but the moths are not

964
01:17:15,159 --> 01:17:19,079
visiting the flowers. They're actually laying
eggs on the inflorescences and with the caterpillars

965
01:17:19,119 --> 01:17:26,279
eating the bloody flowers. So who
knows what's going on there? Moth pollination

966
01:17:27,239 --> 01:17:32,960
or the moths that do the pollinating
tend to arrive in very specific kind of

967
01:17:33,079 --> 01:17:38,840
time windows. So there may be
you know, across the course of the

968
01:17:38,920 --> 01:17:42,159
whole night, there may be half
an hour, an hour a wave and

969
01:17:42,279 --> 01:17:46,119
expect these moths to arrive and then
they'll disappear for the rest of the night.

970
01:17:47,520 --> 01:17:50,800
And they won't do it every night, They only do it on certain

971
01:17:50,960 --> 01:17:57,239
nights and so and so, you
know, studying moth pollination could be a

972
01:17:57,399 --> 01:18:00,800
little bit frustrating, you know,
Spacetually, you know you've given the moths

973
01:18:00,800 --> 01:18:08,319
are nocturnal and most pollination ecologists U
a diurnal and so sitting around waiting for

974
01:18:08,439 --> 01:18:11,800
these things to all night, waiting
for these things to visit be a little

975
01:18:11,800 --> 01:18:15,239
bit frustrating. But when you've got
camera traps and so on, it that

976
01:18:15,439 --> 01:18:19,039
that, you know, talking about
technology again, the camera traps make things

977
01:18:19,119 --> 01:18:26,119
a little bit easier now. But
but moth pollination is definitely under recorded in

978
01:18:27,600 --> 01:18:30,600
everywhere in the world. I think
a lot of pollination is totally under recorded.

979
01:18:30,600 --> 01:18:33,840
I mean, you ask people,
ask botanist, so that's some reacharch

980
01:18:34,039 --> 01:18:39,319
researchers will pollinates these things are I
look at that there's no one's gone out

981
01:18:39,319 --> 01:18:42,039
there and studied it. I mean, especially where I live. I mean

982
01:18:42,039 --> 01:18:45,000
I'm in a very understudied area.
I mean lots of places in Texas are

983
01:18:45,039 --> 01:18:50,680
not that well studied South Texas,
especially West Texas. To you know,

984
01:18:50,840 --> 01:18:56,520
no one, no one's we were
doing. I was noticing things pollinating paote

985
01:18:56,640 --> 01:18:59,960
in the field and other all the
other cool cactus species that grow in here.

986
01:19:00,119 --> 01:19:02,840
And I looked it up and there
wasn't much online about any of it.

987
01:19:02,960 --> 01:19:06,359
And we found these cool beetles in
some of the flowers. There were

988
01:19:06,439 --> 01:19:11,960
some of the of course cool solitary
desert bees. You know, I know,

989
01:19:12,199 --> 01:19:15,000
in really hot areas, beeflies actually
do a lot of pollinating because they

990
01:19:15,000 --> 01:19:18,279
are a lot more tolerant of heat. They've got a lot more heat tolerance

991
01:19:18,319 --> 01:19:21,279
than some of the bees do,
which was new to me. A friend

992
01:19:21,279 --> 01:19:26,680
of mine studies beeflies at the Smithsonian. It's wild shit, but it's great.

993
01:19:26,800 --> 01:19:29,960
That's what's crazy to me is that
we so much is getting destroyed right

994
01:19:30,000 --> 01:19:33,119
now and we haven't even figured out
how all this stuff is connected, you

995
01:19:33,199 --> 01:19:36,720
know, like as a species,
we haven't. And you've still got people

996
01:19:36,960 --> 01:19:40,359
at least in my country of course, who are like, why that's not

997
01:19:40,399 --> 01:19:42,199
important? Why do you want to
study that? Why do you want us

998
01:19:42,239 --> 01:19:45,199
to go look at flowers? Why
doesn't matter if this little insect pollinates this

999
01:19:45,319 --> 01:19:48,680
thing. It's you know, because
this is like this whole Jenga tower of

1000
01:19:48,760 --> 01:19:53,119
the ecosystem. You want to know
what all the blocks do, especially while

1001
01:19:53,159 --> 01:19:57,840
you're in the process of removing it
to build dollar general stores and office parks

1002
01:19:57,920 --> 01:20:02,439
and you know, agriculture, solar
fields, whatever. Yeah, whatever it

1003
01:20:02,479 --> 01:20:08,199
does. Absolutely so. My first
book, poll and Pollination, I made

1004
01:20:08,239 --> 01:20:14,640
a back of the envelope calculation based
on a few different sources which suggest that

1005
01:20:15,399 --> 01:20:20,640
we have some kind of information,
some kind of knowledge of the pollinators of

1006
01:20:20,800 --> 01:20:27,199
about ten percent of the flowering plants. And there's what three hundred and fifty

1007
01:20:27,239 --> 01:20:31,119
thousand species of flowering flaring plants so
forth. Somewhere around thirty thirty five thousand

1008
01:20:31,159 --> 01:20:36,119
of those we know something about the
pollinators, but that might be just lists

1009
01:20:36,199 --> 01:20:42,279
of the insects would visit the flowers. And I updated that in Birds and

1010
01:20:42,439 --> 01:20:46,439
Flowers and had some new information there
and came to pretty much the same conclusion

1011
01:20:46,720 --> 01:20:54,239
there. So you know, we
think we know a lot about pollinators,

1012
01:20:54,359 --> 01:21:00,800
about what is pollinating the flowering plants, but actually our knowledge is limited in

1013
01:21:02,079 --> 01:21:05,279
real terms. You know, ten
percent of the flowering plants we have some

1014
01:21:05,439 --> 01:21:12,039
information for, but it's also biased. It's biased towards the big, showy,

1015
01:21:12,640 --> 01:21:18,159
you know, flowers where that are
relatively easy to access there not you

1016
01:21:18,239 --> 01:21:24,119
know, big trees up in the
canopy of rainforests. They're down below on

1017
01:21:24,159 --> 01:21:28,119
the forest floor, or they're in
grasslands, and they're big and they're showy

1018
01:21:28,159 --> 01:21:32,439
and they attract their attention. So
we have a limited knowledge of what's going

1019
01:21:32,479 --> 01:21:35,800
on there. Despite the fact that
We've been studying this stuff for you know,

1020
01:21:36,359 --> 01:21:40,359
two hundred years or so. Yeah, yeah, yeah, So now

1021
01:21:40,359 --> 01:21:42,760
I want to ask you how did
you get in to this? Like what

1022
01:21:43,000 --> 01:21:46,960
was your angle into becoming fascinated with
because I think it's an immensely fascinating topic.

1023
01:21:47,319 --> 01:21:49,960
It took me a while to finally
get hit over the head with him

1024
01:21:49,960 --> 01:21:53,439
and be like, oh, come
on, look at this. This is

1025
01:21:54,159 --> 01:21:57,199
some incredible stuff that's going on right
in front of you. You can observe

1026
01:21:57,239 --> 01:21:59,760
in your front yard, you know, if you plant the native plant garden.

1027
01:22:00,079 --> 01:22:01,239
I mean, I killed my lawn. It was the first thing I

1028
01:22:01,319 --> 01:22:04,000
did when I got the house I
live in now, got ripped up all

1029
01:22:04,039 --> 01:22:09,520
the lawn before i'd even moved furniture
in and just started planting stuff. And

1030
01:22:09,640 --> 01:22:13,239
now my yard is super diverse.
I've got all these different species of insects,

1031
01:22:13,279 --> 01:22:15,399
lizards, birds, and I'll go
out and I mean the insects I

1032
01:22:15,520 --> 01:22:19,199
see coming to my yard now,
as some of the native plants I've got

1033
01:22:19,279 --> 01:22:23,319
here are so cool. I mean, I'm learning so much just by having

1034
01:22:23,399 --> 01:22:28,760
this here. What got you into
it? Yeah, it's so so.

1035
01:22:28,920 --> 01:22:33,319
I was the archetypical kid who was
always looking under rocks for spiders and beetles

1036
01:22:33,359 --> 01:22:39,239
and so on, or peering into
rock pools looking for crabs and sea and

1037
01:22:39,319 --> 01:22:44,279
emony's and stuff. I grew up
in the in the northeast of England,

1038
01:22:45,279 --> 01:22:47,760
tank called Sunderland, which is a
sort of an industrial town. At one

1039
01:22:47,800 --> 01:22:55,439
point he was the biggest shipbuilding town
in the world. And my family they

1040
01:22:55,439 --> 01:22:59,720
were all kind of in the shipbuilding
industry, welders and riveters and so on

1041
01:22:59,840 --> 01:23:03,680
on on my mother's side, and
they were all coal miners on my father's

1042
01:23:03,760 --> 01:23:08,600
side. My father was a coal
miner for a for a while, and

1043
01:23:08,760 --> 01:23:14,199
so so the landscape that that I
learned, my initial kind of natural history

1044
01:23:14,319 --> 01:23:24,319
was sort of post industrial. You
know, weedy plant communities on post industrial

1045
01:23:24,760 --> 01:23:28,279
sites, which I know is something
which which interests you, and these are

1046
01:23:28,359 --> 01:23:31,199
they I agree with you. These
are fascinating places for plant diversity, both

1047
01:23:31,319 --> 01:23:36,600
native and non native. But there's
also interesting geology there. You had,

1048
01:23:36,760 --> 01:23:44,960
you know, carboniferous coal shales and
coal deposits being overlain by by Permian geology

1049
01:23:45,079 --> 01:23:50,359
there with with a huge Permian tropical
reef system running through the area as well.

