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All right, Okay, here we
go. All right, Welcome to the

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Crime Pays a Botany doesn't podcast.
The fucking recorders finally hooked up. Now

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I was recording without the MIC's hooked
up. You know, I've had it.

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I haven't been getting as much sleep
lately. I'm burningley candle at both

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ends, trying to do too much
shit here. But uh, anyway,

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welcome to that one. Yeah,
welcome to the Welcome to the Crime Pace

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podcast. I'm here with my friend
Peter Breslin. He's a botanist who studies

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the cactus family out of Arizona.
He's actually been to jail much respect for

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trespassing in West Texas before, because
the state has some of the most ridiculous

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fucking I mean, it's it's like
ninety five percent private property in the state.

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I didn't Doug telling me, told
me, like east of the Mississippi,

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it's like eighty five percent private property, which makes sense because you know,

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there's it's easier to grow stuff there, a lot of the desert terrain,

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you know, the Honky Death Cult. No offense of course that anyone

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who might find that offensive, but
it's just what I call it, you

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know, kind of tongue in cheek. They had the Honky Death Cult arrived

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on the West coast first. Maybe
things would be different had it not been

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mostly it had not been so arid
in the western half of the United States,

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you know, maybe it would have
been different. But as it is,

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it's private property everywhere, so and
we'll talk about that too. But

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man, thank you so much for
being down to come on this podcast.

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Man, I'm stoked to talk to
you. Yeah, yeah, thanks for

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having me. I'm uh, you
know, I'm really really happy to be

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here. I've been a longtime fan, longtime listener, first time caller.

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Right on. Man, Well,
thank you, thank you for support being

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into what I do it. I'm
just glad. I can, you know,

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keep it semi interesting. So I'm
all right. Well, first off,

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okay, so we're going to talk
about a lot of stuff. There

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was recently a revision of the genus
Mammalaria, at least a lot of the

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Baja and Sonoran desert species. That
makes total sense to me because if you

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look at some of those fish hook
Mammalaria, they totally do look like the

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closely related genus coach of Miya,
which I which I've seen in Baja,

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which is a really cool fucking they're
hummingbird pollinator, right coach Amia is Yeah,

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I mean, the the theory is
that because of the shape of the

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flowers, you know, they look
like they're pollinated by birds. They have

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that sort of funnel shape, you
know, and they're red. They're super

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red color, which usually is like
a bird attract and kind of color.

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So yeah, although no formal study
has been done of like, you know,

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actual pollinator visits to those flowers,
but anyway, that's the idea.

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Yeah. Well, okay, so
we'll talk about that. We're going to

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get to that. I want to
talk about pediocactus because that's a fucking cool

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genus. Man, that's like the
high Desert Arizona, and there's some really

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weird cryptic ones species in that genus
in a really god one of the most

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beautiful landscapes in the world. I
think, Yeah, it's crazy. But

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first let's talk about the jail.
So what happened? What tell us where

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you were, Describe the habitat,
describe the geology you were hiking to,

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and uh, oh geez, because
it's it's a fascinating stuff, right,

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I mean novaculate, right, is
that that's the what is no vaculating?

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Uh, it's well, you know
what, I'm not a geologist, so,

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but it is. It's like a
really weird, compressed, very lightweight

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kind of rock. Like when you
when you see it, it's it's wild.

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It's like when you pick it up, it just feels like it's more

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like balsa wood or something, you
know what I mean. It's it's very

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cool. And there's this area of
West Texas near Big Bend National Park,

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uh in in Brewster County, and
the novaculate is like the major geological feature

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through this little tiny area of West
Texas. Oh god, you could see

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it from the satellite too. It's
fucking amazing. I'm sorry to interrupt that.

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No, it's totally. It's got
that color. Yeah, it's like

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a pale beige, sort of whitish
kind of color. It's very visible like

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if you dry. Yeah. I
mean, I've been going over to West

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Texas for about thirty years, uh
to check out the cacti. Because one

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of my big hobbies before I got
into you know, getting the PhD and

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becoming more formally drained or whatever,
was to just go look at cacti and

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take pictures. And like be out
there in their app pat. That's I've

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been doing that for like thirty years
or more. And so I've always been

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fascinated by these uh novaculate cabios nevaculate
endemic cacti. And these are cacti that

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have specifically adapted to this substrate.
You can grow them in cultivation in anything

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like they'll grow. They're very easy. A lot of them are very easy

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to grow in cultivation, but in
habitat you're only going to find them on

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this particular kind of rock soil.
Como d say adaphic endemism. Nice almost

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these say a daphic And to keep
interrupting, I get through, fucking excited

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questo, no problem problem. So
this is biogenic silica. This is silicious

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rock, silica based rock that was
deposited uh in a just for anyone listening

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to deposited in a marine environment.
I think someone had messaged me once telling

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me it was like silica sponges or
something. Either way, it's a cool

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fucking rocket's really weird. Concordal fracts
are kind of white, kind of slippery.

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Continue once yeah, yeah, So
the cacti that grow in there are

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closely related to more widespread cacti,
but they're specific, you know, they're

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special either species or subspecies of the
more widely distributed cattie. So it's all

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it's this really cool system. Now
you know, this environment, this habitat

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right meets centuries of incredibly draconian,
you know, strict private property laws in

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Texas and the origin Like if you
look at the history of these private property

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laws, they really originated around the
slave trade because there was there was a

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real fear, you know, around
slave uprisings and slave escape slaves in this

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part of the world. And connect
that up with Mexico, right, because

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Texas was Mexico maybe should still should
be. But anyway, that's not okay.

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So if anybody's offended by that,
I apologize. They can take a

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walk whatever, they can go take
a walk to some evacuate go ahead,

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right exactly. So these private property
laws intersect, they have a really deep

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history of really really interesting connection with
with American politics and with yeah, I

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mean it's not it's not super straightforward
the way it gets presented, like you

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know, well, we we own
this land, so we have the right

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to protect the land. It's got
a lot of other dimensions to it.

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But anyway, totally really quick on
that note, really quick, just just

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really quick. Yeah, I mean, yeah, people can protect it,

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but it's if someone wants to go
in and harvest all their okatillo, harvest,

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poach the shit out of it,
you know, destroy the land,

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rip all the okata out of the
land, because they found out they can

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make money selling it to you know, rich people in Phoenix who want it

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and their landscaping. They can do
that too. So it's totally I mean,

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there have been good things to come
from from the private property, like

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some protection, but not much a
lot of it's really preventing people from getting

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out there and experiencing it. Well, it's that it's that concept of like

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ownership and freedom to do whatever you
want with the land, which doesn't really

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always intersect with the idea of stewardship
of the land, you know what I

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mean, Like totally you can you
can extract all you want because it's your

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land and nobody can tell you what
to do. Goddamn tell me what to

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do, right exactly. And that
also huge conflict in intersection with the Endangered

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Species Act, right because this is
the federal government coming in, you know,

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these damn Feds or whatever coming in
and telling people in Texas what they

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can and can't do on their own
land. And this all sort of evolved

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through the late nineteen seventies to eighties
into the early nineties where a lot of

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these novacuate endemic cacti are also federally
listed in endangered species because they're very rare

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and they grow only on you know, this substrate, and they're you know,

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they're endangered. And one of the
things they're endangered by is trampling like

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ranching and land use. And you
know, this extractive economy of Texas where

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the land is for human use the
most part totally. There isn't a totally

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abstractive, totally extractive you know,
there isn't a big culture of environmentalism in

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Texas. No, No. And
then the land ethic sucks too, you

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know. And I would say this
contrasts sharply with the idea the land ethic

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that we need to have, which
is a it's not your fucking land.

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Actually you're just borrowing it. You're
going to die at some point, that

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land is going to continue going on
living, and all the things that live

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there have a right to live there. Too. You know, it shows

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in an eight gratitude, humility and
respect for the other life forms there versus

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it's mine and it's you know,
I can do with it what I want

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because God put it here strictly for
me. You know, it's a there's

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a whole fucking deranged value system behind
it. Go on, Sorry, I

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just it's an interesting cultural conflict,
you know, it's huge, it's really

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complex, and there's always like this
tension within that context, you know,

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between the rugged individual landowner freedom stuff
right, and the federal government coming in

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and telling people what they can and
can't do. So that's part of this

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whole practice thing, right, because
as soon as a species gets listed as

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an endangered species under the Act,
the goal becomes to be sure that that

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species recovers to the point where it's
no longer at risk of going extinct.

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And those recovery plans specify critical habitat. And then as soon as critical habitat

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is specified, you can't do anything
in a lot of ways, like the

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land use rules sometimes really significantly change. So that's part this is all part

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of why I went to jail,
and you know, so to cut to

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the chase, basically, I've been. I go went out to West Texas

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for about thirty years, and really, like I'm thinking back to all these

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visits. I've gone almost every spring
for a long time. You know,

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I was a high school teacher for
about twenty five years, and every spring

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break I would pretty much duck over
to the Big Bend area, you know,

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until yeah, you know, until
I started the PhD process. I

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didn't have time to do it for
a while there. But so I think

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in all of those visits, it
would be accurate to say that I didn't

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set foot on fenced land once until
this time when I got arrested. So

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it's kind of ironic, you know, that I was like a first offender,

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like in reality, because I had
always always been told, you know,

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when you're in Texas you can get
shot, Like, don't go behind

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a fence because anything fenced is private
and people are hardcore, you know,

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it is a religion. It's like
a whole values thing here. And it's

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funny too because that whole endangered species
thing that you know, all the for

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lack of a better word, rednecks. I don't say that in any I've

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got red neck friends, you know, or whatever. I've got it's good

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to have a red neck friend.
You get a red neck friend who's going

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to help you. You got a
deer problem in your year, I'll figure

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out how to shoot it. You
know, maybe with botany, without without

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rednecks. Botany and rednecks go together, right, and you know you might

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there are some of them. They're
willing to break the law for good causes

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at some point, you know.
So anyway, but the the the mentality

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you hear at are sometimes is,
you know, if they find the federally

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listed and endangered species in our land, they're going to take it. But

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in Texas, if they find an
endangered species on your land, that's like

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more incentive. They're gonna like tell
you to get rid of it, you

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know, like when the wall was
going in. I mean, an endangered

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species makes almost makes the the culture
of this state go after it more to

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make to destroy it, because it's
so it's so the mentality here is just

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so against all that. You know, it's a cultural thing. It's so

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weird too, because i mean,
hunters, right wingers, they should all

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be for land conservation too, you
know, they should all be great,

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they should all be and that's cool. I mean it plays like the South,

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like you know, Kyle from Native
Habitat projects doing great work, and

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you know the more like rightly I
mean everyone's into them, but the more

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right leaning side of the of the
culture, you know, into land conservation,

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like, hey, you want good
hunting habitat plant native plants, that's

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going to support the animals you want
to haunt, et cetera. So it

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shouldn't be a political thing, but
here in Texas it is. It's like,

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you know, and then when when
prostrate milk we got listed as endangered

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within two weeks, our pig Attorney
General Ken Pexton, you know, got

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really hot. He got a heart
on for this land and then went after

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it. And last when the wall
started, Yeah it was brutal. I

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was just there. I just saw
the wall where we were saving all this

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stuff. A few days ago,
I was with some friends looking for reticulated

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colared lizards out there, and yeah, oh wow, fucking weird. The

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scene. It's like Jesus Christ,
you know, It's it's just I've been

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going there for years and now there's
this giant anyway, so it is crazy.

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I mean, my partner and I
were just down around Lukeville on the

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Arizona border where the wall is,
and we saw hundreds of African refugees walking

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along the wall just on the US
side, probably Senegalese maybe or from Mauritania.

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Just hundreds. I mean, I
would estimate probably two or three hundred

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African refugees walking along the wall.
And you know, they just closed the

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Lukeville crossing like indefinitely. You can't
even at Lukeville now. It's completely closed.

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So so you know, that's another
element around all this stuff is with

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the private property laws. There's,
uh, these guys that I met when

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I was in jail. There was
one guy from Guatemala who was an undocumented

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you know, immigrant, and his
story which I pieced together, he was

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waiting to be deported actually, and
so they put him in my cell because

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I was in I was in a
like a holding cell, separate from the

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main jail community because they don't want
to you know, like until they figure

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out what to do with with me, weird like sixty something white guy botanists.

203
00:15:50,399 --> 00:15:54,759
You know, they didn't want to
put me in the main jail population,

204
00:15:54,960 --> 00:16:00,559
right, So anyway, they put
this dude in there because he's waiting

205
00:16:00,600 --> 00:16:07,039
for for CBP to Customs Border Patrol
to pick him up and take him to

206
00:16:07,120 --> 00:16:11,480
the freaking airport in El Paso and
send him back to Guatemala. Right,

207
00:16:11,159 --> 00:16:17,440
So with my bat Spanish, his
bat Spanish, he tells me that he

208
00:16:17,519 --> 00:16:26,039
was arrested for trespassing after crossing you
know, the border, and I think

209
00:16:26,200 --> 00:16:30,200
he tried to get it was like
right around Ohinaga, if you know where

210
00:16:30,240 --> 00:16:33,519
that is. Yeah, yeah,
of course, near for Idio Psidio.

211
00:16:33,639 --> 00:16:40,720
Right, And so he got busted
and he spent eight months in the Brewster

212
00:16:40,799 --> 00:16:47,440
County jail waiting for his hearing,
waiting for his deportation. Fucking waste money

213
00:16:47,480 --> 00:16:49,720
too, man, I know,
I was, God, I was.

214
00:16:49,799 --> 00:16:55,559
I was in there lank tree just
collecting seeds and looking at rocks. Uh

215
00:16:55,679 --> 00:16:56,679
god, I must have been me
like a week ago. I was looking.

216
00:16:56,679 --> 00:17:00,639
I wanted to see if in Cilia
Scaposa had any on it too,

217
00:17:00,279 --> 00:17:03,200
And it just parked, parked on
the side of the road. It's like

218
00:17:03,200 --> 00:17:07,640
a little bit east of Sanderson.
Maybe this this dude comes out. It's

219
00:17:07,640 --> 00:17:11,160
a big white guy, looks like
fucking Lurch, you know, from Adam's

220
00:17:11,160 --> 00:17:12,799
family, and he's like, what
are you doing. I'm like, I'm

221
00:17:12,839 --> 00:17:15,000
looking for rocks. I'm just gonna
I'm don't worry. I didn't cross.

222
00:17:15,039 --> 00:17:18,279
He's like, all right, well, you know, we get some weird

223
00:17:18,319 --> 00:17:22,240
people here, and I'm like,
fucking weird people like what like like drag

224
00:17:22,359 --> 00:17:26,480
queens and fucking like people dressed like
like goth people like you get like teen

225
00:17:26,519 --> 00:17:29,640
god, like, what are you
talking about? Weird people? Like what

226
00:17:29,640 --> 00:17:32,319
do you mean? You know,
I know, he meant fucking migrants and

227
00:17:32,440 --> 00:17:36,720
like from Guatemala, Like what the
fuck is weird? What is weird about

228
00:17:36,759 --> 00:17:38,440
him? They don't They're not like
a perstevee. It was just so fucking

229
00:17:38,599 --> 00:17:42,240
don And then this other guy came
up after he's like all right, well,

230
00:17:42,279 --> 00:17:45,079
I'm like yeah, and then I
just started and then I just start

231
00:17:45,160 --> 00:17:48,480
talking about the geology, like the
fucking Chirtinlgoles and the limestone, just boring

232
00:17:48,519 --> 00:17:52,000
that, you know, just trying
to get this guy bored. So he

233
00:17:52,079 --> 00:17:56,359
leaves me alone and uh and can
tell that like I'm not it's not a

234
00:17:56,359 --> 00:17:59,039
cover that I'm like, actually,
legit, you know what I'm talking about.

235
00:17:59,039 --> 00:18:00,279
And then this other guy comes up
up and he's like this guy was

236
00:18:00,359 --> 00:18:03,119
just fucking off the chain, like
he must he seemed like he was on

237
00:18:03,240 --> 00:18:07,319
coke or something. He's like,
Ah, the Joe Biden people, they

238
00:18:07,359 --> 00:18:08,920
come through the lash with Joe Biden. What the fuck. I'm like,

239
00:18:08,920 --> 00:18:11,119
what the fuck is he talking about? Like it's like when you talk to

240
00:18:11,160 --> 00:18:15,240
a tweaker on the street or something
and you're like, you're trying they're like

241
00:18:15,240 --> 00:18:17,599
telling you a story, like a
homeless tweaker, and you're trying to figure

242
00:18:17,640 --> 00:18:21,240
what the fuck they're talking about.
Like you have to pie piece the conversation

243
00:18:21,359 --> 00:18:22,839
together, cause it's like a ping
pong ball all over it, you know,

244
00:18:23,039 --> 00:18:26,359
Joe Biden people, Cartales they're coming
to I'm what the fuck is he

245
00:18:26,400 --> 00:18:30,000
talking Joe Biden? And Cartel's like, fuck, this guy is on one.