1050
01:23:50,399 --> 01:23:54,479
So I did a lot of fossil
collecting, collecting there. But then

1051
01:23:54,520 --> 01:23:58,279
on these these sort of permian limestone
you get limestone classland as well, which

1052
01:23:58,319 --> 01:24:03,920
is high high plant diversity. But
then I also I also started growing you

1053
01:24:03,960 --> 01:24:09,079
know, cactiro and succulent So that's
what got me interested in the milkweeds,

1054
01:24:09,159 --> 01:24:14,479
was growing the you know, the
succulent stapelias and so on, and got

1055
01:24:14,560 --> 01:24:20,880
really fascinated with with those and gradually
got kind of you know, turned onto

1056
01:24:20,960 --> 01:24:27,479
the botanical aspects. But then being
at university after I finished my my b

1057
01:24:27,720 --> 01:24:31,159
SC, I was I had no
idea what what to do. I knew

1058
01:24:31,199 --> 01:24:35,319
what I didn't want to do was
to go out and get a real job.

1059
01:24:35,640 --> 01:24:39,119
I wanted to you know, hang
around a bit longer, learn more,

1060
01:24:39,239 --> 01:24:46,600
do a PhD. And my honors
thesis supervisor at at university guy called

1061
01:24:46,600 --> 01:24:51,359
Andrew Lack. He had some funding
for a pH d and he suggested I

1062
01:24:51,439 --> 01:24:58,199
applied for it, and he had
worked on plant pollinator interactions and that that

1063
01:24:58,359 --> 01:25:01,079
kind of turned me onto that.
Interestingly, again, it's something I talk

1064
01:25:01,119 --> 01:25:04,920
about in the book. Andrew's father
was a guy called David Lack, who

1065
01:25:05,000 --> 01:25:12,960
was a very very renowned ornithologist,
and he was the first ornithologist to go

1066
01:25:13,159 --> 01:25:20,760
back to the Galapagos Islands after Darwin
was there and study the finishers, and

1067
01:25:21,520 --> 01:25:27,359
he wrote a book all about this, and so Andrew was his son.

1068
01:25:27,439 --> 01:25:30,800
And Andrew were kind of moved more
into botany a sense to get outside of

1069
01:25:30,880 --> 01:25:34,520
his father's father's shadow, but he
still had an interest in birds, and

1070
01:25:34,560 --> 01:25:40,880
so it was it was a gift
of a book all about Australian birds before

1071
01:25:40,880 --> 01:25:44,840
I went to Australian ninety three after
I finished my PhD. It was that

1072
01:25:44,960 --> 01:25:48,119
which kind of turned me on to
thinking about birds and also thinking about birds,

1073
01:25:48,199 --> 01:25:54,199
visiting visiting flowers. So you know, it's the usual sort of story

1074
01:25:54,279 --> 01:26:03,680
of having inspiring mentors and teachers who
who turn you onto these these things.

1075
01:26:04,319 --> 01:26:11,279
Also a guy called called Nick Vasa
who's an American pollination ofcologist. He and

1076
01:26:11,359 --> 01:26:14,760
his wife Mary Price, who were
over in California for a while. They

1077
01:26:14,800 --> 01:26:19,800
know in in Arizona, but they've
been incredibly influential in my, uh my

1078
01:26:20,000 --> 01:26:26,880
research trajectory, if you like.
It's yeah, having people around you who

1079
01:26:26,960 --> 01:26:30,960
inspire you and who interest you and
have you know, point you in certain

1080
01:26:30,039 --> 01:26:34,640
directions, that's what that's what turns
you. I'm surprised No one had written

1081
01:26:34,680 --> 01:26:39,279
a book on this before though,
because it's it's such a cool topic and

1082
01:26:39,399 --> 01:26:42,760
it's all over the world. I
mean, it's a you know, people

1083
01:26:42,800 --> 01:26:47,319
who aren't really tuned into anything outside
of just the human world. I mean,

1084
01:26:47,359 --> 01:26:51,239
Aladin and I even realize birds do
a lot of pollination. They think

1085
01:26:51,279 --> 01:26:55,560
it's just bees, but it's you
know, bees, flies, there's a

1086
01:26:55,840 --> 01:26:58,600
wealth of insects. But I mean, especially with the bird thing, I

1087
01:26:58,640 --> 01:27:00,640
mean, it's it's so cool,
man, it's I mean, I've noticed

1088
01:27:00,680 --> 01:27:04,000
it everywhere now. You know,
this thing is adapted to birds. The

1089
01:27:04,079 --> 01:27:08,159
size of this you look at like
a schlumberger at cactus, one of those

1090
01:27:08,439 --> 01:27:12,279
quote unquote Christmas cactus that you can
get at like a big box store,

1091
01:27:13,079 --> 01:27:15,239
you know, around Christmas time.
It's boom when I think flowers, it's

1092
01:27:15,800 --> 01:27:20,600
perfect size, perfectly adapted for a
bird. There's not be going in there.

1093
01:27:20,920 --> 01:27:24,680
You know. It's the same same
thing with Martha. Someone's got to

1094
01:27:24,680 --> 01:27:28,039
write a book on math pollination.
Now they haven't yet, you know,

1095
01:27:29,119 --> 01:27:32,439
let me, let me let me
just write that. Damn seriously, man,

1096
01:27:33,520 --> 01:27:38,079
it's really cool. I got a
question. I got a question.

1097
01:27:38,720 --> 01:27:42,680
Just go ahead. Let me let
me just follow what you're going to say

1098
01:27:42,720 --> 01:27:45,680
that about. Why is why has
nobody written a book about this? I

1099
01:27:45,039 --> 01:27:50,399
think part of it is because up
until relatively recently, most times when you

1100
01:27:50,439 --> 01:27:56,319
say bird pollination, people say humming
birds, and and there's a ghizillion books

1101
01:27:56,840 --> 01:28:01,680
on humming birds. It's been covered
so many times. There are two books

1102
01:28:01,800 --> 01:28:05,119
on sunbirds, one which was written
in the nineteenth century, one which was

1103
01:28:05,159 --> 01:28:09,920
written in the late nineties, early
to early two thousands. There have been

1104
01:28:10,039 --> 01:28:14,199
no books about about honey eaters.
So you know, when I talked to

1105
01:28:14,279 --> 01:28:17,279
my publisher about about what was going
to what book I was going to do

1106
01:28:17,439 --> 01:28:23,279
to follow up pollinations and pollination,
I pitched this idea of birds and flowers,

1107
01:28:23,600 --> 01:28:27,319
and it immediately immediately struck a chord
with them, because you know,

1108
01:28:27,439 --> 01:28:30,359
it is such a such a gap, such an obvious thing to be to

1109
01:28:30,479 --> 01:28:33,680
be writing about. To look at
this in its in its totality, and

1110
01:28:33,840 --> 01:28:36,840
yeah, I don't know why nobody
did it before, but you know,

1111
01:28:39,800 --> 01:28:43,000
that's hopefully this is this is the
start of a trend. Yeah, I

1112
01:28:43,079 --> 01:28:45,319
mean it's well, it just gets
people paying more attention to the ecosystem and

1113
01:28:45,399 --> 01:28:47,720
that oh yeah, this is the
thing, you know, this is there's

1114
01:28:47,920 --> 01:28:54,039
like, you know, all these
these these links between different organisms that you

1115
01:28:54,119 --> 01:28:57,239
wouldn't think are that you know,
closely related to having that much to do

1116
01:28:57,800 --> 01:29:00,960
with each other. But okay,
unrelated to the I gotta I gotta ask

1117
01:29:00,039 --> 01:29:06,119
two things. Most of the UK
geology is very old, sedimentary calcareous stuff.

1118
01:29:06,199 --> 01:29:12,199
I mean, is that true?
I see wild, Yeah, it

1119
01:29:12,840 --> 01:29:16,279
varies. I mean then in the
south you've got you know, cretaceous chalks

1120
01:29:16,399 --> 01:29:23,479
and limestones. Further north, you
so you've got carboniferous coal shales, You've

1121
01:29:23,560 --> 01:29:28,319
got uhet them into Scotland and the
Lake District and so on, you've got

1122
01:29:28,399 --> 01:29:33,359
granite as well. Actually, geologically
it's very very diverse and a lot and

1123
01:29:33,439 --> 01:29:42,439
then you know you've got quaternary sediments
and glacier landscapes as well overlying that.

1124
01:29:42,920 --> 01:29:47,119
So so actually geologically it's a very
very complex and diverse country. When when

1125
01:29:47,119 --> 01:29:50,439
you consider it a you know,
it's a relatively small country. There have

1126
01:29:50,560 --> 01:29:56,319
just been so many cool you know, biologists paleontologists that have come out of

1127
01:29:56,399 --> 01:30:00,359
there that that you know, talk
about having a childhood, you know,

1128
01:30:00,159 --> 01:30:04,520
looking for fossils, messing around with
these old old rocks and calcareous rocks and

1129
01:30:05,159 --> 01:30:08,319
you know that kind of thing.
So I yes, it's not. But

1130
01:30:08,399 --> 01:30:12,800
there's not much volcanism though, right
like there's I mean you've got there is.

1131
01:30:14,359 --> 01:30:19,840
Yeah. Yeah, up in Scotland
there has been so Arthur's Seat in

1132
01:30:20,399 --> 01:30:26,399
Edinburgh and of fact, I think
the castle as well are both on sort

1133
01:30:26,399 --> 01:30:34,159
of igneous grimit volcanic plugs, but
but ancient ancient volcanoes. We haven't had

1134
01:30:34,199 --> 01:30:40,000
any vulcanism for a very long time. But that like rhyolight or basalts or

1135
01:30:40,039 --> 01:30:46,920
anything like that, where it's a
good question. You're you're pushing at the

1136
01:30:47,000 --> 01:30:50,119
limits to my You've got to go
to the UK. I got to go

1137
01:30:50,199 --> 01:30:56,479
to the UK. I get banned
from the UK. I feel like there

1138
01:30:56,600 --> 01:30:59,960
was like the name of a punk
bands, the lp of punk band.

1139
01:31:00,359 --> 01:31:01,960
But no, I'd love to go, man, I'd love to check out

1140
01:31:02,119 --> 01:31:06,399
q and and some of the fossil
areas. God damn, damn fu.

1141
01:31:06,560 --> 01:31:10,159
Yeah, it would be most welcome. I'd I'd love to host you and

1142
01:31:10,439 --> 01:31:13,479
show you run the most welcome Yeah, I would. Yeah, they're you

1143
01:31:13,520 --> 01:31:16,079
know, America is you know,
all going downhill? I think I don't

1144
01:31:16,079 --> 01:31:20,600
think there's any crawling out of this
hole we're getting ourselves. So I want

1145
01:31:20,640 --> 01:31:24,760
to be too cynical, you know, just culturally and intellectually. It's not

1146
01:31:24,880 --> 01:31:27,680
going to be a very nice Hey, we don't have any healthcare in the

1147
01:31:27,760 --> 01:31:32,479
middle classes anyway. I really have
a way of enlightening, uh the subject

1148
01:31:32,520 --> 01:31:35,920
matter. But okay, but moving
on to the the piliads too, I

1149
01:31:35,960 --> 01:31:39,760
want to ask you about those.
Are most of those the stapiliads, the

1150
01:31:39,840 --> 01:31:44,279
succulent milkweeds dominant, you know,
the ones that are dominant, and the

1151
01:31:44,359 --> 01:31:51,079
African continent and uh madic gascar wherever
are those? Mostly most of them are

1152
01:31:51,159 --> 01:31:54,640
fly pollen it, I mean,
are the most Is that correct? There?

1153
01:31:54,720 --> 01:31:59,840
Most of them seem to be uh
co evolving with flies of one sort

1154
01:31:59,840 --> 01:32:02,039
of another ponding, and I most
them produce rancid smelling flowers, right,

1155
01:32:03,800 --> 01:32:10,199
Yeah, most of them produce either
rancid smelling flowers or fermented flowers smelling flowers,

1156
01:32:10,399 --> 01:32:13,239
or you know, fermenting fruit and
so on. And you assume that

1157
01:32:13,439 --> 01:32:20,880
maybe they're attracting attracting fruit flies for
example. Yeah, it seems to be

1158
01:32:20,920 --> 01:32:27,960
the case. But again, you
know that there's a small proportion of the

1159
01:32:28,039 --> 01:32:30,920
species that have actually been studied in
the in the field weather pollenation bile which

1160
01:32:30,960 --> 01:32:36,960
has actually been studied in detail relatively
small proportion. But you know, all

1161
01:32:38,000 --> 01:32:42,479
of these generous Stapelia, Juernia,
Caralouma, Huodia, all of these you

1162
01:32:42,600 --> 01:32:46,680
know that we now should be inferially
it's calling them all serrupedgia. Oh god,

1163
01:32:46,840 --> 01:32:53,199
really, well we're aware of So
what is that one? Isn't it?

1164
01:32:53,319 --> 01:32:57,720
So these were split? I mean, is this a case of where

1165
01:32:57,960 --> 01:33:01,319
they're lumping because if they didn't lump, they'd have to create new genera that

1166
01:33:01,920 --> 01:33:06,319
would be more confusing or what?
Yeah? Pretty much. So the genus

1167
01:33:06,399 --> 01:33:15,479
Cyupegia is not monophyletic, so these
trap flowers seems to have seemed to have

1168
01:33:15,600 --> 01:33:21,640
evolved within this clade at least twice, maybe maybe three times. And then

1169
01:33:21,880 --> 01:33:29,000
intermingled with that, you've got another
genus called Brachistelma, which is non succulent

1170
01:33:29,920 --> 01:33:36,960
and looks like a Syrupegia in terms
of having you know, tubers or wiry

1171
01:33:38,039 --> 01:33:45,840
stems, but with open flowers,
again mostly fly pollinated. And then you've

1172
01:33:45,880 --> 01:33:54,039
got Stapeliods, which are succulent and
again which mostly have the open open flowers,

1173
01:33:54,079 --> 01:33:59,520
but some of them are kind of
partial partial traps if but you've got

1174
01:33:59,560 --> 01:34:03,279
to treat the whole lot as a
as a monophyletic clade. And Serupedgia is

1175
01:34:03,359 --> 01:34:08,640
the old old name for for that
right, And so in theory it's it's

1176
01:34:08,760 --> 01:34:13,920
it's all ceru pedgia, which actually
which actually turns it into an enormous genus.

1177
01:34:17,119 --> 01:34:24,359
Well, because because there are no
good morphological characteristics that would you know,

1178
01:34:24,560 --> 01:34:30,159
separate out different types of Seripeggia,
there's there's so there's two competing camps

1179
01:34:30,199 --> 01:34:34,520
here. There's some South African botanists
who say you've got to call it all

1180
01:34:34,600 --> 01:34:41,119
ceripeggia. There's some German botanists who
say, okay, serrapeger is paraphyletic,

1181
01:34:41,600 --> 01:34:45,520
but they refer to it as being
taxonomically sound. We can say what a

1182
01:34:45,840 --> 01:34:50,560
what a serupedgi is? So I
think that it's kind of a philosophical argument,

1183
01:34:50,800 --> 01:34:57,640
do you want your genera to be
monophyletic or not? I see,

1184
01:34:57,720 --> 01:35:00,640
I'm a splitter, and I think
that this is based in like archaic This

1185
01:35:00,800 --> 01:35:06,319
is based in archaic rules of nomenclature
and human humans trying to wrap That's just

1186
01:35:06,439 --> 01:35:09,840
my opinion. I you know,
feel free to agree with that. Of

1187
01:35:09,920 --> 01:35:13,039
course we don't. It's fine with
me. But I'm just you know,

1188
01:35:13,560 --> 01:35:16,399
just because one genus is nested within
another, you just split up the other

1189
01:35:16,479 --> 01:35:19,640
genus. It doesn't matter if they're
not more. You can't tell apart morphologically.

1190
01:35:20,279 --> 01:35:28,399
To me, the answer of you
know, using morphological figures, you

1191
01:35:28,479 --> 01:35:32,760
know, or despite huge morphological differences, still lumping them together anyway, because

1192
01:35:32,760 --> 01:35:35,479
that's what that doesn't make sense.
It's just kind of like this or that

1193
01:35:35,600 --> 01:35:40,199
they're both the same thing. What
matters is you've got the data that shows

1194
01:35:40,439 --> 01:35:42,920
you know the phylogeny. You can
look at the cleatagram and be like,

1195
01:35:42,960 --> 01:35:46,119
okay, I understand what's going on. Like you know the cacti genus Pelacifhera

1196
01:35:46,479 --> 01:35:50,640
and Escobari and Coraphanta. Someone's trying
to say, now, and I saw

1197
01:35:50,680 --> 01:35:54,680
the fire, I saw the phylogeny, and I get it. I understand

1198
01:35:54,720 --> 01:35:57,760
the phylogeny. That's what's important.
You understand those relationships. But I'm not

1199
01:35:57,840 --> 01:36:00,600
going to start calling all these other
genera pelacifer I mean, that's nuts to

1200
01:36:00,680 --> 01:36:04,199
me because they're so different and same
thing with like, sorry, I'm not

1201
01:36:04,279 --> 01:36:08,319
trying to sound heated. I just
get passionate about, you know, with

1202
01:36:09,560 --> 01:36:13,920
the primula and oh god, I
can't remember the name anymore. It was,

1203
01:36:14,439 --> 01:36:17,960
you know, the the Shooting Stars, Doda Kathion, you know the

1204
01:36:18,119 --> 01:36:25,359
Doda kathy on our buzz pollinated premila
is not that's a huge ecological niche that's

1205
01:36:25,399 --> 01:36:27,560
this huge thing. And now it's
like, okay, we've got to call

1206
01:36:27,640 --> 01:36:30,960
them primila because they were nested within
it. We just just split out the

1207
01:36:31,039 --> 01:36:34,800
other species of Primila and call them
something different. Well, because we can't

1208
01:36:34,840 --> 01:36:39,159
tell them apart from this, yes, But conversely, you can tell these

1209
01:36:39,239 --> 01:36:43,439
apart, and you're lumping them together, you know, concealing a huge story.