246
00:18:30,000 --> 00:18:33,640
I'm getting like a contact high from
time. But he was like this

247
00:18:33,799 --> 00:18:37,559
old you know, he's this old
fucking honky who's with these flappyjowels. And

248
00:18:37,640 --> 00:18:40,559
I don't know what the fuck he
was talking about. Man, He's telling

249
00:18:40,599 --> 00:18:42,599
me there's Cartel going through the you
know, and I'm like, man,

250
00:18:42,680 --> 00:18:48,839
I've been here literally like fifty times. I've never seen fucking anyone, you

251
00:18:48,839 --> 00:18:52,119
know, I've never seen any fucking
migrants. I've never the cartel moves all

252
00:18:52,160 --> 00:18:56,559
their drugs through the border crossings.
They're not moving drugs through your fucking backyard,

253
00:18:56,920 --> 00:19:00,440
you know. Just like it's the
amount of fear, I mean,

254
00:19:00,559 --> 00:19:03,720
the amount of fear out there that's
been kind of stirred up, you know,

255
00:19:03,880 --> 00:19:10,119
for for landowners, for people who
already kind of had a default setting

256
00:19:11,039 --> 00:19:15,400
that they had to build a fort
like around their fucking catty. That's what

257
00:19:15,480 --> 00:19:18,960
I was thinking about, Like,
I can't imagine living like that, like

258
00:19:18,039 --> 00:19:22,160
just paranoid. And I mean I
would pack heat certainly, and mostly for

259
00:19:22,240 --> 00:19:26,000
feral hogs. Well, you know, and I'm sure the cartel. I'm

260
00:19:26,039 --> 00:19:32,960
sure there have been cartel crossing through
once in a while, but maybe but

261
00:19:33,160 --> 00:19:37,279
probably moving people, moving coyotes whatever
to fuck, you know. And I'm

262
00:19:37,319 --> 00:19:41,440
not trying to debate anyone on that
ship, you know whatever, But but

263
00:19:41,160 --> 00:19:45,279
it's it just it all ties into
why I went to jail though. Yeah,

264
00:19:45,400 --> 00:19:48,759
yeah, totally, this paranoid went
to this militarization of the border,

265
00:19:48,759 --> 00:19:52,640
this dystopic. Really quick, let
me mention, I saw that fucking Wolverine

266
00:19:52,640 --> 00:19:56,839
movie that came out. This sounds
corny, trust me, it comes back

267
00:19:56,880 --> 00:20:00,559
around. Don't worry. It was
like five dollars movie theater, you know,

268
00:20:00,599 --> 00:20:02,720
when you want some shit to sedate
your brain. Used to go to

269
00:20:02,759 --> 00:20:04,319
a five dollars movie theater in jack
Lena Square when I lived in Oakland,

270
00:20:04,599 --> 00:20:08,200
and I saw that fucking movie,
and I was like, holy fuck,

271
00:20:08,200 --> 00:20:11,640
I can't believe that was just a
dumb ass Marvel movie. Like I thought

272
00:20:11,640 --> 00:20:15,160
it was gonna be a dumb ass
Marvel movie. But the world did it

273
00:20:15,240 --> 00:20:19,119
portrayed? Because it takes place in
like twenty thirty was so dystopic and fucking

274
00:20:19,200 --> 00:20:23,400
real. There's like a scene with
these frat boys driving past the migrant camp,

275
00:20:23,519 --> 00:20:26,839
like you know, chanting Usa,
USA. He's standing out of the

276
00:20:26,960 --> 00:20:30,000
roof of a limousine. I'm like, this is fucking who wrote this?

277
00:20:30,079 --> 00:20:33,759
Man? This is pretty advanced for
you know, shitty Marvel. Like wow,

278
00:20:33,880 --> 00:20:37,559
okay, but but that's very I
mean I think of that all the

279
00:20:37,599 --> 00:20:41,400
time. I'm like, this is
gonna be the fucking you know, I

280
00:20:41,440 --> 00:20:42,920
don't know. There's so much shit
in there, and there's like robotic you

281
00:20:42,960 --> 00:20:47,599
know, there's like self driving trucks
just blazing in whatever anyway, But go

282
00:20:47,680 --> 00:20:51,359
on, So this is why you're
arrested. So tell everybody what you were

283
00:20:51,359 --> 00:20:55,799
going to look at the evaculate and
what species? Yeah, well, that's

284
00:20:55,880 --> 00:21:00,960
you know, that's a great question. I had been tempted by these outcroppings

285
00:21:00,960 --> 00:21:07,839
of nevaculate that you can see from
the highway there that goes there's this Texas

286
00:21:07,880 --> 00:21:11,519
I think it's Texas Highway three ninety
five, might be US three ninety five,

287
00:21:11,519 --> 00:21:17,480
I don't know, But anyway,
it goes from Marathon, Texas straight

288
00:21:17,559 --> 00:21:23,720
shot down to the northeastern entrance of
Big Ben National Park. So it's like

289
00:21:23,759 --> 00:21:30,759
a main drag kind of road right
through the heart of this novaculate habitat,

290
00:21:30,799 --> 00:21:33,000
you know what I mean, Like
on either side of the road. You

291
00:21:33,079 --> 00:21:37,680
just see it. You see it
everywhere, and it's so tempting, you

292
00:21:37,720 --> 00:21:42,440
know, but everything is a ranch, like everything is privately owned, you

293
00:21:42,480 --> 00:21:48,119
know, everything's fenced, you know, et cetera. Yeah, but I've

294
00:21:48,160 --> 00:21:51,000
been driving down that road, like
I said, for like thirty years,

295
00:21:51,880 --> 00:21:56,200
always tempted, right, and so
for I don't have any idea exactly why,

296
00:21:56,680 --> 00:21:59,559
but I just got this, like, you know, I have to

297
00:21:59,559 --> 00:22:03,359
take a look kind of feeling,
you know, And so I pulled over

298
00:22:03,599 --> 00:22:10,359
right at this one area where the
novaculate is really right up to the road

299
00:22:10,440 --> 00:22:17,440
cut, and there are a few
areas along that highway where you can still

300
00:22:17,480 --> 00:22:21,519
find uh. And this is on
the public right of way, so you're

301
00:22:21,640 --> 00:22:27,640
allowed to be there between the road
and the fence. You can still find

302
00:22:29,000 --> 00:22:34,799
some of these very tiny, very
rare, hard to find novaculate endemic cacti.

303
00:22:36,599 --> 00:22:41,640
And you just have to know which
road cut along that highway is still

304
00:22:41,640 --> 00:22:48,240
publicly accessible where you can find these
stopped Escobaria minima and a kind of serious

305
00:22:48,279 --> 00:22:55,240
what is it Davisii? Are those
two of them or veridiflorous subspecies divisik But

306
00:22:55,279 --> 00:22:57,920
I think it's listed as a kind
of areas divisii, like as a species

307
00:22:59,519 --> 00:23:04,720
and as minima Escobari hesteri, and
of course I think those were those have

308
00:23:04,759 --> 00:23:10,799
both been moved now into elo CIPHERA. I'm not doing that. I refuse,

309
00:23:10,920 --> 00:23:12,599
there's no fun. I think it's
a good I think it's a good

310
00:23:12,599 --> 00:23:17,079
paper actually, although I have more
I want to say about that later,

311
00:23:17,119 --> 00:23:18,480
but yeah, yeah, let's talk
about that. I'm gonna write that down

312
00:23:18,480 --> 00:23:22,640
so we don't forget, but keep
going. Okay, But there's pholo Cactus

313
00:23:22,640 --> 00:23:27,920
slavitus peness which is like this miniature
form of the of the Texas rainbow cactus,

314
00:23:27,960 --> 00:23:33,119
the you know, the felo cactus
bicolor, which is pretty widespread down

315
00:23:33,160 --> 00:23:40,200
in New Mexico, et cetera.
But Flavidus penis is a miniature, a

316
00:23:40,240 --> 00:23:45,000
little tiny form of that, you
know. And that's one of the themes,

317
00:23:45,039 --> 00:23:51,200
by the way, these novaculate endemics, so they tend to be miniature.

318
00:23:51,240 --> 00:23:56,599
They're like very they're very small,
they're very camouflage usually there. They

319
00:23:56,640 --> 00:24:03,839
have this unusual adaptation to that substrate
of being tiny like little plants. When

320
00:24:03,880 --> 00:24:07,720
I was looking at escobari and minima, and I'm not saying the trespassed to

321
00:24:07,799 --> 00:24:11,759
do it, but you know,
of course, but someone could infer from

322
00:24:11,799 --> 00:24:15,759
that what they may. I was, I was like, this almost looks

323
00:24:15,799 --> 00:24:18,880
like the rabbit shit because there's jag
rabbit pillots everywhere. I'm like, it's

324
00:24:18,880 --> 00:24:23,039
so fucking tiny. It's like totally
cryptic. And there's that cool slaginella everywhere,

325
00:24:23,079 --> 00:24:26,640
you know, that resurrection fern and
anyway, amazing go on. It's

326
00:24:26,680 --> 00:24:32,319
incredible habitat and it you know.
It's the weird thing about these little tiny

327
00:24:32,359 --> 00:24:37,359
plants, right is in cultivation they
get a lot bigger, So what to

328
00:24:37,519 --> 00:24:40,559
really see them, like, that's
the other sad thing or you know,

329
00:24:41,559 --> 00:24:47,480
frustrating thing about these private property laws
is to see what these plants actually look

330
00:24:47,680 --> 00:24:52,039
like, you know, in their
natural habitat. You have to go to

331
00:24:52,119 --> 00:24:56,759
where they grow. Like if you're
looking at them in cultivation, you're seeing

332
00:24:57,160 --> 00:25:02,920
much larger versions than and how they
grow in habitat. So, you know,

333
00:25:03,000 --> 00:25:06,839
I've always wanted to see him.
And you know, even after thirty

334
00:25:06,920 --> 00:25:14,599
years, I've never seen Escobaria hesterai
in inhabitat. It's not accessible to the

335
00:25:14,599 --> 00:25:18,640
public, Like there's just no way
to get to where it grows legally.

336
00:25:18,480 --> 00:25:22,880
So anyway, I just I said
to myself, look, I'm just gonna

337
00:25:22,920 --> 00:25:27,640
pull over and just duck into this
land really quick, see where I can

338
00:25:27,680 --> 00:25:32,440
find real quick, do it,
and then get out. Yeah, do

339
00:25:32,519 --> 00:25:34,559
it. Just get in there real
quick, real quick. My dad's mafia

340
00:25:34,640 --> 00:25:38,079
bookie cousin used always say that real
quick, real quick, just real quick,

341
00:25:38,240 --> 00:25:42,799
just you know, just just for
a second. So I did that.

342
00:25:42,880 --> 00:25:47,880
You know, I went in right
as I'm kind of behind the fence,

343
00:25:48,359 --> 00:25:52,000
not too far, maybe one hundred
yards. This dude drives down the

344
00:25:52,119 --> 00:25:56,039
ranch road. That's right, there
with a road grader, like he's one

345
00:25:56,039 --> 00:25:57,519
of the workers on the ranch.
He's grading the road, you know,

346
00:25:57,599 --> 00:26:03,279
he's fixing up the true and I
knew right away that he had seen me,

347
00:26:03,359 --> 00:26:08,039
you know, So I started to
head back to my car and kind

348
00:26:08,039 --> 00:26:11,559
of waved at the guy, and
he waved at me, and he drove

349
00:26:11,599 --> 00:26:14,359
across the highway and kept on,
you know, the ranch road on the

350
00:26:14,359 --> 00:26:17,279
other side of the highway, and
I was like, huh, maybe I

351
00:26:17,319 --> 00:26:22,240
don't know, maybe this is chill. So I made the bad decision to

352
00:26:22,400 --> 00:26:25,599
turn around and walk some more,
you know, and do some more exploring

353
00:26:26,240 --> 00:26:30,079
on this novaculate and it's like everywhere
right And I got sucked in too,

354
00:26:30,160 --> 00:26:38,160
because right away behind this fence,
I'm starting to see dense populations of falo

355
00:26:38,200 --> 00:26:45,680
cactus flavidispius and a kind of arius
neo capillis. I don't know if you've

356
00:26:45,680 --> 00:26:49,119
heard of neo capillos, but it's
it's one of these small flower to kind

357
00:26:49,119 --> 00:26:55,559
of areas related to Varida floris that
or Chlorianthus, you know, and it's

358
00:26:55,559 --> 00:26:59,680
called neo capillos. It's like new
hairs, is what that means. And

359
00:26:59,799 --> 00:27:03,880
it's like the little seedlings are these
incredibly furry, weird looking things. I

360
00:27:04,000 --> 00:27:08,680
have a couple. Yeah, there's
another one that grows in Big Ben Ranch

361
00:27:08,799 --> 00:27:14,880
State Park that does that same thing. It's got it's got hairy. Yeah,

362
00:27:14,720 --> 00:27:18,519
yeah, what is that? Camus
c a us casus. Definitely that

363
00:27:18,680 --> 00:27:22,160
hairy seedling thing, which is some
kind of weird adaptation. Then you know,

364
00:27:22,160 --> 00:27:26,119
when they get older, they just
they lose all that hair and they

365
00:27:26,160 --> 00:27:30,359
just have spines. Right, So
I was seeing those like everywhere, which

366
00:27:30,400 --> 00:27:36,960
is super cool. I took a
few pictures and uh, that was all

367
00:27:37,000 --> 00:27:44,480
I saw, actually, was those
two taxa flavidaspinus and Neo capillis. And

368
00:27:44,519 --> 00:27:45,599
then I was like shit, I
got to get out of here. And

369
00:27:47,039 --> 00:27:52,599
I swear to god, it was
like maybe twenty five minutes total, and

370
00:27:52,279 --> 00:27:56,920
you know, grab some pictures,
got some GPS, started heading back to

371
00:27:56,960 --> 00:28:02,720
my car, and I'm on my
way back to my car and there's like

372
00:28:03,039 --> 00:28:10,640
four sheriff department vehicles there. Maybe
I'm exaggerating. It might have only been

373
00:28:10,680 --> 00:28:18,200
three, but then like we got
one yeah yeah, like the county,

374
00:28:18,079 --> 00:28:22,839
the actual Brewster County sheriff, I
don't remember his name, but he was

375
00:28:22,920 --> 00:28:27,720
there, and these deputies like three
or four other other deputies, and I

376
00:28:27,799 --> 00:28:30,119
was just walking up to them like
what are you going to do? I

377
00:28:30,160 --> 00:28:33,200
mean, you know, they totally
saw me, like I can't like,

378
00:28:33,759 --> 00:28:40,240
you know, pretend like I wasn't
there, And you know, I thought

379
00:28:40,839 --> 00:28:42,680
what was going to happen was going
to be like listen, you know it's

380
00:28:42,680 --> 00:28:45,839
a misunderstanding. Like I've only been
here a few minutes. I just was

381
00:28:45,920 --> 00:28:51,319
taking some pictures. You know,
I'm a botanist, you know I I

382
00:28:51,359 --> 00:28:53,480
don't mean any harm or anything like
that. And in any state with a

383
00:28:53,599 --> 00:28:57,119
rational culture, that's what would have
that's what would have happened. Yeah,

384
00:28:57,160 --> 00:29:02,319
but no, you know it was
like listen, we are required to rescue.

385
00:29:02,480 --> 00:29:07,119
We have to take you to jail. It's required. You know,

386
00:29:07,200 --> 00:29:11,599
you're on private property. The owner. We've contacted the owner and they do

387
00:29:11,640 --> 00:29:15,720
want to press charges. This was
all within a twenty five minute period right

388
00:29:18,039 --> 00:29:22,039
where where I got like six of
the most expensive photos I've ever taken.

389
00:29:22,359 --> 00:29:26,319
Well, you're bad boy. You
I can't believe you because it's so weird

390
00:29:26,319 --> 00:29:30,440
too, because I mean when I
was all my time out West, hopping

391
00:29:30,480 --> 00:29:33,400
fences was just something you did because
the fences were just there to keep the

392
00:29:33,440 --> 00:29:36,279
cattle in. That's all they were. They were going to keep people exactly.

393
00:29:36,480 --> 00:29:37,519
You know, you want to keep
people out, put up a fucking

394
00:29:37,559 --> 00:29:41,880
ten foot tall fence, motherfucker make
it. You know, that's it's not

395
00:29:41,960 --> 00:29:47,759
just hard work, right. But
yeah, I mean most of my field

396
00:29:48,079 --> 00:29:53,319
botany right has been New Mexico,
Arizona, and Sonora and Baja California,

397
00:29:53,359 --> 00:30:00,759
And without exception, I think,
except well there's some hardcore areas of Sonora

398
00:30:00,799 --> 00:30:08,720
and Baja where you don't want to
go on private property. The sketch totally

399
00:30:10,000 --> 00:30:14,200
you're never coming out if you and
but they make that really clear. Most

400
00:30:14,200 --> 00:30:18,759
of the time. They have signs
that are really agro that just say,

401
00:30:18,839 --> 00:30:22,680
listen, we have this, we
have it under video surveillance, do not

402
00:30:22,799 --> 00:30:26,480
set foot in this area. Whereas
the culture in Texas, they just I

403
00:30:26,519 --> 00:30:29,920
think people that grow up here are
just trained, like it's just ingrained in

404
00:30:29,960 --> 00:30:30,839
them. I get friends who grew
up here, I remember, like you

405
00:30:30,839 --> 00:30:33,640
know, botanizing with them in other
states, and they're like, oh,

406
00:30:33,640 --> 00:30:36,559
we shouldn't hop the fence. I'm
like, no, no, it's it's

407
00:30:36,599 --> 00:30:38,559
public, it's just for cattle.
It's okay, it's you know, Dean

408
00:30:38,640 --> 00:30:44,200
Taylor R. I P told me
once about trespassing in California, like,

409
00:30:44,200 --> 00:30:47,039
if they if they don't want,
if it's private property, they got to

410
00:30:47,039 --> 00:30:51,240
have a sign up. They have
to have a no trespassing sign private property

411
00:30:51,359 --> 00:30:52,839
whatever. I mean, I don't
I think that's legit. I don't know.

412
00:30:52,920 --> 00:30:56,359
But either way, but Dean Dean
used to trespass a lot from Bidany

413
00:30:56,400 --> 00:31:02,839
good, good fucking job. I
mentioned to I mentioned this to the sheriff.

414
00:31:02,880 --> 00:31:04,119
I was like, listen, you
know, there's no sign on the

415
00:31:04,160 --> 00:31:10,039
fence or anything. And there's this
opening by where this gate is that was

416
00:31:10,079 --> 00:31:11,960
wide open. And he was like, yeah, anything behind the fence in

417
00:31:12,039 --> 00:31:17,079
Texas, you're you know, it's
illegal. They don't people don't need a

418
00:31:17,160 --> 00:31:22,759
sign, so you know. Uh. I was like, can I contact

419
00:31:22,799 --> 00:31:26,119
the owner and just talk some sense
into him, you know? And they

420
00:31:26,119 --> 00:31:30,400
were like, nope, we got
to take you to jail. So I

421
00:31:30,400 --> 00:31:32,920
wonder if it's a thing where if
the owner would have seen you. You

422
00:31:32,920 --> 00:31:34,480
know. I'm been like, Oh, this guy's just a nerd, you

423
00:31:34,519 --> 00:31:38,119
know, right, just a nerd, like a botany. He's not going

424
00:31:38,119 --> 00:31:42,039
to like run line for a fucking
grow up. He's not like running mi

425
00:31:42,160 --> 00:31:45,680
gropes. He's not, you know, just something man. Because although I

426
00:31:45,680 --> 00:31:51,000
got to admit, like my field
outfit, I look like I'm on the

427
00:31:51,119 --> 00:31:53,039
road, you know, because I
have a day pack and a sun hat.

428
00:31:53,119 --> 00:31:56,759
And yeah, I would know I
would be they would assume the worst

429
00:31:56,759 --> 00:32:00,759
of them. I'm covered in tattoos, I'm normal, pretty dirty foot.