1210
01:36:43,560 --> 01:36:45,239
The evolution of buzz pollination in this
clay. That's nuts to me.

1211
01:36:45,399 --> 01:36:49,159
So I don't know. I think
what matters to me is the phylogeny.

1212
01:36:49,279 --> 01:36:53,520
So I'm just going to start whenever
I call it whatever, or whenever I'm

1213
01:36:53,560 --> 01:36:57,239
being a stubborn schmuck and you know, refusing to call it name, I'm

1214
01:36:57,319 --> 01:37:00,199
just going to have the little cladogram
pulled up on my on so I can,

1215
01:37:00,680 --> 01:37:03,399
you know, or in a video
so I can show people this is

1216
01:37:03,439 --> 01:37:06,399
what happened, and this is you
know, because that's what matters. But

1217
01:37:08,760 --> 01:37:12,560
right, and you know, no, no, no, that's absolutely fine.

1218
01:37:12,840 --> 01:37:15,479
I don't have you know, a
horse in this in this particular race.

1219
01:37:16,119 --> 01:37:20,600
It just you know, yeah,
yeah. But but something which also

1220
01:37:20,800 --> 01:37:26,319
drove me, you know, so
so prior to to South African botanist Peter

1221
01:37:26,359 --> 01:37:31,199
Brun's proposing that we all call them
Serapeggia, what was happening was that every

1222
01:37:32,039 --> 01:37:38,079
three or four years, say,
a new paper would come out which transferred

1223
01:37:38,159 --> 01:37:43,039
a whole bunch of Stapelias into a
different genus, but the mad kind of

1224
01:37:43,079 --> 01:37:47,359
microgenera. And then two or three
years later somebody else would come back and

1225
01:37:47,399 --> 01:37:54,119
would lump them back into the original
And so it continued. And part of

1226
01:37:54,239 --> 01:37:58,000
it was, you know, part
of it was coming up with new characters

1227
01:37:58,039 --> 01:38:04,720
that they thought really kind of represented
this this particular group. But also part

1228
01:38:04,760 --> 01:38:09,439
of it was just fucking ego.
You know, I said, I wasn't

1229
01:38:09,439 --> 01:38:11,680
gonna swear again, but no,
it's good, it's good. Well,

1230
01:38:11,760 --> 01:38:14,359
there's a time to swear. It's
now. It's good. It is Ego.

1231
01:38:14,960 --> 01:38:18,520
What their fucking name in parentheses after
that ship it's fucking gross, it's

1232
01:38:18,640 --> 01:38:25,760
human ship it's it's monkey brain ship, you know, and so yeah,

1233
01:38:25,920 --> 01:38:30,720
and so it created incredible instability.
But I know, I know, you

1234
01:38:30,840 --> 01:38:34,000
know a lot of people were unhappy
about it all being syrupetia. But in

1235
01:38:34,039 --> 01:38:40,720
evolutionary terms, it makes sense,
and actually it tells us something really interesting

1236
01:38:40,760 --> 01:38:45,079
about how these flowers have evolved.
So what you've got is flowers evolving from

1237
01:38:45,119 --> 01:38:51,920
a sort of an open fly pollinated
pollination system into these trap flowers. And

1238
01:38:53,000 --> 01:38:58,960
then the trap flower pollination system is
lost and evolves into an open that's crazy,

1239
01:38:59,640 --> 01:39:03,239
crazy trap. Yeah, it's crazy. The same thing evolves twice on

1240
01:39:03,359 --> 01:39:08,279
it sounds like the fucking environment is
selecting for this twice at two different points

1241
01:39:08,319 --> 01:39:11,680
in time, in two different populations. That's crazy. So for me,

1242
01:39:12,720 --> 01:39:15,680
the more I've gotten into all this
stuff and traveled the world looking at it,

1243
01:39:15,800 --> 01:39:18,119
I don't trust morphogy anymore at all. I don't. I was like

1244
01:39:18,159 --> 01:39:23,119
to show me the DNA. I
don't trust morphology. You think these things

1245
01:39:23,159 --> 01:39:27,600
are closely related, it could have. The story can always be more complex

1246
01:39:27,720 --> 01:39:30,319
than that, which I think is
really cool. Yeah, yeah, no,

1247
01:39:30,600 --> 01:39:35,319
no, absolutely, And so actually
we now know a lot about the

1248
01:39:35,439 --> 01:39:45,239
pollinators of Syrupegia within these different clades
because of this trap flower mechanism. So

1249
01:39:45,560 --> 01:39:51,600
about almost twenty years ago now,
it suddenly occurred to me that the Habarium

1250
01:39:51,680 --> 01:40:00,479
ACW Gardens had a big collection of
Cirrupegia material. But I've been elected in

1251
01:40:00,560 --> 01:40:08,920
spirit in alcohol mixture of alcohol and
formaldehyde, because they've got a huge spirit

1252
01:40:09,039 --> 01:40:15,279
collection. For three dimensionally complex flowers
orchids are well represented there. Syrupedgia Aristolochia

1253
01:40:15,359 --> 01:40:19,720
as well, which is very much
a sort of a parallel evolution with Syrupegia.

1254
01:40:20,479 --> 01:40:26,359
So I spent a couple of years
every time I had some free time

1255
01:40:26,800 --> 01:40:32,399
going down to the Spirit collection at
Queue, opening these flowers up, removing

1256
01:40:32,680 --> 01:40:40,840
the flies, and because they produced
pollinaria in the pollen area persistently fit onto

1257
01:40:40,880 --> 01:40:44,079
the mouth parts, we could tell, you know, which flies were the

1258
01:40:44,119 --> 01:40:48,840
pollinators, which flies were not pollinating
or didn't have evidence for pollinating, and

1259
01:40:48,960 --> 01:40:54,840
I'd send these flies off to specialists. Some of them turned out to be

1260
01:40:54,960 --> 01:40:59,199
new species, as you might expect, but gradually we built up a picture

1261
01:41:00,199 --> 01:41:05,760
of the diversity of flies which were
pollinating these these flowers, and so I'd

1262
01:41:05,800 --> 01:41:09,359
have to look at the exactly ones. But I think again, you know,

1263
01:41:09,720 --> 01:41:15,239
ces Sense's strickt to is probably around
two hundred species, and I think

1264
01:41:15,359 --> 01:41:18,000
we've we've got data on the pollinators
about a third of those. But that

1265
01:41:18,119 --> 01:41:25,239
was only possible because of, you
know, this peculiarity of the of the

1266
01:41:25,319 --> 01:41:30,039
pollination system and the fact that when
botanists collect the flowers stick them into alcohol,

1267
01:41:30,079 --> 01:41:32,159
they're collecting the pollinators at the same
time. That's so cool, that's

1268
01:41:32,239 --> 01:41:38,199
so to speaking of you know,
Aristolochia too, what's up with I've noticed

1269
01:41:38,199 --> 01:41:44,000
this among fly pintid flowers. They've
got this modeling like the speckling like Aristolochia

1270
01:41:44,000 --> 01:41:46,399
erect I've got in my backyard.
It's got that that and you know,

1271
01:41:46,479 --> 01:41:49,000
and you'll see it on some aeroids. You'll see it on a lot of

1272
01:41:49,079 --> 01:41:51,600
plants. You see it. I
see it in a lot of stapiliads,

1273
01:41:53,159 --> 01:41:58,359
that speckled polka dot, that purple
polka dot against like a green backdrop,

1274
01:41:58,600 --> 01:42:02,520
or it's a burgundy polka at against
the green or yellow backdrop. Why why,

1275
01:42:03,000 --> 01:42:05,800
what does that do to attract flies? And why do why are fly

1276
01:42:05,920 --> 01:42:11,279
pinted flowers doing that? Yeah,
it's a it's a really good question.

1277
01:42:11,479 --> 01:42:14,960
You're right, it does turn up
time and time again, and it seems

1278
01:42:15,000 --> 01:42:18,840
to be something which which turns the
flies on there they respond to that.

1279
01:42:19,199 --> 01:42:26,800
I many years ago, not long
after I arrived at University of Northampton when

1280
01:42:26,800 --> 01:42:30,119
it was based in twenty five years, I started I set up some experiments

1281
01:42:30,079 --> 01:42:38,199
in retrospect, some quite naive experiments
where I printed out sheets of paper with

1282
01:42:39,359 --> 01:42:45,359
with artific effectively artificial flowers printed on
them with different kinds of patterning of the

1283
01:42:45,439 --> 01:42:50,479
type that you described on there,
and I put them into into cages and

1284
01:42:50,600 --> 01:42:56,039
put some some blowflies in with them
to see what would what would happen and

1285
01:42:56,119 --> 01:42:59,800
what would they would visit. And
all that happened was that the flies kind

1286
01:42:59,800 --> 01:43:03,119
of around at the top of the
cages and refused to visit these artificial flies

1287
01:43:03,800 --> 01:43:08,119
in reprospect. It was a little
bit naive, and I kind of abandoned

1288
01:43:08,119 --> 01:43:11,800
it after a while, but somebody
should definitely be doing that kind of experiment

1289
01:43:12,439 --> 01:43:17,079
in the future to really kind of
in a better way. It's kind of

1290
01:43:17,199 --> 01:43:21,600
mean. It's obviously a visual abuse. Yeah, but I wonder why that.

1291
01:43:23,000 --> 01:43:25,880
I wonder why that gets flies,
you know why I get some hat

1292
01:43:26,119 --> 01:43:29,000
like why I get some what about
it? Is it? What does it

1293
01:43:29,079 --> 01:43:33,319
resemblance it's some like resemblance to rotting
meat or rotting you know, vegetable material

1294
01:43:33,439 --> 01:43:38,119
or something or what is it?
You know, Yeah, it could be.

1295
01:43:38,199 --> 01:43:40,960
It could be you know, the
sort of modeling that you might expect

1296
01:43:41,199 --> 01:43:47,039
to uh to to get on a
on a yeah, a piece of piece

1297
01:43:47,079 --> 01:43:51,159
of rotten meat or whatever. But
but it occurs in some that there's a

1298
01:43:51,840 --> 01:43:58,319
gone back with stapeliods. There's a
there's a genus called Hounia, and within

1299
01:43:58,479 --> 01:44:03,720
Houornia there's a group called the lifeboy
who, which are so called because they

1300
01:44:03,760 --> 01:44:12,720
have this raised annulus around the sexual
parts of the of the flower, which

1301
01:44:12,760 --> 01:44:19,039
looks like a lifeboy. And yeah, and it's like a circular ring.

1302
01:44:19,079 --> 01:44:23,800
It's like a doughnut kind of Yeah. I wouldn't think it looks like a

1303
01:44:23,920 --> 01:44:26,800
lifeboy. I would think it looks
like a puckering you know what. But

1304
01:44:27,479 --> 01:44:30,800
we won't even get into that.
So that so that was the point I

1305
01:44:30,920 --> 01:44:34,039
was going to make. I think
that that they're mimicking the assholes of dead

1306
01:44:34,079 --> 01:44:41,159
animals, because that's what vultures go
for, that's what it flies and everything.

1307
01:44:41,159 --> 01:44:45,800
That's the first opening. That's the
first opening into acas. Yeah,

1308
01:44:46,079 --> 01:44:50,319
yeah, exactly. And but but
you know, I haven't looked at a

1309
01:44:50,399 --> 01:44:55,800
lot of assholes of dead animals,
but I don't think you get that kind

1310
01:44:55,840 --> 01:45:00,479
of reticulation around that. But on
these these uh these and raised annually,

1311
01:45:00,560 --> 01:45:04,520
you do get this, this kind
of reticulations on some species at least.

1312
01:45:04,960 --> 01:45:12,680
So yeah, who knows. Yeah, that's cool you mentioned that because I

1313
01:45:12,800 --> 01:45:14,760
was like, I saw that.
I'm like, that's a butthole, man,

1314
01:45:14,960 --> 01:45:17,239
that's a butthhole flower. Yeah,
yeah, yeah, that's right.

1315
01:45:17,680 --> 01:45:23,600
I've got a blog post from a
couple of years ago all about this called

1316
01:45:24,479 --> 01:45:30,680
flowers can be real assholes and it
and it talks, and it talks about

1317
01:45:31,399 --> 01:45:36,960
the the un is also some of
the air racing as well. There's a

1318
01:45:38,079 --> 01:45:43,239
thing which occurs in the Mediterranean called
the dead horse arem, which looks like

1319
01:45:43,680 --> 01:45:48,560
the back end of it they're sticking. It smells like what do you know

1320
01:45:48,600 --> 01:45:57,000
what the species is? Can you
remember the species name? Hor look it

1321
01:45:57,119 --> 01:46:00,520
up like the dead horse? You
know you can't. I can't I enough

1322
01:46:00,560 --> 01:46:03,600
coffee this morning? Yeah, I
forgot. It's morning there. It's like

1323
01:46:03,800 --> 01:46:06,720
nine pm. I gotta, I
gotta, I got a ship. I

1324
01:46:06,720 --> 01:46:11,640
got a plant later too, we
were dead horse, aerm lily. Oh

1325
01:46:11,760 --> 01:46:16,760
yeah, Helissa, Helissa Darross.
Oh my god, what the hell is

1326
01:46:16,840 --> 01:46:20,760
this? This is grotesque? Oh
my god. Yeah. And it's got

1327
01:46:20,840 --> 01:46:27,399
that speckling and that almost like broken
blood vessels is what it looks like,

1328
01:46:27,520 --> 01:46:30,600
you know, like bruised skin.
Oh, it's so disturbing. Jesus Christ,

1329
01:46:30,640 --> 01:46:43,319
it's hilarious. Hell hellico disiros helico
disirosmi. This is so This is

1330
01:46:43,359 --> 01:46:45,640
a good question to ask creationists.
You know, if God, if God

1331
01:46:45,760 --> 01:46:51,399
created all of this, why why
did he or she create flowers that look

1332
01:46:51,479 --> 01:46:55,159
like the back end of the Yeah? Why is he making flowers look like

1333
01:46:55,319 --> 01:47:01,399
buttholes? You know you mister creationist, divine know pious man where you know,

1334
01:47:02,119 --> 01:47:05,239
that's kind of a kind of a
hole in their theory. I guess

1335
01:47:06,079 --> 01:47:11,479
no pun intended. But anyway,
give me one second, home, give

1336
01:47:11,520 --> 01:47:15,439
one minute, okay, starting again? Yet a stock tank is it's not

1337
01:47:15,720 --> 01:47:18,079
it's not full yet, Okay,
it said to go check, but it

1338
01:47:18,199 --> 01:47:23,279
is. Man, It's like it's
like it was forty degrees celsius here today.

1339
01:47:24,279 --> 01:47:27,279
I mean it's really yeah, it's
like one hundred and five. Yeah,

1340
01:47:27,319 --> 01:47:30,119
it's crazy. It's you know,
heat wave. That very unusual for

1341
01:47:30,199 --> 01:47:32,640
this time of year, for this
long. It's it's only going to get

1342
01:47:32,680 --> 01:47:36,640
more of this. I mean,
I feel like to me, temperatures like

1343
01:47:36,720 --> 01:47:41,840
this are just like long cold winters. It's the same thing. It's like

1344
01:47:42,119 --> 01:47:45,279
you can't you know, stuff just
starts dying and you can't. You know,

1345
01:47:45,439 --> 01:47:51,359
you can only go outside at night
safely. Sucks, but it's ditical

1346
01:47:51,399 --> 01:47:57,119
to function. I was so repulsed. I think it was yesterday of the

1347
01:47:57,159 --> 01:48:00,319
heat wave going on impossed India at
the moment, and they're getting up close

1348
01:48:00,399 --> 01:48:04,840
to fifty fifty degrees. That's insanity, man, that's that's that's you're dead.

1349
01:48:04,960 --> 01:48:10,239
I mean, it's how the oil
companies did such a good job of

1350
01:48:10,439 --> 01:48:14,800
fooling people that there's still some people
that are just head in the sand about

1351
01:48:14,840 --> 01:48:17,199
it is insane. It just speaks
to the power of the propaganda machine.

1352
01:48:17,239 --> 01:48:21,800
Trust the oil companies, not the
scientists. You know, the scientists are

1353
01:48:21,880 --> 01:48:26,600
trying to screw you over. The
oil companies have nothing to gain, they're

1354
01:48:26,640 --> 01:48:30,800
only alter anyway. Well, I
wanted the SORR. I was going to

1355
01:48:30,840 --> 01:48:34,079
say, I don't know if you're
aware, but the do you know about

1356
01:48:34,079 --> 01:48:42,920
the international Botanical Congress, which happens
every six years and it attracts thousands of

1357
01:48:42,960 --> 01:48:46,359
botaners from from around the world.
It's the last time it was It took

1358
01:48:46,399 --> 01:48:53,680
places in shen Zen in China six
years ago. This actually no longer than

1359
01:48:53,760 --> 01:48:57,239
seven years ago, so we have
the problems of the pandemic. This year

1360
01:48:57,359 --> 01:49:02,159
is in Madrid in July eye end
of July, and the temperatures there are

1361
01:49:02,199 --> 01:49:05,960
predicted to be in the low forties. So we're going to have probably three

1362
01:49:06,079 --> 01:49:11,960
or four thousand botanists from around the
world descending on the Drid and passing out

1363
01:49:12,000 --> 01:49:15,119
to the heat struggle. Yeah,
that doesn't sound that sounds brutal, man.

1364
01:49:15,199 --> 01:49:18,159
That's you know, the higher latitude
places are going to become refuges.

1365
01:49:18,439 --> 01:49:23,039
I feel like, you know,
like it's Chicago, which growing up as

1366
01:49:23,039 --> 01:49:26,000
a little kid, that was our
winters used to be nasty. They're not

1367
01:49:26,079 --> 01:49:29,000
even that bad anymore. Yeah,
they're not. I mean, it's just

1368
01:49:29,119 --> 01:49:31,399
it's it's like kind of a bummer
for people to live there. Like I

1369
01:49:31,399 --> 01:49:35,399
remember snowy winters. We don't doesn't
get them that much anymore. But yeah,

1370
01:49:35,479 --> 01:49:38,960
man, anyway, well, I
want to ask you one more question

1371
01:49:39,640 --> 01:49:41,920
and then I'll let you go because
I know it's morning. You got the

1372
01:49:41,920 --> 01:49:45,479
whole day ahead of you. And
uh, anyway, I'm going to bet

1373
01:49:45,560 --> 01:49:48,039
here in like two or three hours. But okay, a parsonaci and the

1374
01:49:48,079 --> 01:49:51,840
broader turned the recorder back on,
by the way, Yeah yeah, yeah,

1375
01:49:51,880 --> 01:49:54,680
yeah, yeah, we're rolling.
We're rolling. Oh yeah, that's

1376
01:49:54,760 --> 01:49:59,680
right. Okay, right, sorry, but a parsonacy the broader of Possanac.