430
00:32:00,799 --> 00:32:04,440
You know, I got that face
covering. I used to you know,

431
00:32:04,480 --> 00:32:07,559
like I'm irish. I don't want
to get freaking skin cancer, right,

432
00:32:07,599 --> 00:32:12,160
so I do full coverage, and
so I look I look like I've been

433
00:32:12,160 --> 00:32:15,440
on the road a long time.
In fact, when they booked me into

434
00:32:15,519 --> 00:32:21,599
Brewster County jail, uh, they
went through my whole like daypack and you

435
00:32:21,640 --> 00:32:24,839
know, I had like this bottle
of salt tablets in there, and they

436
00:32:24,880 --> 00:32:29,200
were fascinated by that, like,
you know, is this drugs? You

437
00:32:29,240 --> 00:32:31,240
know? Yeah, they get excited
about stuff like that. It's so cute.

438
00:32:31,359 --> 00:32:35,920
W They get so excited when you've
got something in the bag. It's

439
00:32:35,960 --> 00:32:38,319
so cute. The police do that. They get so excited. It's just

440
00:32:38,400 --> 00:32:43,599
you know, very exciting, right
oh yeah, and you know, I

441
00:32:43,599 --> 00:32:47,039
mean they don't know me from from
anybody. And but but what about me

442
00:32:47,200 --> 00:32:50,799
though. I mean, like,
like I said, I'm a sixty something

443
00:32:51,480 --> 00:33:00,640
botanist driving a Subaru Crosstree Irish Irish
buttons. But they just loved booking me,

444
00:33:00,680 --> 00:33:02,920
and they loved the whole thing.
I think, like, I think

445
00:33:02,960 --> 00:33:07,319
it made their I think it was
very interesting to them, like like like

446
00:33:07,359 --> 00:33:09,440
they weren't too where they mean like
where they died to or were they just

447
00:33:09,519 --> 00:33:12,960
kind of like, oh, actually
they were. They were very nice the

448
00:33:13,119 --> 00:33:15,759
entire time, and like I got
to ride in the front of the sheriff's

449
00:33:15,920 --> 00:33:20,720
truck. Oh, there you go
to nice. I've been arrested a few

450
00:33:20,759 --> 00:33:24,880
times is probably guess I didn't They
didn't cuff me. Uh, it's always

451
00:33:24,880 --> 00:33:28,440
fun when the cops have a good
time. You know. A couple of

452
00:33:28,480 --> 00:33:30,039
times I got arrested because I chat
them up and ship. You know,

453
00:33:30,079 --> 00:33:34,680
we have fun there. It's like
a you know, even though I'm being

454
00:33:34,759 --> 00:33:38,880
booked, and uh, they've always
generally been just probably because I try to

455
00:33:39,000 --> 00:33:42,079
charm them and talk them, talk
to them and ship. You know,

456
00:33:42,079 --> 00:33:45,039
They're always like, yeah, have
some ship. I remember one time the

457
00:33:45,079 --> 00:33:47,359
cops in Chicago printed out an old
mugshot for me. I was like,

458
00:33:49,039 --> 00:33:52,039
I was like God, that's nice, Thank you. I fucking had it

459
00:33:52,079 --> 00:33:53,480
for a while too. They let
me keep it, and then I lost

460
00:33:53,480 --> 00:33:57,000
it. I don't know where it
went. I don't know where to I

461
00:33:57,000 --> 00:33:59,880
should go them all sign it,
I should see it. Yeah anyway,

462
00:34:00,000 --> 00:34:02,960
alright, go ahead, Yeah,
so anyway, Yeah, it was a

463
00:34:04,000 --> 00:34:07,519
weird scene. And then you know
it's weird in Bruster County, they're they're

464
00:34:07,559 --> 00:34:10,119
pretty hardcore, Like the Brewster County
jail is not a place you want to

465
00:34:10,159 --> 00:34:13,599
be, like it is, really, I wouldn't think so. I wouldn't

466
00:34:13,599 --> 00:34:15,760
think it's that bad. Is it
just a lot of methoads or what?

467
00:34:15,920 --> 00:34:21,960
Well. I couldn't really tell too
much about the general population because, like

468
00:34:21,960 --> 00:34:28,599
I said, I was separate from
them, you know. But h was

469
00:34:28,719 --> 00:34:31,880
like the guys who got put in
my holding cell while I was there,

470
00:34:31,880 --> 00:34:37,119
because I was there for almost two
days. And that's another aspect of this

471
00:34:37,159 --> 00:34:40,840
whole thing that just freakd freaked me
out, Like I couldn't figure out how

472
00:34:40,880 --> 00:34:44,719
to get out, you know what
I mean. You were in jail for

473
00:34:44,800 --> 00:34:49,880
you. I was in jail for
the weekend before nine to eleven happened.

474
00:34:49,960 --> 00:34:52,719
I was in jail the whole weekend
my friends from Chicago because we got arrested

475
00:34:52,719 --> 00:34:57,159
in San Francisco. I was just
doing graffiti. They got out. They

476
00:34:57,159 --> 00:35:00,199
were in jail when nine to eleven
happened, so that must have sucked.

477
00:35:00,239 --> 00:35:02,400
You'd be like, oh, fuck
either, never let me out, they're

478
00:35:02,440 --> 00:35:08,559
gonna hear yeah exactly. Well so
yeah, So the guys that got put

479
00:35:08,599 --> 00:35:16,960
in my holding cell were foreign nationals
who were either being deported or extradited to

480
00:35:17,119 --> 00:35:22,920
other states in the US due to
other charges that they had. So that

481
00:35:23,039 --> 00:35:27,679
was really eye opening. You know, like this dude who's being flown back

482
00:35:28,519 --> 00:35:32,880
to Goosi, Galpa in the Honduras
right at taxpayer expense, Like I mean,

483
00:35:34,039 --> 00:35:37,079
he's going to be deported back to
his old country. And then this

484
00:35:37,199 --> 00:35:42,360
other guy being extradited to Louisiana because
he was selling drugs over there and got

485
00:35:42,440 --> 00:35:45,119
and you know, had a warrant, et cetera. So it was pretty

486
00:35:45,119 --> 00:35:50,639
crazy. You know. Then this
young guy too, who was actually from

487
00:35:50,760 --> 00:35:55,199
Ohinaga on the other side you know
the river. He was in there because

488
00:35:55,239 --> 00:36:01,360
he had veteran heroin at a border
checkpoint. That's a bad one. So

489
00:36:01,360 --> 00:36:06,559
he was not only an undocumented guy, but he also you know, had

490
00:36:06,679 --> 00:36:09,599
a possession charge and he'd been in
the Brewster County jail for like two and

491
00:36:09,639 --> 00:36:14,880
a half years, which is just
crazy to think about. I mean,

492
00:36:14,880 --> 00:36:17,000
for county jail to be in that
long. Yeah, that's crazy, man.

493
00:36:17,039 --> 00:36:20,320
That's not the way it's supposed to
work. Jail's not supposed to be

494
00:36:20,320 --> 00:36:24,079
for that prison is you know,
you know, I mean I got the

495
00:36:24,159 --> 00:36:29,360
sense that it was super crowded.
Man. You heard a lot like it

496
00:36:29,840 --> 00:36:35,719
felt to me like there were a
lot of people in there, and they

497
00:36:35,719 --> 00:36:39,079
book you in, they take all
your civilian clothing and stuff and everything,

498
00:36:39,119 --> 00:36:45,039
and then they then because they want
to be hardcore right and show like the

499
00:36:45,880 --> 00:36:50,519
that they're tough on crime or whatever, they put everybody in a pink jumpsuit,

500
00:36:52,159 --> 00:36:57,880
which which was you know, I'm
like, what the hell jumps Yeah,

501
00:36:58,320 --> 00:37:00,000
sink jumps It was not so bad, That's that's funny. I But

502
00:37:00,239 --> 00:37:04,360
man, they're probably trying to do
that because they're like, oh man,

503
00:37:04,400 --> 00:37:07,119
you know, some macho shit like
I gotta be embarrassed to wear this.

504
00:37:07,280 --> 00:37:08,920
I'd be like, fuck, yeah, do whatever. Let me draw on

505
00:37:08,960 --> 00:37:12,119
it, let me draw some ship
on it. I'll get, I'll get

506
00:37:12,159 --> 00:37:15,039
I'll make a fucking festivity out of
it, you fucking assholes. Let me

507
00:37:15,199 --> 00:37:19,000
give me a fucking sharpie. Let
me get on this thing. You know,

508
00:37:19,199 --> 00:37:22,840
Yeah, I think it was.
I think it was that guy what's

509
00:37:22,840 --> 00:37:25,679
his name, r Paio in Phoenix, in Maricopa County. Is that guy's

510
00:37:25,719 --> 00:37:30,880
still alive by what miracle? And
of fucking cholesterol drugs? Is that piece

511
00:37:30,920 --> 00:37:35,800
of shit's still alive? Amazing?
Like like Henry Kissinger, Right, yeah,

512
00:37:35,800 --> 00:37:37,159
they fucking lived till there are one
hundred. Man, these pieces of

513
00:37:37,639 --> 00:37:43,559
why only the good die young?
But anyway, this guy started the pink

514
00:37:43,639 --> 00:37:46,000
jumpsuit thing. I think in the
tent city that he ran, you know,

515
00:37:46,239 --> 00:37:51,599
the sheriff in Mayracopa County in Phoenix, and I think Brewster County was

516
00:37:51,599 --> 00:37:53,840
like emulating this guy because they think
of him as like a hero, you

517
00:37:53,880 --> 00:38:00,400
know, so fucking morny. It's
so corny, man, these fucking what

518
00:38:00,599 --> 00:38:04,599
doors. I was in for a
couple of days and then but they gave

519
00:38:04,599 --> 00:38:07,719
you. Everyone was wearing pink jumpsuits
though, everybody except the guys who were

520
00:38:07,719 --> 00:38:12,800
getting deported. Of course, they
were back in their civilian clothes, which

521
00:38:12,840 --> 00:38:15,920
I envied. I was like,
shit, I've always wanted to go to

522
00:38:15,840 --> 00:38:19,119
to Goosey, Galpa. You know, there's some cool catti in Honduras.

523
00:38:19,360 --> 00:38:21,480
Yeah, I don't know if you
want to go there now, you know,

524
00:38:22,199 --> 00:38:24,280
a little hot. I had a
friend who went that was there twenty

525
00:38:24,360 --> 00:38:28,639
or thirty years ago and said it
was fucking gratty at a great time,

526
00:38:28,679 --> 00:38:32,280
but now it's all controlled by criminal
gangs and shit. So well I got

527
00:38:32,280 --> 00:38:36,320
that impression for sure. But yeah, anyway, so I was in for

528
00:38:36,320 --> 00:38:38,760
a while. I saw the judge
about twenty four hours after I was booked

529
00:38:38,800 --> 00:38:47,079
in, and he set my bond
at like two thousand dollars because I was

530
00:38:47,159 --> 00:38:50,480
at the time, you know,
I was teaching high school in California.

531
00:38:50,519 --> 00:38:55,559
Actually, I was on spring break
from my private school teaching job in Los

532
00:38:55,599 --> 00:39:00,719
Angeles. And I guess they I, you know, was made of money

533
00:39:00,800 --> 00:39:05,920
or something. So they set the
bond, and I didn't know how that

534
00:39:05,960 --> 00:39:07,880
all worked. You have to actually
get a bondsman, you know, to

535
00:39:08,960 --> 00:39:15,719
bond yourself out of jail. So
the guy, the dude who was like

536
00:39:15,800 --> 00:39:17,480
the front desk guy, helped me
out with all that, you know,

537
00:39:17,559 --> 00:39:22,480
and helped me contact the bondsman.
They came down at the last minute.

538
00:39:22,599 --> 00:39:28,599
It took this woman six hours to
drive from like Echoes or something to bruce

539
00:39:28,599 --> 00:39:31,119
you County to bond me out.
I didn't get out of jail until like

540
00:39:31,119 --> 00:39:38,480
seven pm. And yeah, so
jes so, I you know, my

541
00:39:38,639 --> 00:39:49,039
Cactus network like went into effect.
And Mike Powell, doctor Powell at Saul

542
00:39:49,159 --> 00:39:54,039
Ross, who's like one of the
great cactus botanist. Yeah, well he

543
00:39:54,039 --> 00:40:01,519
he rounded up an excellent criminal defense
attorney who named Liz Rogers, and I

544
00:40:01,639 --> 00:40:05,920
really want to put a plug in
for her if you ever need you ever

545
00:40:06,000 --> 00:40:10,519
need criminal defense in West Texas.
Liz Rogers is incredible. She's totally connected.

546
00:40:10,599 --> 00:40:15,199
She knows everybody. She grew up
there right the CRIMEA podcast we do

547
00:40:15,320 --> 00:40:22,000
free advertising for good criminal defense attorneys
were more than you go exactly. But

548
00:40:22,000 --> 00:40:23,480
anyway, she came through for me. You know, it turned out she

549
00:40:23,559 --> 00:40:29,679
knew the ranch manager of the land
that I was on and we worked out

550
00:40:29,960 --> 00:40:35,800
a deal where the charges that you
dropped and that's how it all kind of

551
00:40:35,800 --> 00:40:38,000
went away. She just made it
go away. Did this guy chill out?

552
00:40:38,039 --> 00:40:40,239
I mean, it just seems so
silly that this couldn't be Like,

553
00:40:40,360 --> 00:40:45,280
listen, man, this is totally
chilled out. You know a little bit

554
00:40:45,320 --> 00:40:52,599
of the local connection. Liz knew
like the guy's wife and helped out the

555
00:40:52,679 --> 00:40:54,679
daughters with some equestrian stuff and you
know how it works. Yeah, yeah,

556
00:40:54,760 --> 00:40:58,679
I mean it just it just seems
so silly. You're not really everybody

557
00:40:58,719 --> 00:41:01,199
knows everybody, You're not really doing
anything wrong. You know you're going to

558
00:41:01,199 --> 00:41:07,800
exactly though, I think that became
really clear, you know that that I

559
00:41:07,840 --> 00:41:14,239
had no nefarious intention of any kind, right, and uh so fortunately right

560
00:41:14,360 --> 00:41:17,320
the uh the charges were dropped and
and I you know, I really appreciated

561
00:41:17,360 --> 00:41:22,920
that. But the sad thing is, I mean, okay, so there's

562
00:41:22,920 --> 00:41:31,000
an upside that I saw directly to
these really severe like private property laws,

563
00:41:31,039 --> 00:41:35,000
and that is that as soon as
I was on the other side of that

564
00:41:35,079 --> 00:41:42,239
fence, there were rare plants were
just everywhere. They were really very like

565
00:41:42,639 --> 00:41:46,519
densely populated within this small area,
right the check poachers haven't hit hit them

566
00:41:46,559 --> 00:41:51,719
yet exactly, whereas if you're on
the road cut, you're never going to

567
00:41:51,760 --> 00:41:54,519
find them. Everybody's dug them out. And I would say, you know,

568
00:41:55,199 --> 00:42:00,000
without with some evidence, I will
say that it's most sleep people from

569
00:42:00,039 --> 00:42:07,760
other countries who come over and extract
these rare plants from publicly accessible areas and

570
00:42:07,840 --> 00:42:12,760
smuggle them out of the country.
Yeah. I had Jared Martin, this

571
00:42:12,840 --> 00:42:16,400
guy Jared Marbles that wrote a book
called The Cactus Hunters on my podcast Cactus

572
00:42:16,440 --> 00:42:22,599
Hunters. Yeah, and we're reviewing
that for for the Cactus and second journal

573
00:42:22,679 --> 00:42:25,079
that's coming out, which i'll you
know, i'll talk about that too.

574
00:42:25,159 --> 00:42:32,119
But anyway, so that there's an
unintentional upside for ranches where people are leaving

575
00:42:32,159 --> 00:42:38,840
the plants alone anyway that it looked
to me like they're just everywhere, and

576
00:42:38,920 --> 00:42:44,920
so there's this weird like conservation side
effect of these private private property laws,

577
00:42:44,960 --> 00:42:52,360
you know. But on the other
hand, you know, there's no opportunity

578
00:42:52,519 --> 00:42:58,360
to gather any data or do any
actual studies or it's just if the culture

579
00:42:58,519 --> 00:43:01,079
was just a little different if some
of the landowners because I know landowners here

580
00:43:01,079 --> 00:43:05,880
in South Texas that are cool,
you know, that will let you on

581
00:43:06,039 --> 00:43:08,639
that likes science, that they are
very few and far between. They're certainly

582
00:43:08,679 --> 00:43:12,599
not the majority by any means,
but you know, it just seems like

583
00:43:12,599 --> 00:43:15,039
the thing like, man, no
one's gonna take you know, no one's

584
00:43:15,079 --> 00:43:19,360
gonna take your land because you have
rare plants on it. It's fucking Texas.

585
00:43:19,400 --> 00:43:21,800
If anything, they'll just you know, it's more incentive for them,

586
00:43:21,880 --> 00:43:25,119
the state to destroy it or tell
you you know exactly, but you know,

587
00:43:25,400 --> 00:43:29,679
at least like help people out.
Like there's no reason, you know,

588
00:43:29,800 --> 00:43:31,440
especially if you just because you've got
different politics or whatever. Like,

589
00:43:31,480 --> 00:43:34,599
come on, man, like we
don't just don't talk about that shit,

590
00:43:34,639 --> 00:43:37,039
like let us on to come look
at plants, you know, like,

591
00:43:37,400 --> 00:43:38,840
you know, let us come study
this stuff. It's really cool. You

592
00:43:38,880 --> 00:43:43,119
should be into it too. There's
a cool story here. This isn't a

593
00:43:43,119 --> 00:43:47,679
fucking greeny environmentalist thing. This is
just studying the life on earth. You

594
00:43:47,679 --> 00:43:51,679
know, you could even put like
a religious twist on it. It's God's

595
00:43:51,880 --> 00:43:54,840
you know, it's God's, God's
creation wherever the fuck you want to say

596
00:43:54,840 --> 00:43:57,320
it for people, you know what
I mean? Come on, man,

597
00:43:57,480 --> 00:44:00,559
why can't we get around this?
You know? Well, you know,

598
00:44:00,719 --> 00:44:08,119
coincidentally, I am hoping still to
actually get like official permission to go back

599
00:44:08,480 --> 00:44:13,320
to this exact same I was gonna
ask, Yeah, did the dude do

600
00:44:13,360 --> 00:44:15,280
you think the dude like softened up
like you could order him? You know

601
00:44:15,320 --> 00:44:20,320
what edible arrangements are you know the
fruit basket. It's like a you order

602
00:44:20,400 --> 00:44:23,400
him one of those or some fucking
they like, right, they wanted to

603
00:44:23,440 --> 00:44:27,440
eat. Let them meat. Get
him some brisket exactly, you know,

604
00:44:27,639 --> 00:44:30,840
pounds of like wagy beef for something. There's a good barbecue place in Marathon.

605
00:44:30,960 --> 00:44:34,559
Be like, listen, sir,
I'll buy you a fucking you know,

606
00:44:34,719 --> 00:44:36,960
three pounds of brisket. Let me
in your land. They go,

607
00:44:37,000 --> 00:44:43,079
look at did it seem like that's
an option at all or what? I'm

608
00:44:43,079 --> 00:44:49,159
not sure, but you know,
like I said that the attorney who I

609
00:44:49,199 --> 00:44:52,840
was able to hire because of Mike
Fowl, who who knew This person,

610
00:44:53,119 --> 00:44:59,840
you know, is pretty well connected
and knows like all the ranchers knows,

611
00:45:00,159 --> 00:45:07,400
and and she herself owns a ranch
that I visited, and just hundreds of

612
00:45:07,480 --> 00:45:12,440
Aria Carpus fischeradus there Jesus, you
know, like not dug up at all,

613
00:45:13,480 --> 00:45:16,079
so many of them like on on
her ranch. Unfortunately, her ranch

614
00:45:16,159 --> 00:45:23,800
is not on the Novacu late that
Lis. It's just forever in the limestone.

615
00:45:23,800 --> 00:45:28,440
Man I could spend I let a
free plant walk here in the Rio

616
00:45:28,480 --> 00:45:31,039
Grande Valley on Sunday and towards the
end of it. I felt like one

617
00:45:31,079 --> 00:45:35,320
of those beady eyed graffiti kids is
just looking at everything, you know,

618
00:45:35,400 --> 00:45:38,159
not not making an eye cut someone's
talking to him. He's not looking them

619
00:45:38,159 --> 00:45:40,360
in the eye. He's looking around
at all the other ship, trying to

620
00:45:40,360 --> 00:45:44,519
fit, you know, see if
there's anything cool around. Like just I

621
00:45:44,639 --> 00:45:46,079
was, I just am like,
I'm going into a wormhole here. I

622
00:45:46,119 --> 00:45:51,320
came here like teach basically a free
class. Now I'm fucking distracted and looking

623
00:45:51,320 --> 00:45:53,559
at all this stuff. It's Powell. I mean, go ahead, sorry,

624
00:45:53,599 --> 00:45:57,239
Oh go ahead say first, I
was gonna say Powell. You know,

625
00:45:57,280 --> 00:46:00,679
Powell told me that. Doctor Powell
told me that the it's the culture

626
00:46:00,679 --> 00:46:04,039
in Texas used to be so different, like thirty forty years ago. And

627
00:46:04,079 --> 00:46:05,880
he said, I said, what
changed? He said, yeah, the

628
00:46:05,960 --> 00:46:08,880
Endangered Species actors. It became this
thing where everyone's paranoid that the government's going

629
00:46:08,960 --> 00:46:13,400
to come take their land, which
again was probably hyped. You know,

630
00:46:14,119 --> 00:46:19,039
all this divisive shit is divisive shit
on either side of the political special degree

631
00:46:19,280 --> 00:46:22,960
is hyped by social media, and
it's got to be fucking foreign entities partially

632
00:46:23,000 --> 00:46:28,440
responsible. I mean, I saw
our Facebook shut down like five thousand fake

633
00:46:28,719 --> 00:46:34,639
Chinese accounts, that we're all networked
together, that we're posting all this divisive

634
00:46:35,239 --> 00:46:38,840
both right left and right comments,
you know, to try to stir ship

635
00:46:39,000 --> 00:46:43,119
up totally. But to be fair, I think everyone is so miserable and

636
00:46:43,159 --> 00:46:46,639
depressed right now in our culture anyway, you know, because we don't have

637
00:46:46,760 --> 00:46:51,320
decent healthcare. Education sucks. You
spend most of your life in these car

638
00:46:51,400 --> 00:46:53,800
slums. You can't interact with people. It's lonely everything. Everybody's afraid of

639
00:46:53,800 --> 00:46:58,199
everybody else, right, right,
You just go into the fucking endless parking

640
00:46:58,199 --> 00:47:00,400
lots, you know, spend most
of your time in a car when you're

641
00:47:00,400 --> 00:47:01,599
not at work, and then you
come home, you watch Netflix or some

642
00:47:01,679 --> 00:47:05,480
dumb shit just to sedate your mind. Crazy as shit, you know.

643
00:47:05,519 --> 00:47:08,039
And I spent the entire summer traveling. I was able to get July and

644
00:47:08,079 --> 00:47:12,760
August off from the postdoc that I'm
doing, and I was camping a lot,

645
00:47:12,920 --> 00:47:17,320
like twenty eight or well thirty days
of camping altogether July and August,

646
00:47:17,320 --> 00:47:22,400
and I just saw this kind of
desperation out there, like even in national

647
00:47:22,480 --> 00:47:30,480
forests or over all these beautiful,
beautiful areas where people like the energy was

648
00:47:30,559 --> 00:47:35,400
just really negative and a real drag
up in Glacier National Post Dark. Well,

649
00:47:35,440 --> 00:47:37,239
it's imagine. I mean, that's
what I'm saying is if you're already

650
00:47:37,239 --> 00:47:40,320
in a bad place and someone's putting
all this shit in front of your the

651
00:47:40,360 --> 00:47:44,360
screen, you're looking at it in
front of your eyes, everything's terrible,

652
00:47:44,400 --> 00:47:46,440
world of everything's going to shit.
Fuck these people, look, they want

653
00:47:46,480 --> 00:47:50,280
to destroy you. You know,
these people are out to get All that

654
00:47:50,320 --> 00:47:53,079
shit is just fucking poison, and
it just that becomes your thing. I

655
00:47:53,079 --> 00:47:57,679
mean, I've got friends who I
love dearly, who's like they're unhappy in

656
00:47:57,719 --> 00:48:01,239
their lives and they focus on like
all the news events and external shit and

657
00:48:01,519 --> 00:48:05,719
and like everything's fucked, and god, the world is so terrible. Man,

658
00:48:05,760 --> 00:48:08,559
the world's always been fucking terrible.
Now there's just eight billion people,

659
00:48:08,920 --> 00:48:14,760
like people have been putting. Yeah, people have been fucking doing horrible shit

660
00:48:15,280 --> 00:48:20,800
to each other for millennia. And
it's not a justification, it's just the

661
00:48:20,840 --> 00:48:23,760
truth. We're a fucking crazy species
of primate. I'd like to hope at

662
00:48:23,760 --> 00:48:28,119
some point our culture, you know, we become somewhat more enlightened. But

663
00:48:28,119 --> 00:48:30,000
again, the only way you do
that really is through culture. But I

664
00:48:30,119 --> 00:48:34,079
just it's a really dark time now, and I think it's a lot of

665
00:48:34,079 --> 00:48:37,920
it is like people you know,
are intentionally pouring gas on the fire too,

666
00:48:37,320 --> 00:48:42,159
and social media is a perfect venue
to pour gas on the fire,

667
00:48:42,239 --> 00:48:45,440
you know. So anyway, it's
good, good to protect yourself from all

668
00:48:45,480 --> 00:48:49,519
that. And I think botany,
you know, botany is an actual very

669
00:48:50,199 --> 00:48:53,360
you know, like healing like amazing, oh yeah, sort of oasis right

670
00:48:54,400 --> 00:48:58,519
for me. I mean, I
know, like you feel the same way

671
00:48:58,559 --> 00:49:01,280
because I can pick it up from
all the work that you do. But

672
00:49:01,320 --> 00:49:06,840
there's nothing like just being out there, you know, looking at what's growing

673
00:49:07,360 --> 00:49:10,559
on the land, checking out the
floor of a particular area, whether you've

674
00:49:10,599 --> 00:49:15,079
been there a thousand times or if
it's your first time there, it's a

675
00:49:15,159 --> 00:49:23,159
complete like bomb e a l m
uh healing soothing Baum exactly. I agree.

676
00:49:23,639 --> 00:49:28,119
You know, if there's a if
there's balm in Gilliad, it's probably

677
00:49:28,199 --> 00:49:31,719
botany. But anyway, for me, anyway, it's always been that way,

678
00:49:31,840 --> 00:49:37,519
you know. Yeah, So the
whole West Texas thing, like even

679
00:49:37,519 --> 00:49:40,159
with all that, I I as
soon as I got out of jail,

680
00:49:40,199 --> 00:49:44,559
I just like went camping for like
three nights. Memory, Yeah, put

681
00:49:44,559 --> 00:49:47,039
the fucking phone down. Stop doom
scrolling, stop just gating, cause I

682
00:49:47,079 --> 00:49:50,440
see people doing that all the time. It's like, man, what are

683
00:49:50,440 --> 00:49:52,719
you reading? Like what do you
look at? I see people in line,

684
00:49:52,760 --> 00:49:54,719
like what are you staring at on
the phone? Ten ten dollars says

685
00:49:54,760 --> 00:49:59,880
You're not staring at like good interesting
shows. You're not reading fucking paper,

686
00:50:00,119 --> 00:50:02,480
You're not reading a PDF version of
a textbook. You're looking at stupid shit

687
00:50:02,519 --> 00:50:07,360
on Instagram or some fucking moron twisting
and twirling on TikTok or like and these

688
00:50:07,480 --> 00:50:13,599
these apps are designed too, like
I'll I'll log into something to like post

689
00:50:13,639 --> 00:50:15,000
something or to look at a message. I got it, and then I

690
00:50:15,000 --> 00:50:17,480
am like, ten minutes later,
I'm like, nah if like shake my

691
00:50:17,599 --> 00:50:22,920
like when I just got the striped
looking at pictures of fucking some dude skydiving

692
00:50:22,079 --> 00:50:25,760
or fucking you know whatever, like
I just parachute doesn't open or right,

693
00:50:27,000 --> 00:50:30,559
like God, this ship is infecious. It's so it's such a mind fuck

694
00:50:30,599 --> 00:50:31,960
anyway, Okay, well, well
that's why I got to get out,

695
00:50:32,000 --> 00:50:36,519
Like I mean, you know,
right after I got out of jail in

696
00:50:36,559 --> 00:50:40,239
Bruster County and went over to Big
Ben Ranch State Park, which you know

697
00:50:40,480 --> 00:50:45,119
is just incredible, uh, you
know, incredible botany over there. It's

698
00:50:45,159 --> 00:50:50,400
so many epiphilantha oki and yeah,
all kinds of crazy, you know,

699
00:50:50,599 --> 00:50:55,440
beautiful plants like all over. So
that was cool. I was good to

700
00:50:55,480 --> 00:51:00,920
be able to go from jail to
this like totally remote camp site. It's

701
00:51:00,000 --> 00:51:02,400
good. You knew what to do
for yourself too. You weren't like,

702
00:51:02,440 --> 00:51:05,760
man, this sucks, I just
want to go home now. You were

703
00:51:05,760 --> 00:51:07,760
like, you know what, I'm
going to keep it. I want to

704
00:51:07,840 --> 00:51:10,079
keep it at this I gotta like, I gotta. Yeah, I really

705
00:51:10,079 --> 00:51:15,400
feel like, you know, it's
a saving grace for sure. And I

706
00:51:15,440 --> 00:51:19,679
think that was what kind of attracted
me to get the PhD in the first

707
00:51:19,719 --> 00:51:24,400
place. Was some of the happiest
times I had, you know, especially

708
00:51:24,400 --> 00:51:28,599
toward the end and my teaching career, was that I would just take every

709
00:51:28,679 --> 00:51:31,079
break that I had, like spring
break, you know, winter break,

710
00:51:31,199 --> 00:51:35,880
the summers, and I was just
botanizing, like I was out looking for

711
00:51:35,960 --> 00:51:38,880
cacti, you know, and taking
pictures and going to I was already going

712
00:51:38,920 --> 00:51:42,920
to Baja. I've been going down
the air for a long time, and

713
00:51:43,159 --> 00:51:47,320
and it sort of occurred to me
suddenly you know, like, well maybe

714
00:51:47,320 --> 00:51:52,719
you should just like try to do
this full time rather than you know.

715
00:51:52,320 --> 00:51:59,639
So that's kind of what got me
into the PhD was an attempt right to

716
00:51:59,639 --> 00:52:04,519
to go so like all in,
yeah, yeah, on the work that

717
00:52:04,599 --> 00:52:07,760
I had already been doing. That's
all I was doing. I was working

718
00:52:07,760 --> 00:52:09,039
for the railroad, and just like, man, I gotta get time off

719
00:52:09,199 --> 00:52:13,159
and and it just be the job. I didn't, you know, I

720
00:52:13,159 --> 00:52:15,760
didn't have any obligations yet, so
I was It's like the job just became

721
00:52:15,800 --> 00:52:20,719
a thing to enable me to go
out there to these places that felt so

722
00:52:20,800 --> 00:52:22,280
good. And then I was just
like I want to know everything about them,

723
00:52:22,320 --> 00:52:27,239
you know, same thing like it
takes takes over, you know.

724
00:52:27,559 --> 00:52:30,719
Yeah, yeah, the same way
you find anything you love or you fall

725
00:52:30,760 --> 00:52:32,559
in love with and you're like,
I want to know everything about it.

726
00:52:32,679 --> 00:52:35,679
I want to know everything, you
know. Yeah, well, you know,

727
00:52:35,760 --> 00:52:38,960
regarding Baja, like I didn't know
when I started the PhD, I

728
00:52:39,000 --> 00:52:45,599
had no intention. In fact,
I sort of had the opposite. I

729
00:52:45,679 --> 00:52:52,840
was resisting the idea of working with
Mammalaria the genius. I see what you

730
00:52:52,920 --> 00:52:55,559
do. You're doing a good segue
here, sir, Thank you am I

731
00:52:55,719 --> 00:53:00,199
okay, because I were talking about
mammalari and coaching me and I yeah,

732
00:53:00,280 --> 00:53:01,800
let's do it. Yeah, I
mean, like people said to me,

733
00:53:04,000 --> 00:53:09,239
there's a lot of questions right about
the evolutionary relationships of these cacti, the

734
00:53:09,320 --> 00:53:15,400
mammalaria, which Charlie Butterworth years ago
two thousand and five at least might have

735
00:53:15,440 --> 00:53:21,880
been earlier than that. He called
that whole group of cacti the mammaloid clade,

736
00:53:22,079 --> 00:53:27,719
right, and so that was like
Mammalaria, Corythanta, Escobaria, Cachmea,

737
00:53:29,800 --> 00:53:31,679
you know, I was ciphero,
which is really a controversial, but

738
00:53:32,320 --> 00:53:37,880
anyway, that was the mammaloid clade, this huge group of cactasy you know,

739
00:53:37,000 --> 00:53:43,880
like probably I mean even conservatively right, people estimate like one hundred and

740
00:53:43,920 --> 00:53:50,320
sixty four species or a taxa,
which is almost ten percent of the whole

741
00:53:50,360 --> 00:53:52,360
cactus family. And when he said
this, I mean, did it turn

742
00:53:52,360 --> 00:53:55,079
out that was actually a true clade
like the DNA you know, look,

743
00:53:55,480 --> 00:54:00,199
molecular ANA analysis showed it was indeed, all these things were pretty closely related

744
00:54:00,280 --> 00:54:05,920
or what. Yeah, it's a
really well supported clayde and that goes back

745
00:54:05,960 --> 00:54:12,119
almost twenty years of DNA work,
which is that like the leading edge of

746
00:54:12,239 --> 00:54:16,320
doing molecular phylogy right is like twenty
to twenty five years ago, especially kactas,

747
00:54:17,360 --> 00:54:23,280
and he started, like he found
he and Rob Wallace you know from

748
00:54:23,360 --> 00:54:29,880
Ioway, they were working together and
they found some weird things that they didn't

749
00:54:30,159 --> 00:54:34,280
fully expect, which for example,
the plashyphers nested you know, in that

750
00:54:34,360 --> 00:54:45,960
clade, and that like the delineation
among the genera the genuses was not as

751
00:54:45,000 --> 00:54:52,199
strong as they expected. There was
some really kind of interesting preliminary unexpected results

752
00:54:52,440 --> 00:54:58,039
going on. Or is it what
I mean now? Probably not introgression,

753
00:54:58,400 --> 00:55:05,000
probably not ridiculate evolution, which is
when new species arise through spontaneous hybrid events,

754
00:55:06,800 --> 00:55:09,679
which happens probably all the time.
In Opuntia, for example, like

755
00:55:09,719 --> 00:55:15,159
the prickly pairs, they are often
described as being promiscuous, you know,

756
00:55:15,480 --> 00:55:22,599
but apparently not so much in the
mammaloid clade. I think what they started

757
00:55:22,639 --> 00:55:30,039
to uncover there about twenty years ago
was that these taxa are all way more

758
00:55:30,119 --> 00:55:40,239
closely related than people realized, and
like in evolutionary terms, super recent divergence,

759
00:55:40,440 --> 00:55:44,639
you know, like that they really
haven't been separate all that long.

760
00:55:44,760 --> 00:55:49,920
What are we talking? A million
years? Two million five? Great question.

761
00:55:51,559 --> 00:55:55,760
Apparently the mammaloid clade as a whole, Mammalaria Corthantha escobaria, the whole

762
00:55:55,800 --> 00:56:02,239
deal diverged about seven and a half
million years ago. Oh it's decent.

763
00:56:02,280 --> 00:56:06,719
I mean, it's still some recent, but it's decent. Okay, How

764
00:56:06,719 --> 00:56:10,840
old is the cactus Family's been estigated
and estimated at what thirty million years somewhere

765
00:56:10,840 --> 00:56:15,840
between? I would say thirty to
thirty five million years? Yeah, which

766
00:56:16,320 --> 00:56:22,199
again, like if I'm not mistaken, then I could be. I think

767
00:56:22,239 --> 00:56:29,639
the andrewsperms that is the flowering plants, right that reproduce according to flowers and

768
00:56:29,679 --> 00:56:37,960
seeds seed plants. I think they
as a whole like group are one hundred

769
00:56:37,000 --> 00:56:40,480
and eighty million years old. One
hundred eighty. I know it's one twenty

770
00:56:40,519 --> 00:56:45,519
five, but there's but there's you
know, microfossils of pollen from before that.