1377
01:49:59,840 --> 01:50:03,039
Now the esclepiadoity it's you know,
I've got like plant I've got I've

1378
01:50:03,079 --> 01:50:08,840
got Mandavilla lenuginosa in my yard,
which is a native down here, really

1379
01:50:08,920 --> 01:50:12,439
cool moth pollinated flowers. They smell
divine, They go off every night.

1380
01:50:13,039 --> 01:50:16,720
When you know this when you look
at the floral parts and I dissected them

1381
01:50:17,680 --> 01:50:24,279
last year. What what's going on? I mean, rob rogosu Regoso had

1382
01:50:24,359 --> 01:50:28,399
mentioned. Rauso had mentioned that there's
like a like a kind of like a

1383
01:50:28,520 --> 01:50:32,119
Chinese finger trap thing going on with
some of these, with some of the

1384
01:50:32,199 --> 01:50:36,960
members of manda Villa, which is
talk about a broad genus. But what

1385
01:50:38,199 --> 01:50:42,239
what exactly is is going on there
with I mean, how does the moth

1386
01:50:43,000 --> 01:50:50,239
pollinate apostan ac Sensus stricto produces,
doesn't produce pollennia like milkweed family subfamily does.

1387
01:50:50,319 --> 01:50:54,920
Right, it's just pollen. So
how does how do you know you've

1388
01:50:54,960 --> 01:50:58,439
got this long moth proboscis going down? Their moths can smell really well,

1389
01:50:58,520 --> 01:51:01,560
they can. That's why all moth
plate flowers have that really pleasant and strong

1390
01:51:01,680 --> 01:51:05,159
scent to them. Well, how
does it, uh, what's going on

1391
01:51:05,319 --> 01:51:09,520
with the androwesem with the actual the
stamens in there? How does it do

1392
01:51:09,680 --> 01:51:13,039
pollen exchange? Where does the pollen
go? Is it just wrapped up in

1393
01:51:13,119 --> 01:51:15,119
the proboscis? Then when it flies
off to another flower, what happens?

1394
01:51:16,760 --> 01:51:25,119
Yeah? So again itmost depends on
on on the genus, but essentially what

1395
01:51:25,239 --> 01:51:29,439
the what the flower is doing.
I think Rob's idea of being like a

1396
01:51:29,560 --> 01:51:39,840
finger trap is a really nice analogy
because the the flowers are determining where,

1397
01:51:42,319 --> 01:51:48,479
uh, where where the press is
going, and it guides it effectually guides

1398
01:51:48,520 --> 01:51:56,920
it into you know, the one
hole within within the flower. And then

1399
01:51:57,119 --> 01:52:04,279
as the pro is withdrawn, it's
the flowers sort of pushing the mouth parts

1400
01:52:05,359 --> 01:52:12,800
against a slightly different exit route,
which scrapes off the pollen which is already

1401
01:52:12,840 --> 01:52:17,159
on the pro bosses onto onto the
onto the stigma which you know, the

1402
01:52:17,199 --> 01:52:23,720
stigma is not on the top of
the style, is kind of underneath the

1403
01:52:25,560 --> 01:52:30,000
style. It's really hard to explain
which verbally without having a having a picture,

1404
01:52:30,199 --> 01:52:33,560
but the pollen gets scraped off sort
of underneath on the underneath of the

1405
01:52:34,159 --> 01:52:43,039
stigma style, and then as the
as the the proboss is withdrawn, it

1406
01:52:43,199 --> 01:52:48,079
picks up the pollen that's being produced
and often kind of deposited on the stigma

1407
01:52:48,159 --> 01:52:53,479
head. So it's it's almost like
the kind of a secondary pollen presentation there,

1408
01:52:53,800 --> 01:52:59,760
but it varies a lot between between
genera. But one of the interesting

1409
01:52:59,800 --> 01:53:04,600
things with with some of these apostenoids
is that they produce this sort of band

1410
01:53:04,760 --> 01:53:15,239
of sticky, almost kind of glutenous
material which sticks onto the probossa the most

1411
01:53:15,279 --> 01:53:19,159
part of the pollinator, and then
picks up the pollen on the way out,

1412
01:53:19,439 --> 01:53:26,000
so the pollen is effectively glued onto
the onto the provossis. It's almost

1413
01:53:26,159 --> 01:53:30,560
like like, yeah, it's almost
like an evolutionary step towards the you know,

1414
01:53:30,640 --> 01:53:36,439
the evolution of of pollen area.
In some of the more derived slepiods,

1415
01:53:36,920 --> 01:53:44,279
and there's a group of of old
world of possense called the peraploids,

1416
01:53:44,760 --> 01:53:50,760
so subfamily peraplakoid E used to be
a family Peraplecace. But in those they're

1417
01:53:50,800 --> 01:53:56,359
produced, they produce these kind of
spoon shaped translators which are sticky at one

1418
01:53:56,479 --> 01:54:00,399
end and they stick to to the
insect sort of that are visiting, many

1419
01:54:00,520 --> 01:54:04,840
wasps and flies. The end,
they have this kind of spoon with with

1420
01:54:05,079 --> 01:54:13,239
these they're not pollinear as such,
but they compact with its contents of half

1421
01:54:13,239 --> 01:54:20,239
an anther basically which of the pollen
sort of compressed together and stuck into the

1422
01:54:20,319 --> 01:54:25,319
spoon shaped structure at the end.
So you can see these sort of evolutionary

1423
01:54:25,479 --> 01:54:35,359
steps throughout the family towards the evolution
of true pollen area of the milk complex

1424
01:54:35,560 --> 01:54:40,039
milkweed flour avolve. That's so cool. So I mean you can see it's

1425
01:54:40,039 --> 01:54:43,880
like an intermediar. You can kind
of see how it arose. I mean,

1426
01:54:44,720 --> 01:54:46,960
realistically, there was a fork in
the road. One one lineage went

1427
01:54:47,039 --> 01:54:51,239
this way, the milkweed lineage,
sleepy authority went the other way. But

1428
01:54:53,600 --> 01:54:56,520
that's so cool. I love this
is what's the kind of thing I love?

1429
01:54:56,600 --> 01:55:00,039
Like it was Peter Burnard that got
me into dissecting flowers and really looking

1430
01:55:00,159 --> 01:55:03,560
harder. I mean, he you
know, he would just it was cool.

1431
01:55:03,640 --> 01:55:08,359
I mean it was a really cool
thing for me to It made everything

1432
01:55:08,600 --> 01:55:10,640
I got, you know, I
got to stop and look at everything,

1433
01:55:10,720 --> 01:55:13,720
like, why do the why does
salvias have those weird lever mechanisms in the

1434
01:55:14,479 --> 01:55:16,920
in the in the stamens. It's
you know, it's so cool. It's

1435
01:55:17,000 --> 01:55:19,880
a there's so much there's so much
more there when you look closer. And

1436
01:55:19,920 --> 01:55:24,439
getting a macro lens was really helpful
too, you know, so I can't

1437
01:55:24,520 --> 01:55:27,039
I'll see stuff on the macro lens. I don't even see with my eyes.

1438
01:55:28,439 --> 01:55:31,000
Yeah. Yeah, But but you
know, we were looking at that

1439
01:55:31,199 --> 01:55:41,920
Rovolfia that I that I mentioned earlier
on and also a really interesting Asian geners

1440
01:55:42,039 --> 01:55:45,039
Vilaris, which we we've been looking
at in one of the in one of

1441
01:55:45,079 --> 01:55:49,680
the other parks here, which has
much bigger flowers which are much easier to

1442
01:55:50,800 --> 01:55:59,000
to study. Uh. And the
flowers smell of of boiled rice. It's

1443
01:55:59,039 --> 01:56:03,319
just interesting front and is called it
the boiled rice plant. This this again

1444
01:56:03,920 --> 01:56:09,079
got to get robbout out here.
Assume tell us what's what's in these uh?