771
00:56:45,599 --> 00:56:49,519
But there's been those smoking gun from
the Jurassic yet. Okay, so

772
00:56:49,599 --> 00:56:52,239
one twenty five, so we'll go. I just will lose the other fifty

773
00:56:52,239 --> 00:56:55,960
five million years and just say what's
twenty fo Well, I'm sure they evolved

774
00:56:57,000 --> 00:56:59,679
a little bit before that because again
I think there's pollen, but I know

775
00:56:59,760 --> 00:57:04,639
that this fossil flowers all right,
So we say one twenty five hundred,

776
00:57:04,679 --> 00:57:13,239
twenty five million years ago, so
the cactus family is already comparatively like,

777
00:57:13,440 --> 00:57:21,400
relatively recent at thirty to thirty five
million years. Yeah, and it's it's

778
00:57:21,400 --> 00:57:25,880
a remarkable, incredibly you know,
diverse family of plants. If you think

779
00:57:25,920 --> 00:57:34,280
about it, you have packy serious
WEBERI like this gigantic organ pipe style cactus.

780
00:57:34,280 --> 00:57:36,719
I got one in my yard.
Yeah, I just wrapped it in

781
00:57:36,840 --> 00:57:38,960
frost cloth last year when it got
a little cold. But I mean it's

782
00:57:39,039 --> 00:57:43,360
it's still it's not it doesn't have
sixty stems, and it's not you know,

783
00:57:43,480 --> 00:57:47,280
eighty feet wide yet. But one
day and then you have Blasphelia litla

784
00:57:47,320 --> 00:57:52,679
putana right, the little tient it's
not even a centimeter across, and it's

785
00:57:52,719 --> 00:57:57,920
flowering. And those grow in those
rock cracks right in I think Argentina.

786
00:57:58,440 --> 00:58:04,760
Those are high elevations. Yeah,
so you have this like morphological diversity in

787
00:58:04,800 --> 00:58:10,239
a relatively young plant family that's just
astonishing. And then they're the adaptations are

788
00:58:10,280 --> 00:58:15,719
incredible too. I mean the number
of ecoregions even way down to like level

789
00:58:15,800 --> 00:58:21,800
four ecoregions that host members of the
Baptist family is huge. I mean,

790
00:58:21,840 --> 00:58:25,840
it's like tons of ecoregions, right, So it's pretty cool. It's a

791
00:58:25,840 --> 00:58:30,000
great family to study, as you
know, I mean, you know,

792
00:58:30,079 --> 00:58:34,039
there's a lot of plants that we're
studying. But anyway, when you look

793
00:58:34,039 --> 00:58:39,320
at the mameloid played diverging in that
context right about seven seven point five million

794
00:58:39,400 --> 00:58:45,000
years ago, that gives a little
perspective on the kind of recent you know,

795
00:58:45,159 --> 00:58:53,719
divergence. And then what we found
was that the way things shake out,

796
00:58:53,840 --> 00:59:06,719
the most like species rich within that
group, especially like a Baja California,

797
00:59:08,480 --> 00:59:15,360
seem to have diverged within the last
five hundred thousand years to even as

798
00:59:15,400 --> 00:59:22,000
recently as two hundred and fifty thousand
years. We can't get more specific than

799
00:59:22,000 --> 00:59:27,400
that because two hundred and fifty thousand
years is like within the error limits of

800
00:59:27,440 --> 00:59:30,159
the model that we use. You
guys do molecular clock dating, like just

801
00:59:30,320 --> 00:59:36,360
calibrated rate of mutation or what.
Yeah, we used We used a pretty

802
00:59:36,360 --> 00:59:42,800
common technique these days, which is
to do a time calibrated molecular phylogeny with

803
00:59:42,920 --> 00:59:49,079
a using Bayesian statistics. You know, and you run the model and it

804
00:59:49,199 --> 00:59:53,519
runs forever, and then you get
a sense of you know, where they're

805
00:59:53,920 --> 01:00:00,000
Like if you look at a tree, the tree is basically these intersection points

806
01:00:00,119 --> 01:00:05,920
and then branches, and the intersection
points are called nodes, right, And

807
01:00:06,519 --> 01:00:15,199
the time calibrated phylogeny estimates when those
nodes like diverged into different species all just

808
01:00:15,280 --> 01:00:20,559
based on the rate of you know, mutation of ATC and G. Yeah,

809
01:00:20,800 --> 01:00:23,039
you know, you there's this prior
work you have to do with your

810
01:00:23,119 --> 01:00:34,880
data set where you find the best
available model of nucleotide substitution for your particular

811
01:00:35,000 --> 01:00:42,480
data because it varies, you know, there's different different rates of substitution,

812
01:00:43,280 --> 01:00:46,719
and actually it varies across the nucleo
types. And by substitution we mean one

813
01:00:46,760 --> 01:00:50,920
of those DNA one of those four
DNA letters. We're putting this out there

814
01:00:50,920 --> 01:00:53,000
so anyone who wants to read more
and doesn't know what that we're talking about

815
01:00:53,039 --> 01:00:58,039
can can research it, you know, preferably in line at the DMV instead

816
01:00:58,079 --> 01:01:00,400
of staring at their phone and doom
scrolling the can look this shit up anyway.

817
01:01:00,960 --> 01:01:05,840
The substitution you're talking about, the
change up in the letters, right,

818
01:01:05,960 --> 01:01:12,599
the rate of mutation in a genetic
barcode. Yeah, so like nucleotide

819
01:01:12,639 --> 01:01:17,000
what are called polymorphisms. So you
have a column of data for all of

820
01:01:17,039 --> 01:01:22,800
your species or you know, plants
that you're looking at, and you might

821
01:01:22,840 --> 01:01:27,320
have like let's say you have one
hundred samples, one hundred different species,

822
01:01:28,039 --> 01:01:31,880
and let's say eighty five of them
in that column have the letter A,

823
01:01:32,960 --> 01:01:39,360
but the other theme right have the
letter C. So that's an example of

824
01:01:38,360 --> 01:01:45,760
a polymorphism for that nucleotide. And
if you have enough of those accumulated in

825
01:01:45,800 --> 01:01:50,800
the right way and the Bayesian engine, you know, statistics kicks in and

826
01:01:50,840 --> 01:01:59,559
it analyzes all this data. The
hypothesis you spit out right is how these

827
01:01:59,639 --> 01:02:04,400
sample as you've collected are related to
each other, how they have descended.

828
01:02:04,480 --> 01:02:09,599
It's like a family tree basically.
Y Yeah, you know, you get

829
01:02:09,840 --> 01:02:14,800
you get some kind of a tree, and you get an estimate of when

830
01:02:15,519 --> 01:02:21,599
different events occurred, and you get
you get a cool picture with Maloyd clade

831
01:02:21,639 --> 01:02:28,920
too that is completely related to geography. Oh wow, So when you map

832
01:02:28,960 --> 01:02:32,559
these things out, it's like an
Aha moment. It makes sense exactly.

833
01:02:32,960 --> 01:02:38,239
You take your taxa where they show
up on the tree and their evolutionary relationships

834
01:02:38,280 --> 01:02:44,599
with each other, and you map
them on the actual Earth, and all

835
01:02:44,599 --> 01:02:50,079
of a sudden you just see,
like wow, one, you know,

836
01:02:50,239 --> 01:02:53,440
a huge driving force right of the
of the evolution of this group of cacti.

837
01:02:53,639 --> 01:02:57,639
If only you could show guys like
that rancher in West Texas, you

838
01:02:57,679 --> 01:03:00,239
know, like, this is what
we do, maybe a chance, So

839
01:03:00,360 --> 01:03:05,039
fucking cool, this is what we
do. We're understanding life. We're looking

840
01:03:05,079 --> 01:03:07,679
back at, you know, at
deep time, at what's happened by life.

841
01:03:07,719 --> 01:03:10,519
It's so fucking cool. So okay, so what But anyway, the

842
01:03:10,800 --> 01:03:15,280
short of this is that I want
to talk about is that there were some

843
01:03:15,360 --> 01:03:22,000
species in the genus Mammalaria that turned
out actually be more closely related to the

844
01:03:22,039 --> 01:03:28,679
genus Coachmea, which is a Baja
species that looks notably different from Mammalaria's.

845
01:03:28,719 --> 01:03:31,639
I mean, I've seen them in
Baja there. They tend to look like

846
01:03:31,760 --> 01:03:37,719
worms, like you know, or
caterpillars draping off these cliffs near the ocean,

847
01:03:37,760 --> 01:03:43,079
with these fish hook spines and prominent
tubercles and fucking bright red flowers.

848
01:03:43,119 --> 01:03:47,320
And it turns out plants like what
like Mammalaria tetran sista is that now,

849
01:03:49,760 --> 01:03:53,760
But Mammalaria brandigi is still Mammalaria,
right, right, exactly, so because

850
01:03:53,760 --> 01:03:57,360
it looks more you could see that, Yeah, you could see mammalary brand

851
01:03:57,679 --> 01:04:00,639
it looks like hydride. It's a
baa species bradig anyway, go yeah,

852
01:04:00,679 --> 01:04:03,519
sorry, no, but it's you
know, so, I don't know,

853
01:04:03,639 --> 01:04:10,760
like it's one of these funny things, right because I think like ninety nine

854
01:04:10,760 --> 01:04:15,719
point nine percent of humanity, the
people on the planet right, don't really

855
01:04:15,840 --> 01:04:26,199
care whether this group of plants right
is in the genus Mammalaria or separated out

856
01:04:26,239 --> 01:04:31,000
into an expanded circumscription of the genus
coach a man like you know that we

857
01:04:31,079 --> 01:04:35,000
get down to this level where people
who are going to sit up and take

858
01:04:35,119 --> 01:04:42,199
notice of this are already aware of
the genus Mammalaria, Like they have their

859
01:04:42,239 --> 01:04:46,280
favorite plants, their hobbyists or their
researchers. They've been dealing with this genus.

860
01:04:46,320 --> 01:04:51,719
And it's an interesting thing, you
know, with this specialty consciousness in

861
01:04:51,760 --> 01:04:57,280
our culture right now. On the
other hand, you know, my like

862
01:04:58,320 --> 01:05:01,840
I okay, so frankly, I
didn't really care what genus they were in.

863
01:05:03,199 --> 01:05:11,519
What I was interested in was this
evolutionary story that that came revealed by

864
01:05:11,960 --> 01:05:17,119
our molecular phylogeny. And what for
me, that's what's fascinating about life on

865
01:05:17,159 --> 01:05:21,440
Earth is the story of that life, Like how is it tied to the

866
01:05:21,519 --> 01:05:27,239
landscape, how was it? How
did it evolve over time? Where did

867
01:05:27,280 --> 01:05:30,519
these species come from? Why are
there so many of them? These kinds

868
01:05:30,519 --> 01:05:34,199
of questions, you know, which
I'm just endlessly fascinate. The taxonomy is

869
01:05:34,239 --> 01:05:38,599
boring to me, like, and
what's funny is that it's the one thing

870
01:05:38,639 --> 01:05:43,599
that upsets people like the most is
oh god, you know, they change

871
01:05:43,599 --> 01:05:46,199
the names all the time. But
for me, the goal as an evolutionary

872
01:05:46,360 --> 01:05:51,719
biologist is really to reveal the evolutionary
story and to have the names reflect the

873
01:05:51,760 --> 01:05:56,800
evolutionary relationships. To the degree that
we're able to do that totally, I

874
01:05:57,159 --> 01:06:01,280
agree to. The only thing I
agree with those some of these changes are

875
01:06:01,400 --> 01:06:06,039
just due to taxonomic rules, you
know, like like as happened with h

876
01:06:06,760 --> 01:06:11,000
oh that dry mark is what was
the fucking shooting star? I can't remember

877
01:06:11,039 --> 01:06:14,719
the the primela and the shooting stars. It's like, well, we just

878
01:06:14,800 --> 01:06:17,519
lumped them in, even though they're
buzz pollinated notably different from the genus Primula

879
01:06:18,159 --> 01:06:21,719
do to Kathion, because otherwise we'd
have to create a whole bunch of other

880
01:06:23,400 --> 01:06:25,480
you know, genera and blah blah
blah. And it's like, okay,

881
01:06:25,519 --> 01:06:29,920
well, but but I'm totally with
you, like I want I want the

882
01:06:30,000 --> 01:06:33,599
name changes. Like they just split
up Miski's you know, uh to now

883
01:06:33,679 --> 01:06:36,880
Tuma and I forget the other one. But it's like, fuck, yeah,

884
01:06:36,880 --> 01:06:40,960
I do that because they're obviously if
that's what the DNA shows, there's

885
01:06:40,960 --> 01:06:43,760
a different story there. I want
the story. I don't just want the

886
01:06:43,800 --> 01:06:45,639
ease of remembering a name. I
want the fucking context. I want the

887
01:06:45,679 --> 01:06:48,840
story. I want to know.
And that's what people seem to miss is

888
01:06:48,840 --> 01:06:54,119
there's a story there. You know, I haven't read I haven't read the

889
01:06:54,119 --> 01:06:58,880
Pilocifera paper yet, but it's a
good paper. But you know, there's

890
01:06:59,239 --> 01:07:01,599
some stuff I want to say about
that. But yeah, but with nol

891
01:07:01,639 --> 01:07:09,280
Tuma, for example, that was
something that Britain and Rose did in nineteen

892
01:07:09,320 --> 01:07:13,000
twenty eight. It was almost a
hundred Yeah, that was one hundred years

893
01:07:13,000 --> 01:07:15,320
ago, and they knew just by
looking at certain like things you could observe

894
01:07:15,360 --> 01:07:19,239
that weren't in the genome. Yeah, exactly, without looking at the genome.

895
01:07:19,280 --> 01:07:23,960
I mean, yeah, I mean
because phylogenetics used to be, as

896
01:07:23,960 --> 01:07:27,840
you know, totally based on morphology, because that's all people had, right.

897
01:07:28,039 --> 01:07:31,559
It took Carrie Molis taking acid and
driving down Highway one to visualize how

898
01:07:31,599 --> 01:07:36,920
PCR would work, right, exactly, thank god. But you know,

899
01:07:38,079 --> 01:07:45,760
anyway, so I think we live
like in really exciting times around understanding the

900
01:07:45,800 --> 01:07:53,719
evolution of the flowering plants. You
know, there's been incredible advances and great

901
01:07:53,800 --> 01:07:59,000
insight into the way these groups of
plants are related to each other. And

902
01:07:59,079 --> 01:08:02,760
what's funny is like we have more
data in many cases now than we've ever

903
01:08:02,840 --> 01:08:08,159
had to support a lot of these
changes. And you know, for example,

904
01:08:08,159 --> 01:08:15,760
with the coachamea situation coming out of
mammalaria, we had a data set

905
01:08:15,119 --> 01:08:21,760
that was almost the entire chloroplast genome. It was ninety three thousand nucleotides long,

906
01:08:24,359 --> 01:08:30,960
which prior studies of the mammaloid clade
used individual markers from PCR that were

907
01:08:30,000 --> 01:08:36,159
then concatenated, you know, put
together as the data set. And I

908
01:08:36,199 --> 01:08:45,119
think like Butterworth and Wallace, for
example, had a total length of their

909
01:08:45,159 --> 01:08:51,399
alignment of maybe five hundred nucleotides,
maybe eight hundred somewhere in there, maybe

910
01:08:51,439 --> 01:08:58,760
I'm remembering incorrectly. Data and we
had ninety three thousand base pairs, you

911
01:08:58,800 --> 01:09:04,880
know acgen he sequenced, and it
was they were shallow reads like it's you

912
01:09:04,920 --> 01:09:10,800
know, it's this genome skimming method
that we used where you don't get a

913
01:09:10,840 --> 01:09:14,560
lot of depth of the read,
but get a huge data set. And

914
01:09:15,479 --> 01:09:18,159
we you know, it took me
four months to get that alignment, uh

915
01:09:18,920 --> 01:09:25,560
worked out, like because it was
so long. Like there's these statistical ways

916
01:09:25,560 --> 01:09:29,319
of doing the alignment that are automated. Now you know that you throw your

917
01:09:29,399 --> 01:09:34,800
sequences into this into an algorithm and
it eventually takes a while spits out like

918
01:09:34,840 --> 01:09:40,159
an automated alignment of your And by
alignment, what I mean is all the

919
01:09:40,199 --> 01:09:44,840
columns of the data. If you
just imagine these columns of letters, right,

920
01:09:45,119 --> 01:09:47,239
it's kind of like that movie the
Matrix, like the software they show

921
01:09:47,279 --> 01:09:55,199
on the screen right of the all
these letters. An alignment attempts to create

922
01:09:55,800 --> 01:10:00,800
a set of data where the the
codes are aligned, basically, where where

923
01:10:00,840 --> 01:10:06,840
the columns are aligned with each other
in a in a way that reflects the

924
01:10:08,079 --> 01:10:11,720
organization of the data itself. So
like so so it would be like,

925
01:10:11,760 --> 01:10:15,560
oh, look at this same region
of the genome between species A and species

926
01:10:15,560 --> 01:10:18,680
B. You've got uh gce T
whatever code and like, oh, this

927
01:10:18,760 --> 01:10:23,920
appears in a numer in the these
same two species at the same point.

928
01:10:24,479 --> 01:10:29,560
That must imply shared ancestry or that
they're more closely related because there hasn't been

929
01:10:29,560 --> 01:10:33,880
a mutation exactly. Yeah. Yeah, And that's the thing about DNA is

930
01:10:33,920 --> 01:10:39,520
that the is that where the nuclear
tide is is actually very important. The

931
01:10:39,640 --> 01:10:45,840
location of the nuclear tide on the
actual chloroplast genome is an important, you

932
01:10:45,880 --> 01:10:53,159
know, or crucial part of the
genetic code. It's not as if all

933
01:10:53,199 --> 01:10:57,439
the letters are the same, but
they're all jumbled up. They're actually in

934
01:10:57,479 --> 01:11:00,760
what you know, a sequence.
So when people talk about it a genetic

935
01:11:00,840 --> 01:11:03,960
sequence, that's what they mean.
These are actual This is the actual physical

936
01:11:04,000 --> 01:11:13,000
location of that nuclear type that chemical
like on the actual genetic material. It's

937
01:11:13,000 --> 01:11:17,199
a spatial reality and really quick,
you know, you know, you know,

938
01:11:17,239 --> 01:11:20,600
what's mind blowing to me too,
is that that the fact that we

939
01:11:20,640 --> 01:11:24,920
can have computers do this stuff now
that you don't actually there's to be a

940
01:11:25,000 --> 01:11:28,479
human like you just pump the data
into a computer and it boom, just

941
01:11:28,680 --> 01:11:30,880
you know, gets it all together
like that, rather than if you had

942
01:11:30,880 --> 01:11:33,960
to actually go in there. Can
you imagine how fucking tedious and brutal that

943
01:11:34,000 --> 01:11:39,079
would be to do. I mean, the technology is like, it's only

944
01:11:39,119 --> 01:11:42,760
going. It's gonna be cool to
see where the technology for this stuff goes.

945
01:11:42,800 --> 01:11:45,640
And it's also you know, people
might not be interested in this innately,

946
01:11:45,760 --> 01:11:48,199
or they might be like, what's
interesting about it? The same Well,

947
01:11:48,279 --> 01:11:50,760
look at what they do with humans. I mean, you can look

948
01:11:50,800 --> 01:11:57,119
at human DNA and see the migration
patterns that human populations have had over you

949
01:11:57,159 --> 01:12:00,640
know, the last two million years. It's fucking really cool stuff. You

950
01:12:00,680 --> 01:12:03,000
get the whole story there. There's
a story, like a literal story there

951
01:12:03,159 --> 01:12:08,760
of how people moved. So yeah, totally, you know, and it's

952
01:12:08,800 --> 01:12:13,239
getting even I mean, it's getting
even more amazing with people researching what's called

953
01:12:13,239 --> 01:12:17,039
the transcriptome instead of the genome.
You know, the genome is like a

954
01:12:17,039 --> 01:12:26,760
static snapshot of the genetic sequence,
but the transcriptome is dynamic through time and

955
01:12:26,880 --> 01:12:32,640
switches on and off based on environmental
factors. So you know, you can

956
01:12:32,680 --> 01:12:40,119
do an actual experiment for example,
where you have a cactus plant in low

957
01:12:40,199 --> 01:12:45,800
light and you get the material you
know, and you sequence it, and

958
01:12:45,840 --> 01:12:48,840
then you have a cactus plant in
very highlight, like the same species or

959
01:12:48,880 --> 01:12:54,279
even the same plant moved to much
stronger light. And then you can look

960
01:12:54,319 --> 01:13:00,680
at how the genetic code has changed. So you'll get a different readout on

961
01:13:00,720 --> 01:13:06,119
the trumpscriptome even on the same individual
plant of the same species move from you

962
01:13:06,119 --> 01:13:11,279
know, different environmental conditions. Yeah, so what you can begin to do

963
01:13:11,359 --> 01:13:15,960
is get a bead on why the
plants look different, like across their habitat

964
01:13:15,159 --> 01:13:18,800
or you know, like because they'll
punt you for example. I mean you

965
01:13:18,840 --> 01:13:21,279
know how it is if they grow
in the shade, they look different from

966
01:13:21,319 --> 01:13:25,600
if they're in really strong life.
You could almost call them two different species.

967
01:13:25,600 --> 01:13:28,319
Oh yeah, and with low FAFROA
that'd be cool to see. You

968
01:13:28,359 --> 01:13:33,239
know how the production of wax of
farmactly changes from plants growing in the shade

969
01:13:33,239 --> 01:13:38,560
of a miskeat to plants growing out
you know, sandwich between two big limestone

970
01:13:38,640 --> 01:13:45,560
boulders in cool man that is such
which part like which part or parts of

971
01:13:45,560 --> 01:13:53,199
the genome are switching on and off
the mescaline production. Yeah, there you

972
01:13:53,239 --> 01:13:57,359
go. You get all the all
the cactus bros on Instagram interest in it.

973
01:13:57,479 --> 01:14:01,640
Exactly. You take my trich is
serious and stress it out and it'll

974
01:14:01,680 --> 01:14:09,119
produce more mescaline exactly. So that
there's my to create mescaline by splicing this

975
01:14:09,239 --> 01:14:13,840
gene fragment. So that might be
I mean so that there might because you

976
01:14:13,960 --> 01:14:16,720
hear that sometimes. I've I've heard
some of these cactus ers be like,

977
01:14:16,720 --> 01:14:20,039
oh yeah, if you're growing like
drikes or payoty, you know, you

978
01:14:20,119 --> 01:14:24,680
stress it out more. You want
to stress it out before. Actually,

979
01:14:24,680 --> 01:14:27,640
my friend Damon Tai even mentioned that
to me. I never heard that before,

980
01:14:28,039 --> 01:14:32,239
and he's not. I'm but but
well, that's that's what the myth

981
01:14:32,319 --> 01:14:35,479
is, because you get you know, it's and I whatever, I'm into

982
01:14:35,560 --> 01:14:39,720
if that's what gets people into bodany, and I hope it eventually does they

983
01:14:39,720 --> 01:14:43,359
stop just caring about the psychoactive plants. But it is an interesting thing,

984
01:14:43,399 --> 01:14:45,840
and I guess there is kind of
a rational theory there that the production of

985
01:14:45,880 --> 01:14:50,399
these secondary metabolites might increase under times
of stress, the same way that you

986
01:14:50,399 --> 01:14:55,520
know, red pigments like and cacti
beta aanes do and when they're stressed out

987
01:14:55,520 --> 01:14:58,840
either by soil or excess light.
You know, it's really cool stuff to

988
01:14:58,880 --> 01:15:01,760
think about, you know. And
if getting back to the mamaloid clade,

989
01:15:03,039 --> 01:15:13,039
another segue, the you know,
one of the key and we analyze it

990
01:15:13,079 --> 01:15:21,199
as kind of an ancient morphological character. That is a something you can actually

991
01:15:21,199 --> 01:15:28,039
see that's part of the shape or
like character of the plant. You're looking

992
01:15:28,039 --> 01:15:31,800
at it, You're like, oh, yeah, that's almost universal for the

993
01:15:32,399 --> 01:15:40,960
CHAMEA concept that we came up with
is those hook spines, and you know

994
01:15:41,880 --> 01:15:47,960
a lot of groups of organisms developed
the same character independently. That's our parallel

995
01:15:48,000 --> 01:15:54,920
evolution or you know, convergent evolution. And usually those characters or not,

996
01:15:54,920 --> 01:15:59,560
I don't know about usually, but
often they have like a specific function of

997
01:15:59,600 --> 01:16:03,199
some kind of that's why they evolve
repeatedly. It's a you know, it's

998
01:16:03,199 --> 01:16:11,760
a response to the environment that emerges
as a result of selection. And so

999
01:16:11,880 --> 01:16:15,720
one of the fascinating things that I
would like to understand better with the coach

1000
01:16:15,760 --> 01:16:19,560
of Maya separated out because one of
the things I tell people is, you

1001
01:16:19,560 --> 01:16:24,039
know, to remember what's a coach
a maya and what's a mammalarian. Now,

1002
01:16:25,640 --> 01:16:28,960
one thing to keep in mind is
does it have hook spines or not?

1003
01:16:29,640 --> 01:16:33,119
And then you have to combine that
with is it to the west of

1004
01:16:33,960 --> 01:16:38,560
the distribution of the mammaloid played for
the most part, is it Sonora and

1005
01:16:38,640 --> 01:16:43,479
Baja. So if you put the
hook spines together with the biogeography, then

1006
01:16:43,600 --> 01:16:46,560
you're really safe calling it a coach
a maya because that's you know. Now,

1007
01:16:46,560 --> 01:16:50,159
there are some exceptions as always,
you know, organisms are are sneaky

1008
01:16:50,239 --> 01:16:54,920
things, and you know, like
coach a Maya Haley eye, which was

1009
01:16:54,960 --> 01:16:59,159
like one of the original species that
where there were five taxa in the original

1010
01:16:59,199 --> 01:17:04,920
genus that has straight spines. And
then these guys, these uh lex Garcia

1011
01:17:04,960 --> 01:17:10,520
and some other cactus friends of mine
described a brand new coach Maya from the

1012
01:17:10,560 --> 01:17:15,079
mainland of Mexico. Uh that that
fits with the old concept of the genus

1013
01:17:15,640 --> 01:17:23,960
way down around Sinaloa. I believe, uh coach may and TOMASI I like

1014
01:17:23,960 --> 01:17:27,520
like the hardcore, like the core
coach may You know, it has it

1015
01:17:27,560 --> 01:17:30,760
has the stem form and has the
funnel form flowers, you know, the

1016
01:17:30,800 --> 01:17:36,039
weakly like coffee pot shaped spout shaped
flowers that are obviously bird or look like

1017
01:17:36,119 --> 01:17:42,199
bird pollinated uh, coaching may and
Tomasia. I that that new species came

1018
01:17:42,239 --> 01:17:48,079
out like two months before I had
to put my dissertation in, so it

1019
01:17:48,159 --> 01:17:50,840
was like, all right, I
got to include at least a footnote on

1020
01:17:50,880 --> 01:17:55,760
that. But but anyway, so
there are straight spine plants and there are

1021
01:17:55,840 --> 01:18:03,520
some plants that went directly north that
are also orphologically different from the hooks pine.

1022
01:18:04,319 --> 01:18:13,760
One of the one of the groups
of catti that we found completely included

1023
01:18:13,880 --> 01:18:26,159
in the coach Maya plade that we
recovered is Neoloidia. And I know it's

1024
01:18:26,199 --> 01:18:30,720
beautiful plane. Actually when it's flowering, people resist that pretty heavily. Like

1025
01:18:30,079 --> 01:18:35,319
our finding was that that's really a
coach Maya coacha Canoidia. Uh. And

1026
01:18:35,560 --> 01:18:41,359
I think of our out of our
results, that is probably the least accepted

1027
01:18:41,479 --> 01:18:45,680
like change that we made because it
doesn't look you know that if you show

1028
01:18:45,760 --> 01:18:48,520
me the DNA, then I'm like, all right, man, I mean

1029
01:18:48,680 --> 01:18:55,600
they're right there. I mean they're
totally there. And you know what's interesting

1030
01:18:55,600 --> 01:19:00,279
about that too is it's the same
as what Butterworth and Wallace found almost twenty

1031
01:19:00,359 --> 01:19:04,119
years ago. But you know a
lot of these guys in the early molecular

1032
01:19:04,159 --> 01:19:11,760
phylogeny work, including a woman named
Bonnie Sue Krozier who got her PhD at

1033
01:19:12,279 --> 01:19:15,520
U T. Austin. I was
going to say a name like Bonnie Sue

1034
01:19:15,520 --> 01:19:21,960
had ladies from Texas man Bonnie Sue
and she published her whole dissertation was on

1035
01:19:23,000 --> 01:19:28,239
the Mameloy clay and she made the
informal recommendation of moving a whole bunch of

1036
01:19:28,319 --> 01:19:32,000
taxa from Mammal area to coach A
Maya Wow. And that was That was

1037
01:19:32,039 --> 01:19:36,720
also two thousand and five. That's
cool. They saw it earlier. She

1038
01:19:36,840 --> 01:19:41,520
never published for some reason, and
I've never been able to reach her or

1039
01:19:41,600 --> 01:19:45,239
find her. I've been trying.
Yeah, I've been trying to find Bonnie

1040
01:19:45,319 --> 01:19:48,119
Sue Crazier for for like six years
now. And I you know, the

1041
01:19:48,199 --> 01:19:53,159
last did you try one of those
ten dollars internet things you could sign up?

1042
01:19:53,159 --> 01:19:57,560
You know people used to find their
old old Facebook or high school friends,

1043
01:19:57,600 --> 01:20:00,920
you know, right, I mean
I've been stocking I mean his scientists

1044
01:20:00,960 --> 01:20:03,520
for six years. I should come
and Bonnie Sue. Bonnie Sue, if

1045
01:20:03,520 --> 01:20:08,359
you're out there, Peter Breslin's looking
for you. Please you can reach out

1046
01:20:08,399 --> 01:20:11,960
to me or him directly. I'll
put you in touch with him. Wait

1047
01:20:12,000 --> 01:20:15,359
really quick, really quick. Okay, So Coach of Miya formerly Mammalaria tetran

1048
01:20:15,439 --> 01:20:19,239
sistra. Uh, that's a b
pollinated flower. It's pink, but it

1049
01:20:19,359 --> 01:20:25,600
certainly looks be pollinated. So yeah, general yeah or generalists whatever. But

1050
01:20:25,600 --> 01:20:28,520
but either way, it looks much
of him from the flowers of Coacha Maya.

1051
01:20:28,560 --> 01:20:30,279
But everything else. I mean,
when I heard that happened, I

1052
01:20:30,319 --> 01:20:32,319
was like, oh, yeah,
that's totally a coach Maya. The hook

1053
01:20:32,399 --> 01:20:36,159
spines, the fucking it's kind of
close to Baja totally. And that was

1054
01:20:36,319 --> 01:20:40,680
actually, yeah, that was maybe
we were I was just in Arizona.

1055
01:20:40,720 --> 01:20:43,319
I brought up here. It made
me think he was like, oh shit,

1056
01:20:43,479 --> 01:20:45,960
he Breslin did that? No ship, I should reach out to him.

1057
01:20:45,000 --> 01:20:48,039
So, so, what what happened
there? Is that a? Do

1058
01:20:48,119 --> 01:20:54,680
you think that's an older species or
did the generalist pollination evolve outside? Because

1059
01:20:54,680 --> 01:20:58,079
there's no rules in evolution, right, Shit can she can evolve independently,

1060
01:20:58,199 --> 01:21:00,479
Shit can evolve again, it can
go back, it can revert, you

1061
01:21:00,479 --> 01:21:04,319
know, to Wales, went back
to the ocean from the from the from

1062
01:21:04,319 --> 01:21:06,840
the land, you know. So
there's no rules buddy, that a lot

1063
01:21:06,880 --> 01:21:12,479
of stuff can happen here, right, it gets complicated, So we're yeah,

1064
01:21:12,720 --> 01:21:15,760
but that's a great question. Actually, you know, if you look

1065
01:21:15,840 --> 01:21:21,560
at our time calibrated phylogeny that we
did, you got, uh, coach

1066
01:21:21,640 --> 01:21:32,399
Maya tetran sistra, this somewhat distant
taxon that's called coach A Maya gween Zawiyana.

1067
01:21:33,680 --> 01:21:39,600
Uh, that's a Mexican. It's
like I think like San Luis put

1068
01:21:39,640 --> 01:21:45,960
to sea or Chihuahuan, you know, desert endemic, and uh, these

1069
01:21:46,000 --> 01:21:55,600
guys diverged a long time ago within
the coach of Maya clade and they didn't

1070
01:21:55,640 --> 01:22:02,399
go west much. Although these are
species then, right exactly. So sometimes,

1071
01:22:03,079 --> 01:22:10,520
yeah, sometimes you get a sense
from your time calibrated tree of taxa

1072
01:22:10,600 --> 01:22:15,000
that adapted you know, a long
time ago, like three to five million

1073
01:22:15,079 --> 01:22:18,960
years ago, and they've just sort
of been sitting there since then, you

1074
01:22:19,000 --> 01:22:24,439
know what I mean, Like there's
successful enough that there hasn't been a lot

1075
01:22:24,479 --> 01:22:30,199
of selection pressure to change their morphology
or their you know, biogeography very much.

1076
01:22:31,640 --> 01:22:39,159
And then you get this explosion of
species much more recently in the bah

1077
01:22:39,279 --> 01:22:44,720
California environment, which you know you
could get like five or six PhDs out

1078
01:22:44,760 --> 01:22:49,600
of out of just looking at endemism
in the cactus family, right, endemism

1079
01:22:49,880 --> 01:22:57,439
and you know, the biogeographical restriction
of an organism is what an endemic is

1080
01:22:57,520 --> 01:23:02,399
so amazing, man, Yeah,
five minimal whole cactus five or six million.

1081
01:23:02,399 --> 01:23:05,199
They've had five or six Every plant
there has had five or six million

1082
01:23:05,279 --> 01:23:12,279
years to diverge from mainland Mexico's that's
when because the San Andreas runs right through

1083
01:23:12,520 --> 01:23:16,520
right between Baja and mainland Mexico.
Yeah. Yeah, the current you know,

1084
01:23:16,600 --> 01:23:24,239
the current uh historical geographical theory,
right, it is that the peninsula

1085
01:23:24,279 --> 01:23:30,960
started to split about five million years
ago and coincidentally or like conveniently, almost

1086
01:23:30,000 --> 01:23:35,720
too conveniently. I'm a little uncomfortable
with this result. But that also is

1087
01:23:35,800 --> 01:23:42,439
when the Baja California coach Maya and
Mammalaria because they're also real, like you

1088
01:23:42,439 --> 01:23:51,600
said, Mammonalaria brandigii, they show
a rapids divergence in speciation series of events

1089
01:23:51,640 --> 01:23:56,880
about five million years ago. So
they just started to take off after that.

1090
01:23:57,199 --> 01:24:00,800
As soon as the peninsula started to
drift away. Would you call it?

1091
01:24:00,159 --> 01:24:04,279
Would you call it a radiation or
is it not yeah, yeah,

1092
01:24:04,319 --> 01:24:09,399
and it's it's a total it's a
remarkable radiation actually, and I think it's

1093
01:24:09,439 --> 01:24:14,439
still happening. That's the other thing
is we're with the cactus family in the

1094
01:24:14,560 --> 01:24:20,079
north especially, Uh, you get
the impression that you're witnessing evolution, like

1095
01:24:20,159 --> 01:24:28,640
in real time, that the cactus
family in many general, the cylinder Puntia

1096
01:24:28,840 --> 01:24:32,840
puntia, the kind of serious uh
you know, the enameloid clay, that

1097
01:24:32,920 --> 01:24:42,039
it's still diversifying and radiating, you
know, and you're good. I can't.

1098
01:24:42,079 --> 01:24:46,119
I can't love this family anymore,
man, I can't check criminal.

1099
01:24:46,439 --> 01:24:51,520
So I'm running out of space for
tattoos. My fucking brain it's just stoked

1100
01:24:51,560 --> 01:24:56,840
with They're just so fucking cool.
They're just such testimony. I mean,

1101
01:24:56,880 --> 01:25:00,920
it's amazing variations on a stem like
that's all it is. It's just it's

1102
01:25:00,960 --> 01:25:06,479
just variations on a fucking stem.
And and they've been so successful, and

1103
01:25:06,640 --> 01:25:11,920
they've occupied every niche in North and
South America. They've got all kinds of

1104
01:25:11,960 --> 01:25:15,359
different fucking pollinators. I don't know
if any mammal pollinators yet. I'm sure

1105
01:25:15,359 --> 01:25:17,760
there's a case out there somewhere,
probably in South America. Probably they're just

1106
01:25:17,960 --> 01:25:23,520
but anyway. So, but but
why the hummingbird pollination, which I'm a

1107
01:25:23,600 --> 01:25:25,760
bird pollinated. I'm just gonna call
it what it is. I mean,

1108
01:25:25,800 --> 01:25:30,000
I know I was. I'm surprised
there's no one's done pollination studies in Coachamea.