1445
01:56:09,800 --> 01:56:15,600
These just like well, so this
is the interesting question. We took

1446
01:56:15,640 --> 01:56:20,279
a lot of photographs of sunbirds visiting, and the sunbirds are definitely visiting the

1447
01:56:20,359 --> 01:56:25,359
flowers for a long time and taking
a lot of nectar. But if you

1448
01:56:25,479 --> 01:56:30,399
look at the sort of the dimensions
of the the beats and the tongues in

1449
01:56:30,560 --> 01:56:34,800
relation to the flowers, they're probably
not the pollinators. But on one of

1450
01:56:34,840 --> 01:56:39,760
the flowers that we photographed, we
found scales of what we think a hawk

1451
01:56:39,840 --> 01:56:45,239
moths, so we think it's probably
hawk moths pollinated. But the flat the

1452
01:56:45,319 --> 01:56:48,520
flowers are being exploited by by sunbirds. But yeah, they're they're really really

1453
01:56:48,560 --> 01:56:55,720
complex flowers. But but you've got
to understand the three dimensional structure and what's

1454
01:56:55,760 --> 01:57:00,359
happening in relation to the to the
mouth part of the one nata to really

1455
01:57:00,520 --> 01:57:06,439
understand how these flowers function. It's
difficult to appreciate from a herbarium sheet or

1456
01:57:06,479 --> 01:57:11,399
even from a from a photograph.
You've you've really got to understand what's happening

1457
01:57:11,479 --> 01:57:15,199
there. Yeah, it's man,
there's so much that especially with that scent

1458
01:57:15,880 --> 01:57:20,119
for a moth, like a weird
that's a weird scent for a moth of

1459
01:57:20,199 --> 01:57:27,279
flowers yeah, but but but the
scent is is really strong during the day

1460
01:57:27,760 --> 01:57:32,720
as well. Get other stuff too, probably that's weird. And there's a

1461
01:57:32,800 --> 01:57:36,479
couple of diurnal moths too, I
know, right, I mean they're rare,

1462
01:57:36,600 --> 01:57:43,239
but oh yeah, yeah, there's
that's quite know, there's I would

1463
01:57:43,319 --> 01:57:49,119
describe as rare that the dinal well
not necessarily hawkmus, but but dinal moths

1464
01:57:49,359 --> 01:57:59,239
generally uncommon. There are also some
nocturnal butterflies as well, and nocturnal bees

1465
01:57:59,239 --> 01:58:04,560
as well. So again you a
lot of the generalizations about what we what

1466
01:58:04,720 --> 01:58:12,520
we think these groups are like,
you know, we find exceptions. The

1467
01:58:12,640 --> 01:58:15,560
only maths I've seen out during the
day where I lived there are those one

1468
01:58:15,680 --> 01:58:18,920
that you know, the Texas moth, wasp or wasp moth. It's like

1469
01:58:19,000 --> 01:58:25,239
a moth that is doing you know, Bayesian Baysian mimicry. It's like looking

1470
01:58:25,399 --> 01:58:29,920
like a wasp. It's got it's
wild. When I first thought I thought

1471
01:58:29,960 --> 01:58:31,000
it was a wasp, I got
closed and I was like, what the

1472
01:58:31,119 --> 01:58:35,119
fuck? That's so cool? Yeah, but is that one of the clear

1473
01:58:35,159 --> 01:58:41,520
wing moths they have clear wings rather
than than scaly wind No, maybe I

1474
01:58:41,520 --> 01:58:45,840
don't. I'm not that familiar with
moths, but I remember looking at looking

1475
01:58:45,880 --> 01:58:47,479
at this thing and just being it
was wild. I mean it was like

1476
01:58:47,600 --> 01:58:51,399
yellow and or it's beautiful. It's
a beautiful insect, but it was so

1477
01:58:51,560 --> 01:58:58,880
cool. Was Yeah, there's a
whole family called clear wing moths, which

1478
01:58:59,079 --> 01:59:03,760
which I'll say have have clear wings
like a hymenopteran rather than a lepidopterrine.

1479
01:59:04,319 --> 01:59:11,399
And many of these mimic hornets and
wasps and so on. Yeah. Actually

1480
01:59:11,439 --> 01:59:18,520
a photographed one quite recently in a
temple park in Yunan, which clearly is

1481
01:59:18,680 --> 01:59:25,079
mimicking the yellow legged hornet, which
is this invasive hornet that's that's appeared in

1482
01:59:25,199 --> 01:59:30,279
Europe over the last five ten years, and it's just gradually spreading, spreading

1483
01:59:30,359 --> 01:59:33,560
north, and it's got the bee
keepers into a panic because they think they're

1484
01:59:33,560 --> 01:59:42,000
going to eat all of the honey
bees. And this moth is clearly mimicking

1485
01:59:42,279 --> 01:59:45,319
this yellow legged hornet. And what
was crazy about it was I took a

1486
01:59:45,359 --> 01:59:49,000
photograph and then this thing took off
and it buzzed just like a hornet,

1487
01:59:49,279 --> 01:59:54,920
which I have not noticed in any
of the other clear clearing moths. That

1488
01:59:55,039 --> 01:59:57,520
was a real surprise, but it
was definitely a moth. It was definitely

1489
01:59:57,560 --> 02:00:00,319
not a hornet. I found it. It's Horama Anthelon is the genius and

1490
02:00:00,319 --> 02:00:05,479
species. What's the family of clear
winged moths. That's a really good question.

1491
02:00:05,680 --> 02:00:15,359
Google might be your friend on this
one. It's not comment. You'll

1492
02:00:15,359 --> 02:00:18,720
have to, you know, google
google planing moths and you'll find it.

1493
02:00:19,279 --> 02:00:26,960
But most many of them visit flowers
and probably underappreciated as pollinators. Yeah,

1494
02:00:27,000 --> 02:00:30,800
math pollination is so cool. God, I'll find those guys hanging out during

1495
02:00:30,880 --> 02:00:32,920
the day too. They just lurk
and you know, they lurk in a

1496
02:00:32,960 --> 02:00:36,119
plant, in the foliage of a
plant, just hiding out, basically waiting,

1497
02:00:36,319 --> 02:00:41,960
waiting for the night. Such a
cool, such a cool group of

1498
02:00:42,039 --> 02:00:44,720
insects. Well, I guess uh, I could talk to you for another

1499
02:00:44,800 --> 02:00:46,039
two hours, but I guess that's
it. We've already done two hours.

1500
02:00:46,119 --> 02:00:50,079
So I really appreciate your time.
Man, thank you so much. No,

1501
02:00:50,239 --> 02:00:53,720
you're most welcome. It's been a
it's been a pleasure. It's always

1502
02:00:54,359 --> 02:00:58,520
it's always good to talk about this
stuff with people who were enthusiastic. Yeah,

1503
02:00:58,920 --> 02:01:00,039
yeah, for sure. So let's
talk about you because you've got two

1504
02:01:00,119 --> 02:01:03,319
books. It was funny I got
I bought one of your books, and

1505
02:01:03,399 --> 02:01:08,039
then like six months later your publisher
sent it to me and I was like,

1506
02:01:08,079 --> 02:01:10,720
oh shit, I didn't okay,
cool, I was already on this.

1507
02:01:10,920 --> 02:01:15,720
This worked really nice. You got
Pollinators and Pollination and Birds and Flowers

1508
02:01:15,279 --> 02:01:19,399
and both are excellent. Thank you, Thank you very much. I really

1509
02:01:19,399 --> 02:01:24,039
appreciate Yeah, and Pollination, Nature
and Society. That was the first one,

1510
02:01:24,439 --> 02:01:29,399
twenty twenty one. It's funny.
I've been working on that book for

1511
02:01:30,399 --> 02:01:33,520
I think two and a half years, and the deadline had just kind of

1512
02:01:33,600 --> 02:01:41,960
zoomed past with the publisher. And
then my wife, who's a trained as

1513
02:01:41,960 --> 02:01:45,960
a therapist, and I was kind
of given the practicing she writes about about

1514
02:01:45,960 --> 02:01:49,399
therapy, and so she got a
publishing deal for her first book, and

1515
02:01:49,960 --> 02:01:56,039
suddenly, you know, the the
the race was on who could finished her

1516
02:01:56,079 --> 02:02:00,000
book first, and she ended up
writing writing her book in three os and

1517
02:02:00,079 --> 02:02:02,439
I've been working on this bloody thing
for two and a half years, but

1518
02:02:03,039 --> 02:02:08,199
we ended up publishing it about the
same at the same time. And then

1519
02:02:08,279 --> 02:02:10,960
Yeah, as sort of follow up
to that, Birds and Flowers and Intimate

1520
02:02:11,000 --> 02:02:15,479
ffty million year relationship came came next
to the same publisher It's a small British

1521
02:02:15,520 --> 02:02:21,279
publisher called Pelagic who do just some
fantastic books natural history, science books,

1522
02:02:21,319 --> 02:02:26,880
conservation books and so on. It
looks looks interesting, man. Yeah.

1523
02:02:26,880 --> 02:02:29,239
When I when I saw you were
doing it, because I've known about this

1524
02:02:29,319 --> 02:02:31,640
birds and Flowers book for like a
year maybe maybe a little, But when

1525
02:02:31,640 --> 02:02:33,279
I saw that, I was like, God, damn, that looks good.

1526
02:02:33,319 --> 02:02:36,159
I can't wait to you know,
I's like bummed out. Didn't realize

1527
02:02:36,199 --> 02:02:40,319
it was. It wasn't out yet, you know, it was so is

1528
02:02:40,399 --> 02:02:43,680
this is this released yet or it's
coming out or what? No. No,

1529
02:02:44,039 --> 02:02:46,399
it came out in February. Okay, and it's had it's had a

1530
02:02:46,439 --> 02:02:53,960
couple of reviews so far, but
both have been very very positive reviews.