1109
01:25:30,079 --> 01:25:33,479
Those are those are fucking totally bird
pollinatd flowers. There's no other way

1110
01:25:33,520 --> 01:25:38,640
around it. They're narrow, they're
elongated. You look at like Schlamburger aka

1111
01:25:38,640 --> 01:25:42,760
the Christmas cactus, bird pollinated flowers. I had one blooming in my just

1112
01:25:43,520 --> 01:25:45,359
you know, on my front yard
in Oakland. It was the bird perfect

1113
01:25:45,399 --> 01:25:50,359
size for a birdhead bilatterally symmetrical.
Uh you know, why do you think

1114
01:25:50,439 --> 01:25:56,000
that took off? Like? When
was there a great question? Was there

1115
01:25:56,000 --> 01:25:59,239
a bunch of hummingbird diversity five million
years ago in that area or what?

1116
01:26:00,399 --> 01:26:03,720
Nobody knows. A friend of mine
from Asu, Rick Simpson, was a

1117
01:26:03,800 --> 01:26:08,960
hummingbird specialist. He did a bunch
of hummingbird stuff for his peach. It's

1118
01:26:09,039 --> 01:26:12,159
not the same Rick Simpson that came
up with the with the wheed oil?

1119
01:26:12,279 --> 01:26:14,800
Is it? Because I had someone
at once and I was high for like

1120
01:26:14,840 --> 01:26:17,039
a day and a half, I
hit the fly. It was this ship

1121
01:26:17,159 --> 01:26:20,239
called Rick Simpson Oil. It's fucking
real. Look it up, anyone listening.

1122
01:26:20,399 --> 01:26:24,000
I just forgot sorry, I just
saw a niche. I just saw

1123
01:26:24,000 --> 01:26:26,640
an area to get this joke in
there. But it's fucking that shit was

1124
01:26:26,680 --> 01:26:30,520
brutal. I someone said take a
little dime size. They said take a

1125
01:26:30,520 --> 01:26:32,199
little bit, So I took a
little bit. They meant like a grain

1126
01:26:32,239 --> 01:26:34,840
of rice size. I took a
fucking dime size. I was. It

1127
01:26:34,920 --> 01:26:39,039
was terrible. I was watching that
video with the lady, you know,

1128
01:26:39,079 --> 01:26:43,439
the You're too high lady, really
sweet, really sweet video, sweet old

1129
01:26:43,479 --> 01:26:45,760
grammar. You're not gonna die,
You're just too high, you know that.

1130
01:26:46,399 --> 01:26:49,319
But it was terrible. I was
calling I was calling my GP because

1131
01:26:49,319 --> 01:26:51,439
I had held in shirts at the
time. Look, man, I know

1132
01:26:51,479 --> 01:26:54,479
I'm gonna be fine, but the
how to fuck do I? How do

1133
01:26:54,520 --> 01:26:57,119
I get this to stop? You
know, any tricks? He's like fifty

1134
01:26:57,239 --> 01:26:59,640
years old, He's probably never smoked
weed in his life. I'm like,

1135
01:27:00,039 --> 01:27:02,199
it's gotta let the time pass.
But I like, what am I gonna

1136
01:27:02,239 --> 01:27:09,039
do? Lemon water does that help? Like the stuff stay hydrated and you

1137
01:27:09,079 --> 01:27:11,479
know, lie down? Okay,
sorry, sorry, okay, So Rick

1138
01:27:11,520 --> 01:27:14,640
Simpson but anyway, Rick, it's
a different Rick Simpson. But yeah,

1139
01:27:14,720 --> 01:27:18,760
hummingbird evolution in the Baja California area, that's a great question. I'm not

1140
01:27:18,920 --> 01:27:25,039
entirely sure of that literature. I
haven't really dug into that yet, but

1141
01:27:25,319 --> 01:27:29,199
I do know, or I suspect
I should say, should be a little

1142
01:27:29,239 --> 01:27:34,359
more cautious there, that the whole
Coachman clade, not just the core taxa

1143
01:27:34,720 --> 01:27:41,560
that have those funnel shaped flowers,
but the whole clade uh seems to have

1144
01:27:42,000 --> 01:27:49,800
floral significant floral differences from the mammalaria, you know. Yeah, I mean

1145
01:27:49,840 --> 01:27:56,479
that's the study that John Redmond and
I should probably do. John. You

1146
01:27:56,479 --> 01:27:59,560
know, he's at San Diego Natural
History Museum. I know John, I

1147
01:27:59,560 --> 01:28:08,600
love, you know, and he
he's really interested in this relationship between the

1148
01:28:08,640 --> 01:28:14,000
morphological characters right of clades and that
old sort of alpha taxonomist you know,

1149
01:28:14,600 --> 01:28:18,640
if you can't see it and you
can't diagnose it, then it's it doesn't

1150
01:28:18,680 --> 01:28:21,239
matter what the mole kyles say kind
of thing, you know what I mean?

1151
01:28:21,359 --> 01:28:25,680
Hey, can I pause really quick? I ran out of p jars

1152
01:28:25,720 --> 01:28:28,760
and I got to go again.
So yeah, okay, one a second.

1153
01:28:28,760 --> 01:28:30,359
Well, I'll be right back,
Yeah, no problem, hung up

1154
01:28:30,399 --> 01:28:36,760
the phone by is he really ping
and bottles on his own podcast? Your

1155
01:28:36,840 --> 01:28:41,640
god, damn. I'm doing it
for the I'm doing it for them so

1156
01:28:41,800 --> 01:28:45,039
people could get science, good science
education out there. Okay, So what

1157
01:28:45,079 --> 01:28:50,800
were we talking about again in general? Said yeah, yeah, and the

1158
01:28:50,880 --> 01:28:56,279
idea that the coach of maya clade
uh separate from the malaria, actually has

1159
01:28:56,359 --> 01:29:02,279
some measurable like floral differences across the
whole claate, not just the obvious like

1160
01:29:02,560 --> 01:29:09,520
huntingbird polymed flowers of the of the
core coaching mana that were the five taxa

1161
01:29:09,560 --> 01:29:14,760
that we originally described, but the
whole clay. And I think the stigma

1162
01:29:14,800 --> 01:29:17,880
loobes are longer, like for for
folks who don't understand, like flower anatomy,

1163
01:29:18,840 --> 01:29:23,800
you have the style that has stigmas
attached to it and you can kind

1164
01:29:23,840 --> 01:29:30,920
of see those. They're like little
fingers that stick out and they're the things

1165
01:29:30,920 --> 01:29:38,359
that capture the pollen. Uh.
And so we're seeing some patterns that seem,

1166
01:29:38,680 --> 01:29:42,880
you know, like worth analyzing a
little more formally, of a longer

1167
01:29:42,920 --> 01:29:47,640
style than the usual mammalaria and bigger
stigma lobes for a lot of these taxa,

1168
01:29:47,760 --> 01:29:51,399
right, I think for I think
that's important to a degree, but

1169
01:29:51,439 --> 01:29:54,800
it's you know, there's like I
said, there's no rules. Stuff can

1170
01:29:54,840 --> 01:29:58,680
go back, stuff that the environment
selects. Five Well, I guess if

1171
01:29:58,680 --> 01:30:00,720
it's only, however, many hund
of thousands or millions of years of selection

1172
01:30:00,800 --> 01:30:05,439
that that does something, they can
bring flowers back to like a normal totally.

1173
01:30:06,800 --> 01:30:11,640
That's part of the problem, like
with with folks who've done groups of

1174
01:30:11,640 --> 01:30:16,840
plants, you know, and tried
to understand evolution before the advent of molecular

1175
01:30:16,880 --> 01:30:21,520
stuff, is they would choose characters
that may or may not have been really

1176
01:30:23,119 --> 01:30:28,680
informative from from an evolutionary point of
view, because you you can have the

1177
01:30:28,760 --> 01:30:34,520
appearance of something really significant, but
if you really look at like the evolutionary

1178
01:30:34,600 --> 01:30:41,079
history, it's it's just a minor
character. Actually it's not a yeah man,

1179
01:30:41,119 --> 01:30:44,520
I mean that's the thing like thank
God for again, thank God for

1180
01:30:44,600 --> 01:30:48,199
Carrie Mullis taking acid on Highway one. Fuck right, fucking mad man,

1181
01:30:48,319 --> 01:30:53,079
because I mean I've seen you know, I did that video on astropight them.

1182
01:30:53,119 --> 01:30:59,159
It's perfect example of how much you
can fuck around with with morphological plasticity

1183
01:30:59,439 --> 01:31:02,319
in a single species. I've seen
I've seen, you know, these Japanese

1184
01:31:02,520 --> 01:31:08,479
growers and tie growers breed astrophy them
that look like fucking lofafra. And they've

1185
01:31:08,479 --> 01:31:12,439
done that in fifty years. Like
you're telling me if humans can do that

1186
01:31:12,479 --> 01:31:15,399
by selected britty in fifty years,
you're telling me, you know, why

1187
01:31:15,439 --> 01:31:18,600
couldn't quote unquote the I was gonna
say nature, but why couldn't the environment

1188
01:31:19,199 --> 01:31:25,319
do that in five million? Man? It totally, there's totally. I

1189
01:31:25,359 --> 01:31:30,079
mean there's there's Yeah, you need
that DNA. That's the smoking gun.

1190
01:31:30,119 --> 01:31:32,039
That's the real shit. That's what
you know, that's what it is to

1191
01:31:32,079 --> 01:31:36,119
be all end all. But I'm
still not ready to accept philisiffery. Well

1192
01:31:36,880 --> 01:31:40,640
I'll talk about that now, actually
if you want, Yeah, let's talk

1193
01:31:40,760 --> 01:31:45,119
is that just the taxonomic rule thing
is that just like well these are nested

1194
01:31:45,199 --> 01:31:47,680
in, so we've got to call
it. Otherwise we'd have to split up

1195
01:31:47,680 --> 01:31:50,159
everything else. Because if it is, that's stupid. I'm not going to

1196
01:31:50,239 --> 01:31:54,399
do it. But if it's you
know, go ahead, Well it's it's

1197
01:31:54,479 --> 01:31:57,880
two, it's like two things at
once. I mean, first of all,

1198
01:31:58,600 --> 01:32:01,239
Daniel Sanchez and others, you know, I forget all of his co

1199
01:32:01,319 --> 01:32:04,840
authors on this one. It's in
Fido keys. You can look it up,

1200
01:32:04,880 --> 01:32:09,119
you know, pelisipher escobar. All
you have to do is just search

1201
01:32:09,199 --> 01:32:14,640
for, uh like, phylogeny of
Escobaria and Pela cipher. And we're talking

1202
01:32:14,680 --> 01:32:17,520
for anyone listening. We're talking about
Escobaria and a couple other genera being lumped

1203
01:32:17,560 --> 01:32:21,039
in with Pelas cipher, which formerly
was only a few species, which looked

1204
01:32:21,079 --> 01:32:28,119
totally different from most from Escobaria from
what was and from and actually from almost

1205
01:32:28,159 --> 01:32:33,119
all cat guys. Yeah, is
weird, really weird cool plants. Yeah,

1206
01:32:33,159 --> 01:32:38,560
and quite quite rare too, uh, I guess, And I think

1207
01:32:38,840 --> 01:32:42,319
pretty threatened in habitat as far as
I understand. Oh yeah, sul Ross

1208
01:32:42,319 --> 01:32:46,279
got a box of them that customs
caught that were totally shipped. They're collected

1209
01:32:46,319 --> 01:32:51,760
and being shipped to China or Eastern
Europe or something. Nauseating humph But anyway,

1210
01:32:54,079 --> 01:32:58,359
Yeah, so it's been a long
standing question since, you know,

1211
01:33:00,640 --> 01:33:09,119
Corey Fantha was split into Corey Fantha
and Escobaria. Like people, some people

1212
01:33:09,199 --> 01:33:11,680
think Escobari is legit. Other people
are like, no, you know,

1213
01:33:11,720 --> 01:33:15,479
they're all just Corey Fantha. I
think the American botanists in general have leaned

1214
01:33:15,520 --> 01:33:20,319
towards just Correy Fantha, like Corey
fanth Vivipora, you know, Corey phantham

1215
01:33:20,319 --> 01:33:27,920
Minima, Corya Esteri, and I
think UK and maybe European botanists have gone

1216
01:33:28,119 --> 01:33:36,560
for Escobaria and Corey Fantha has two
separate genera and there were some supposedly some

1217
01:33:36,720 --> 01:33:42,520
characters that frankly I don't even remember
what they are, that separate these two

1218
01:33:42,520 --> 01:33:47,079
groups of plants, right, so
Sanchez at all. In last year twenty

1219
01:33:47,119 --> 01:33:53,880
twenty two, you know, they
published a molecular phylogeny, but it included

1220
01:33:54,159 --> 01:33:57,239
morphology as well, which I always
really appreciate. You know that they have

1221
01:33:57,439 --> 01:34:01,840
both in their tree, like it's
a they call a total evidence tree because

1222
01:34:01,840 --> 01:34:08,520
it has molecules and morphology. But
anyway, they did find support for a

1223
01:34:08,600 --> 01:34:14,399
clade that is that you know,
roughly congrument with the old idea of Escobaria

1224
01:34:14,560 --> 01:34:21,079
separate from Coreythanta. But the problem
is that it contains pelasiphera uh and and

1225
01:34:21,199 --> 01:34:27,479
Pelia cipher has priority, and in
in naming it was it was named about

1226
01:34:28,079 --> 01:34:31,960
oh god, I think like twenty
years before ooh okay, So Pelis cipher

1227
01:34:32,239 --> 01:34:40,279
is technically in Escobaria. Since most
of the species in that clade are Escobaria,

1228
01:34:40,439 --> 01:34:44,880
it should kind of be in Escobara. But because of the rules of

1229
01:34:44,960 --> 01:34:47,960
priority. Yeah, these fucking rules
are so stupid. Go ahead, you

1230
01:34:48,039 --> 01:34:51,920
know what what No, it's I
agree actually, And actually we ran up

1231
01:34:51,920 --> 01:34:58,479
against that with Coachameha too. I
had wanted to name come up with a

1232
01:34:58,520 --> 01:35:05,439
new name because Coachumeya is so well
known as a little mini genus of like

1233
01:35:05,560 --> 01:35:12,399
five very distinct taxa, which it
is a super well supported clade by the

1234
01:35:12,399 --> 01:35:15,520
way. I mean, they really
are very closely related to each other,

1235
01:35:16,279 --> 01:35:20,680
which is no big surprise. But
but anyway, you can't really just come

1236
01:35:20,760 --> 01:35:30,079
up with a new name because the
clade contains that previously describe genus coach Maya.

1237
01:35:30,159 --> 01:35:34,279
So so we you know, that's
where Coacha, Canoidia and Coachameya,

1238
01:35:34,520 --> 01:35:39,840
like Tetra and Sistra come from.
And a lot of people object right to

1239
01:35:39,920 --> 01:35:44,840
those combinations, like coach a grammy, I because that thing doesn't look like

1240
01:35:45,880 --> 01:35:49,159
ora, you know, but it's
those hook spines though, Like that's another

1241
01:35:49,199 --> 01:35:59,239
one I saw. Yeah, but
some of these floral modifications too. If

1242
01:35:59,239 --> 01:36:03,399
you ever see the stilopes on coach
me and grahamy there really quick. When

1243
01:36:03,399 --> 01:36:06,920
we're done with this, can you
send me that that Sanchez article isn't available

1244
01:36:06,920 --> 01:36:10,159
on scihub yet so I can't steal
it. Can you send it to me

1245
01:36:10,760 --> 01:36:17,640
when we're happy. Phylogenetic relationships in
Kora Panta and Implications on Pelaciferan Escobaria Sanchez,

1246
01:36:18,079 --> 01:36:23,079
twenty twenty two. Sanchez at all
So so okay, So I thought

1247
01:36:23,079 --> 01:36:27,399
it was open access. It's you
know what, maybe that it might be

1248
01:36:27,560 --> 01:36:30,279
that might be like it's not on
site of I don't know, I didn't

1249
01:36:30,279 --> 01:36:32,800
Yeah, let me look. Yeah, I'm just you know, I'm trying

1250
01:36:32,840 --> 01:36:36,119
to do a bunch of stuff here
at the same time. And problem.

1251
01:36:36,239 --> 01:36:42,560
Yeah, it's never mind, it's
all on Oops. I think it's right

1252
01:36:42,600 --> 01:36:45,000
there. Oh and I got some
lovely photos. I love these fucking these

1253
01:36:45,039 --> 01:36:49,680
research papers. They get the the
collage photos so really quick. So so

1254
01:36:49,800 --> 01:36:56,239
Pela ciphra, what what seems like
happened is Pela ciphra actually is its own

1255
01:36:56,279 --> 01:37:01,079
clade, but it evolved out of
Escobaria. Is that sound correct? It's

1256
01:37:01,079 --> 01:37:06,159
not like it's not like one Pella
cipher's over here in the phylogeny and the

1257
01:37:06,199 --> 01:37:09,960
others over here, like there's still
sister to each other. They're still next

1258
01:37:10,000 --> 01:37:14,439
to each other, right, but
they're nested within Escobara, So it could.

1259
01:37:15,039 --> 01:37:16,960
I mean, you know, fuck, I wish the rules a love

1260
01:37:17,039 --> 01:37:21,000
for it, because that's still technically
it's own unique thing, you know.

1261
01:37:21,079 --> 01:37:27,199
It's not like it was polyphyletic.
No, but you can, I mean,

1262
01:37:27,239 --> 01:37:31,039
you can apply to the committee to
conserve a name, and so it

1263
01:37:31,119 --> 01:37:40,680
might be an interesting project to apply
to conserve the name Escobaria, and that

1264
01:37:41,920 --> 01:37:45,520
they don't always approve that, but
sometimes, you know, for a name

1265
01:37:45,560 --> 01:37:47,960
that's been in circulation for a long
time, and I think Escobari has been

1266
01:37:48,000 --> 01:37:53,840
around for maybe eighty years or something, you know, that they do approve

1267
01:37:53,920 --> 01:37:57,439
that, you know, and and
so maybe that maybe that'll happen down the

1268
01:37:57,479 --> 01:37:59,960
line. But but but either way, I mean, I'm still gonna call

1269
01:38:00,039 --> 01:38:03,600
a pill of cipher because it is
still a good clade and it's still you

1270
01:38:03,640 --> 01:38:05,800
know, it's I mean, I
try to follow the rules, you know.