1531
02:02:54,880 --> 02:02:59,439
I know there's another couple in the
pipeline, so it's it's some take of

1532
02:02:59,520 --> 02:03:05,079
work is starting to uh to spread
there. And I hope it appeals to

1533
02:03:05,279 --> 02:03:10,000
you know, to birders, people
who are interested in ornithology, but I

1534
02:03:10,079 --> 02:03:15,279
hope it also appeals to botanists as
well. You know, crosses, crosses

1535
02:03:15,319 --> 02:03:20,399
that divide, and so often your
people who are are interested in natural history,

1536
02:03:20,439 --> 02:03:25,039
they tend to get stuck in this
kind of silo that they're they're interested

1537
02:03:25,079 --> 02:03:29,039
in botany or in insects, or
they're interested in birds, or they're interested

1538
02:03:29,119 --> 02:03:32,720
in fish, for example. But
you know, it's to me, it's

1539
02:03:32,760 --> 02:03:39,119
the interactions between the species, which
is important as we've discussed everything, but

1540
02:03:39,239 --> 02:03:45,119
also you know, yeah, everything's
connected, and you get a wider appreciation

1541
02:03:45,680 --> 02:03:49,119
of the group that you're interested in
by thinking about those those interactions with the

1542
02:03:49,960 --> 02:03:56,840
with the other groups. So yeah, hopefully it'll have a cross tax on

1543
02:03:56,920 --> 02:03:59,039
appeal. I mean, it hit
me. Yeah, it's sad now as

1544
02:03:59,079 --> 02:04:00,520
it does. Looks this is some
good stuff I gotta get, you know,

1545
02:04:00,880 --> 02:04:03,960
I gotta get this. So well, man, thanks a lot for

1546
02:04:04,079 --> 02:04:06,880
coming on there, coming on here, and uh yeah, man, I

1547
02:04:08,079 --> 02:04:11,359
just uh, I'm sure. I'm
sure I'll be emailing you here with the

1548
02:04:11,439 --> 02:04:14,680
next month or two or something to
send you something. I mean, I'm

1549
02:04:15,199 --> 02:04:17,039
I'm going to Mexico, so I've
got I've only got a few travels planned

1550
02:04:17,039 --> 02:04:20,800
this year because I've been working on
two books of my own which have actually

1551
02:04:20,880 --> 02:04:27,239
been really kind of, like I
said, emotionally traumatizic. I think the

1552
02:04:27,560 --> 02:04:30,000
one I just finished is gonna be
really good whenever it comes out. But

1553
02:04:30,520 --> 02:04:38,199
but hopefully I'm going Writing books is
hard work. It's really Yeah, I

1554
02:04:38,399 --> 02:04:41,760
enjoy it, but it's really really
hard. With Peter was like Peter wrote

1555
02:04:41,800 --> 02:04:43,520
me, he was like, why
don't you loosen up? It's supposed to

1556
02:04:43,560 --> 02:04:45,640
be fun. I'm like, fuck
this man, this is this is like

1557
02:04:45,399 --> 02:04:49,359
a momentous task. It's like it's
making me feel really weird emotionally, like

1558
02:04:49,479 --> 02:04:53,439
if I fail, if I don't
get my ship together with this, or

1559
02:04:53,479 --> 02:04:56,760
I leave something out, I'm gonna
be pissed off. And then just you

1560
02:04:56,840 --> 02:04:59,880
know, it's really I probably am
looking at it the wrong way, but

1561
02:05:00,880 --> 02:05:05,319
but you know, yeah, I
think you have to accept that any book

1562
02:05:05,399 --> 02:05:12,439
you write is going to have errors
in it and is going to have things

1563
02:05:12,479 --> 02:05:15,079
that you you missed out. And
so in both of my books, I

1564
02:05:15,439 --> 02:05:19,760
in the you know, the prepers
of the introduction or the acknowledgement. Sometimes

1565
02:05:19,960 --> 02:05:25,079
I just say, look, if
I've made a mistake, accept responsibility.

1566
02:05:25,079 --> 02:05:29,520
If I've left out your favorite story
about birds and flowers or bee pollination or

1567
02:05:29,560 --> 02:05:33,199
whatever, I apologize. There's only
so much you can do, and then

1568
02:05:33,319 --> 02:05:39,399
just just just just remind them of
that. Charles Darwin misspelled the word species

1569
02:05:39,439 --> 02:05:45,439
in the first edition of origin species. That's hilarious. Yeah, that's that's

1570
02:05:45,680 --> 02:05:47,279
one of the ways you can tell
a kind of first printing, first edition,

1571
02:05:47,560 --> 02:05:51,319
there's a misspelling of species. The
things that I do that I'm most

1572
02:05:51,399 --> 02:05:55,359
proud of are things I did when
I like didn't give a shit about I

1573
02:05:55,479 --> 02:05:59,000
wasn't thinking too hard about the end
result and I just was having fun and

1574
02:05:59,279 --> 02:06:01,279
hyper focus doing something. You know, when you start giving too much of

1575
02:06:01,319 --> 02:06:04,000
a ship, at least for me, that's when I start sucking up.

1576
02:06:04,079 --> 02:06:09,039
So anyway, well all right,
man, Well I can't I can't wait

1577
02:06:09,119 --> 02:06:13,479
to yeah, be sending you photos
of cool pollination systems that I come across

1578
02:06:13,600 --> 02:06:15,840
in the future. Yeah. Anyway, man, Well thanks a lot,

1579
02:06:16,199 --> 02:06:20,560
and good yeah, good luck with
the books. Yeah, yeah, man.

1580
02:06:20,640 --> 02:06:24,439
And I got to get out to
Kunming. You're there for how much

1581
02:06:24,520 --> 02:06:32,159
longer? I'm here until but the
twenty the eighteenth of July. I'm back

1582
02:06:32,199 --> 02:06:36,880
in the UK and then I head
down to Madrid for this big botanical congress.

1583
02:06:38,239 --> 02:06:41,880
But I'm here next year and the
year after for three months. Yeah.

1584
02:06:41,960 --> 02:06:44,439
Maybe next year I'll come out because
Peter's been telling me, is you

1585
02:06:44,520 --> 02:06:45,239
got to get out there, You
got to get out there. You got

1586
02:06:45,319 --> 02:06:48,439
to there's so much cool shit.
There's so much good stuff to see in

1587
02:06:48,560 --> 02:06:54,079
document that's just incredible, you know, and it's it's you know, partly

1588
02:06:54,159 --> 02:06:59,079
it's about the plants and the landscapes
and some incredible plant diversity, high levels

1589
02:06:59,119 --> 02:07:02,319
of endemism, but also culturally.
I mean you go to the local markets,

1590
02:07:02,520 --> 02:07:09,039
the farmers markets and so on,
and there are bags and bags of

1591
02:07:09,279 --> 02:07:15,720
dry flowers that are being used for
teas. I came across dendrobium flowers yesterday,

1592
02:07:15,600 --> 02:07:17,960
which was a new one for me, which is being used to tease,

1593
02:07:18,239 --> 02:07:23,560
but various kind of milkweeds and so
on that are being used for medicinal

1594
02:07:23,680 --> 02:07:28,560
purposes. I mean, the biodiversity
within these these markets is just export is

1595
02:07:28,600 --> 02:07:36,479
it is there? Uh? It's
no, it's variable. Okay, sorry,

1596
02:07:36,520 --> 02:07:39,520
we got yeah, we got caught
off for like ten things. Okay,

1597
02:07:39,520 --> 02:07:42,039
So yeah, what is the what
is the what's the gelgy there and

1598
02:07:42,359 --> 02:07:46,039
coming? You known? I'm ashamed
to say I haven't looked at it in

1599
02:07:46,119 --> 02:07:49,760
as much detail as as I should
have, but there's lots of very kind

1600
02:07:49,760 --> 02:07:55,800
of friable, what seemed to be
metamorphic looks here. I know that there

1601
02:07:55,840 --> 02:08:01,560
are some I think Jurassic sedimentary depart
it's in the area where they're pulling out

1602
02:08:01,800 --> 02:08:07,840
you know, cool new dinosaur species
and bird species and so on. The

1603
02:08:09,000 --> 02:08:16,239
top soil here is is very thick, rich, red, presumably iron rich

1604
02:08:18,119 --> 02:08:22,279
top soil, which actually reminds me
of parts of Africa and Australia I've been

1605
02:08:22,399 --> 02:08:28,079
too, you know, these really
deep red red soils, but very very

1606
02:08:28,159 --> 02:08:31,560
thick in places, so I think
that. Yeah, the geology is is

1607
02:08:31,680 --> 02:08:37,079
kind of is kind of complex deep
river valleys as well, some of which

1608
02:08:37,079 --> 02:08:39,159
are dry river valley, some of
which are wetter river valleys. You get

1609
02:08:39,199 --> 02:08:46,640
these kind of contrasting microclimates with it
within there and again with very distinct distinct

1610
02:08:46,680 --> 02:08:50,199
florash. A lot of topography there, I mean there is. It is

1611
02:08:50,479 --> 02:08:56,680
very mountainous, Yeah it is.
There really is, and still parks that

1612
02:08:56,800 --> 02:09:01,359
have that have barely been been explode
in in you know, last hundred years

1613
02:09:01,479 --> 02:09:07,199
or so. So Yeah, yeah, fascinating, really fascinating. I'm gonna

1614
02:09:07,239 --> 02:09:09,319
go, I mean, I'm gonna
I'm gonna look at the going next year

1615
02:09:09,359 --> 02:09:13,479
then and hopefully I'll come lurk with
you or something. I don't know,

1616
02:09:13,800 --> 02:09:16,239
you'd be really welcome anyway. Man. Well, thanks so much again,

1617
02:09:16,479 --> 02:09:20,520
Jeff and uh yeah until next time, man, stay in touch. Yeah,

1618
02:09:20,960 --> 02:09:24,600
there's been a pleasure, joy all
right, thanks again everybody else go you by