1271
01:38:06,439 --> 01:38:12,399
Yeah, well you can always even
though I got arrested, right,

1272
01:38:12,479 --> 01:38:15,199
No, I don't know a you
know what, I think that's pretty fucking

1273
01:38:15,800 --> 01:38:17,600
I think that's pretty impressive. You
got arrest. I'll tell you what you

1274
01:38:17,640 --> 01:38:25,000
got. You got a couple other
chevrons on your fucking h lapels compared this,

1275
01:38:27,399 --> 01:38:30,279
I want all the good botanists to
spend some time in jail. It's

1276
01:38:30,279 --> 01:38:31,239
good. I mean, not like
that, you know what I mean.

1277
01:38:31,359 --> 01:38:34,039
I mean, just like an overnight, a harmless thing. It's funny.

1278
01:38:34,199 --> 01:38:36,680
I go to jail with them.
It's fun, you know, go to

1279
01:38:36,760 --> 01:38:41,239
jail with some friends were I remember
I was in a fucking prison cell,

1280
01:38:41,279 --> 01:38:45,520
a jail cell in Brooklyn once because
I didn't do shit. I I some

1281
01:38:45,680 --> 01:38:47,960
fucking idiot that I was on the
roof with. There was a roof party.

1282
01:38:48,000 --> 01:38:50,880
Threw a forty at a cop car
from the roof and they the cops.

1283
01:38:51,159 --> 01:38:55,159
The cops just came up and arrested
all of us and it was like

1284
01:38:55,159 --> 01:38:58,199
one of those like eighties sitcoms,
you know where they got like all all

1285
01:38:58,239 --> 01:39:00,079
your friends in a jail cell.
I had the piss and there wasn't a

1286
01:39:00,119 --> 01:39:02,720
where they wouldn't let me out.
I was so bummed. It was kind

1287
01:39:02,720 --> 01:39:08,359
of funny though. It was like
and like the black enamel paint job on

1288
01:39:08,399 --> 01:39:12,000
the fucking jails. It was fucking
hilarious, but anyway. So okay,

1289
01:39:12,039 --> 01:39:15,399
so I'm looking at this so Cora, phantom, macro Marius on this phylogeny.

1290
01:39:15,399 --> 01:39:18,600
Where does that Where does that come
out? Because that's what I'm it

1291
01:39:18,680 --> 01:39:25,479
comes out in Pela cipher. So
that is technically now supposed to be Peli

1292
01:39:25,560 --> 01:39:29,439
cipher it too. Macromraus. Yeah, I'm not going to do that,

1293
01:39:29,520 --> 01:39:31,399
but it's good to know what the
rules are while you're breaking them. At

1294
01:39:31,479 --> 01:39:34,039
least, you know. I always
know what the rules are. Just that's

1295
01:39:34,079 --> 01:39:40,319
just good life advice here. So
I will say I will say as a

1296
01:39:40,560 --> 01:39:45,640
qualifying you know, secret, this
inside information that you will not hear any

1297
01:39:45,680 --> 01:39:56,960
anywhere else is like top secret cactus
evolution info. That uh that a coworker

1298
01:39:57,000 --> 01:40:01,359
and I Lucas Majore who was also
on my HD committee, who's out at

1299
01:40:01,359 --> 01:40:05,640
Florida I had on a podcast a
year ago. Yeah. Cool. So

1300
01:40:05,960 --> 01:40:13,760
we're working on, uh, this
huge sample of the mammaloid clade, and

1301
01:40:14,199 --> 01:40:19,680
we're looking at the Caribbean biogeography of
some of the mammaloids, like how the

1302
01:40:19,760 --> 01:40:25,279
hell did they get dispersed to where
they're at, Like what used to be

1303
01:40:25,319 --> 01:40:29,520
called Escobaria cube beensis for example,
which is a cute, you know,

1304
01:40:30,039 --> 01:40:34,680
Greater Antilles endemic that only grows on
serpentine, by the way, and it

1305
01:40:34,760 --> 01:40:41,560
turns out it's most closely related to
freaking I was sad for a Missouriensis,

1306
01:40:42,319 --> 01:40:46,880
believe it or not. This is
in Cuba. This is on Cuban serpentine.

1307
01:40:47,520 --> 01:40:50,800
Yeah, and it's it's pretty rare, you know, it's a pretty

1308
01:40:50,880 --> 01:40:59,520
rare species. So anyway, part
of what we're finding repeatedly is some different

1309
01:40:59,560 --> 01:41:08,279
results from what Sanchez had all got, where apparently it depends on what you

1310
01:41:08,319 --> 01:41:13,920
want to call it, corfanto or
at scobaria or whatever is actually not monophyletic,

1311
01:41:15,520 --> 01:41:19,720
and so down the line, the
concept of pelicipher that you know,

1312
01:41:19,800 --> 01:41:27,600
that's in Sanchez at All in twenty
twenty two might need some tweaking or revision,

1313
01:41:28,119 --> 01:41:32,399
and the clade structure actually looks pretty
different. The main difference between the

1314
01:41:32,439 --> 01:41:39,800
two studies is that Sanchez at All
we're still using concatenated markers from PCR,

1315
01:41:40,560 --> 01:41:45,920
and their DNA data set is a
little bit not as you know, it's

1316
01:41:45,960 --> 01:41:48,680
not as big as a chloroplast genome. They weren't looking at a broad enough

1317
01:41:49,000 --> 01:41:55,079
section of DNA, so we're looking, We're looking at the whole floroplast genome.

1318
01:41:55,159 --> 01:41:58,439
Wow, man, do you think, I mean, how far away

1319
01:41:58,560 --> 01:42:02,159
are we from full genome sequencing being
much easier than it currently is, because

1320
01:42:02,199 --> 01:42:04,520
that'll be the final stay. Then
you're looking at everything. You're not leaving

1321
01:42:04,520 --> 01:42:08,439
anything out. You got the whole
fucking barcode. You can hold them next

1322
01:42:08,439 --> 01:42:12,640
to each other. You know,
that's a great question. You know,

1323
01:42:12,680 --> 01:42:20,520
there are some idealistic evolutionary biologists who
think we'll go beyond the Linnean system entirely

1324
01:42:20,560 --> 01:42:26,039
and we'll just have Filo codes.
Yeah. I think that ship is corny.

1325
01:42:26,079 --> 01:42:28,439
I think it's goofy, but I
get it. But you got to

1326
01:42:28,439 --> 01:42:30,319
have some ship that's, like I
said, idealistic, right, Yeah,

1327
01:42:30,359 --> 01:42:33,359
Well it also is so niche,
like it's it's just going to be you

1328
01:42:33,359 --> 01:42:38,319
know, it's only a few,
only a handful of people are gonna be

1329
01:42:38,319 --> 01:42:40,920
able. It's just going to be
more elitist and kind of gate cap that

1330
01:42:41,000 --> 01:42:44,000
seems like this is at least a
Latin name. It can be intimidating in

1331
01:42:44,079 --> 01:42:46,039
some people, but people can still
learn it, you know, So schmuck,

1332
01:42:46,479 --> 01:42:50,760
who's just right? Yeah, Yeah, a Filo code you can't put

1333
01:42:50,840 --> 01:42:54,439
on a label, but I think
anyway, Sorry, I yeah, I

1334
01:42:54,600 --> 01:42:56,960
kind of hate that ship, but
I get it. I mean I think

1335
01:42:57,000 --> 01:43:01,239
it could be included with you know, like an flora with the Latin name,

1336
01:43:01,279 --> 01:43:03,920
but you can't move away from the
Latin names. It's just it's so

1337
01:43:04,399 --> 01:43:11,479
it works so well and it's so
accessible. But getting back to your question,

1338
01:43:11,800 --> 01:43:19,319
Yeah about you know, whole genome
analysis like genomics rather than phylogenetics like

1339
01:43:19,439 --> 01:43:26,840
philo genomics. I think we're very
close for a whole lot of Andrew spurns,

1340
01:43:26,920 --> 01:43:30,399
Like, you know, the the
data is increasing, I would say

1341
01:43:30,560 --> 01:43:36,439
exponentially. It's following that rule of
you know, increase in data. That's

1342
01:43:36,479 --> 01:43:42,560
like an exponential rule that somebody came
up with a while back, and you

1343
01:43:42,600 --> 01:43:45,399
know the boom, Yeah, you
get a couple of the it takes a

1344
01:43:45,439 --> 01:43:47,880
minute to get going, but then
when it does, then it's just yeah,

1345
01:43:48,000 --> 01:43:50,680
takes off. I mean that's like
you know, Alan Rockefeller, my

1346
01:43:50,880 --> 01:43:55,239
the friend of mine who's my collegeist. He was carrying a fucking I think

1347
01:43:55,239 --> 01:43:57,920
he had a thermocycler in the trunk
of his car. Like they were doing

1348
01:43:57,920 --> 01:44:01,479
this ship for mushrooms. Just don
the fucking field what yeah. In the

1349
01:44:01,520 --> 01:44:03,279
field, they're like, fuck it, let's do it. Let's you know,

1350
01:44:03,840 --> 01:44:05,920
he just lives for it. I'm
like, I want I want that

1351
01:44:06,079 --> 01:44:10,359
to be I know with plants it's
a little harder, but I want that

1352
01:44:10,439 --> 01:44:13,319
to be a reality. Like I'd
love to have something and that you know,

1353
01:44:13,359 --> 01:44:15,840
oh I collected this stuff. Let's
go back to where we're camped out,

1354
01:44:16,279 --> 01:44:19,640
you know, car camped and just
throw it in there. We'll make

1355
01:44:19,720 --> 01:44:24,399
some food while it's you know,
sequencing getting you know, printed out.

1356
01:44:24,439 --> 01:44:27,880
Awesome. Can you imagine it's like, oh, look at that and you

1357
01:44:28,000 --> 01:44:31,239
just upload it to gen bank and
now it's publicly accessible data and be amazed.

1358
01:44:32,199 --> 01:44:36,680
Well, and that's what's cool,
you know actually is that uh pretty

1359
01:44:36,680 --> 01:44:42,640
early on in all this work,
the decision was made just collectively, I

1360
01:44:42,680 --> 01:44:46,199
guess that that all of these sequences
are going to be publicly available, like

1361
01:44:46,560 --> 01:44:50,279
you know, uh you can.
It's incredible right now. I mean you

1362
01:44:50,279 --> 01:44:56,479
can actually go up and just download
like sequences like for astrophite, for example,

1363
01:44:56,479 --> 01:45:00,479
there's there was a study uh you
know study uh back and there's all

1364
01:45:00,520 --> 01:45:08,399
this DNA info on astrophy them up
on uh you know, publicly available gen

1365
01:45:08,520 --> 01:45:12,239
bank or whatever, and you can
just download it and do the analysis yourself.

1366
01:45:12,560 --> 01:45:15,439
Uh, you know, the software
is free, the data is free.

1367
01:45:15,760 --> 01:45:18,800
It's pretty amazing. So where would
you recommend? So say, there's

1368
01:45:18,840 --> 01:45:24,359
like a uh, you know,
a team, there's someone in her twenties

1369
01:45:24,359 --> 01:45:27,560
who's doom scrolling on TikTok and they
want to learn about this shit instead.

1370
01:45:27,600 --> 01:45:30,920
What is you got a good recommendation
for? Like a book? My book?

1371
01:45:30,960 --> 01:45:35,119
My recommendation book is always that for
introduction to this stuff is Carl Zimmer's

1372
01:45:35,439 --> 01:45:40,560
Evolution Textbook, which you can download
on lib gen for free. You got

1373
01:45:40,600 --> 01:45:45,159
one, Yeah, you got a
recommendation. That's a great resource. I

1374
01:45:45,239 --> 01:45:48,159
don't really have a recommendation. I
haven't really thought about it that way,

1375
01:45:48,239 --> 01:45:53,039
even though I've taught in high school
like for years. That's a great question,

1376
01:45:53,159 --> 01:45:55,359
you know. Now you have to
be inspired to go dig in a

1377
01:45:55,399 --> 01:45:59,000
little bit and put a bibliography.
People always ask me too, They're like,

1378
01:45:59,000 --> 01:46:00,079
they're like, well, I want
to I want to learn about geology.

1379
01:46:00,119 --> 01:46:02,640
What's the good what's the good thing
to read? Should I get a

1380
01:46:02,720 --> 01:46:05,399
roadside geology? Now? Fuck that? Don't don't bother with that. There's

1381
01:46:05,399 --> 01:46:09,000
gonna be shit in there. You
don't understand. You want you want to

1382
01:46:09,039 --> 01:46:13,640
grasp the basic concepts. You know, buy or or get on lib gen

1383
01:46:14,079 --> 01:46:17,279
just a basic geology textbook within the
last ten years, learn like the three

1384
01:46:17,279 --> 01:46:20,840
different rock types. Of those three
rock types, igneous has then broken up

1385
01:46:20,840 --> 01:46:24,840
into two other rock types, uh, you know, and then you're just

1386
01:46:24,880 --> 01:46:29,199
expanding on those theories plate tectonics,
learn that concept, what the the oceanic

1387
01:46:29,279 --> 01:46:31,800
versus continental crust, deduction zones,
all that shit, different kinds of fun.

1388
01:46:32,000 --> 01:46:35,279
Just these basic concepts. That's really
there's only a handful of them,

1389
01:46:35,319 --> 01:46:39,800
and that's what all of geology is
built on. And and learn that those

1390
01:46:39,840 --> 01:46:42,319
you know, those the textbooks.
Seriously, that's what I was doing when

1391
01:46:42,319 --> 01:46:44,840
I was, you know, working
for the Rare and I was just reading.

1392
01:46:44,880 --> 01:46:47,279
I was carrying fucking textbooks in my
my railroad grip, like my railroad

1393
01:46:47,279 --> 01:46:50,039
bag, you know, with all
the fucking track warrants and all the other

1394
01:46:50,039 --> 01:46:53,479
ship we had to have. And
you know, anyone can do this.

1395
01:46:53,560 --> 01:46:56,079
There's you don't need to doom scroll. You don't need to you know,

1396
01:46:56,079 --> 01:47:00,560
fill your head with poisons so well, and you know it's there's so much

1397
01:47:00,560 --> 01:47:05,920
open source software and data now that
once you start digging and exploring. There's

1398
01:47:05,920 --> 01:47:11,159
so much spatial data. There's so
much weather and climate data from Noah,

1399
01:47:11,239 --> 01:47:14,239
you know, and from all these
other organizations, and all you have to

1400
01:47:14,239 --> 01:47:16,720
do is just get up there and
download it and start playing around with it.

1401
01:47:17,000 --> 01:47:20,760
You can you can put R,
the whole program R, you know,

1402
01:47:21,000 --> 01:47:29,319
on your laptop, which our toten
R is a program for statistical analysis

1403
01:47:29,359 --> 01:47:33,039
that it's been under it's been under
development for maybe thirty thirty five years or

1404
01:47:33,039 --> 01:47:39,239
so, and it's completely open source
and you can do anything on there.

1405
01:47:39,359 --> 01:47:44,520
You can do molecular phylogenies, you
can do all kinds of incredible you know,

1406
01:47:44,560 --> 01:47:49,359
statistical analysis of data, and you
can do incredible figures and represent the

1407
01:47:49,439 --> 01:47:54,720
data visually, and there's animated figures
you could do, and all kinds of

1408
01:47:54,760 --> 01:47:58,680
web plug ins stuff you can run
on your website that you can actually develop

1409
01:47:58,720 --> 01:48:02,680
and in the software where it's really
cool and you know, learning curves a

1410
01:48:02,680 --> 01:48:08,319
little bit steep. It's not exactly
user friendly, but once you sort of

1411
01:48:08,319 --> 01:48:10,680
get in there and get used to
it. And I mean a lot of

1412
01:48:10,760 --> 01:48:17,119
younger people these days are way more
they have way more facility with coding than

1413
01:48:17,199 --> 01:48:20,760
we ever will because they you know, they got up in there early,

1414
01:48:21,199 --> 01:48:25,399
and they got used to command line
stuff where they got used to, you

1415
01:48:25,439 --> 01:48:29,359
know, doing certain things that we
just you know, we weren't raised that

1416
01:48:29,439 --> 01:48:31,560
way. Well, okay, really
quick, because I got this fucking guy

1417
01:48:31,600 --> 01:48:34,079
supposed to come by and look at
that. I'm supposed to get my house

1418
01:48:34,119 --> 01:48:36,720
painted because the fucking heat down here
just beats the piss out of it.

1419
01:48:36,760 --> 01:48:40,920
I got only got fifteen twenty minutes. If this fucker comes back before that,

1420
01:48:41,079 --> 01:48:43,479
I told him twelve fifteen. If
he comes before that, I'm not

1421
01:48:43,520 --> 01:48:45,039
answering the fucking door, and I
don't care. We're gonna gave then I'm

1422
01:48:45,039 --> 01:48:49,119
gonna go with a different parent anyway. Okay, So, but really quick,

1423
01:48:49,119 --> 01:48:51,520
we didn't talk about pedio cactus.
You got ten minutes to talk about

1424
01:48:51,520 --> 01:48:57,039
pedio cactus because it's a cool fucking
genus high desert northern Arizona, southern Utah,

1425
01:48:57,439 --> 01:49:00,880
very cryptic, beautiful fucking plants,
and very hard for some of the

1426
01:49:00,920 --> 01:49:04,119
cactus nerds to grow in cultivation as
well too, right, which is all

1427
01:49:04,119 --> 01:49:08,239
the more protect the habitat, all
the more ambises on that. Let's talk

1428
01:49:08,239 --> 01:49:11,800
about pedeo kegs because he did some
really cool work with that. Yeah,

1429
01:49:11,840 --> 01:49:15,279
I love that genus. It's a
really weird group of cacti. I mean,

1430
01:49:15,319 --> 01:49:18,560
you know, cacti can be weird, and then pedos are one of

1431
01:49:18,600 --> 01:49:25,520
those groups that's like super weird,
you know. And I say that in

1432
01:49:25,600 --> 01:49:32,359
reference to their morphology, the way
they look, the spines, the biogeography

1433
01:49:32,439 --> 01:49:43,560
where they're distributed. You know,
they're probably relatively recent radiation post last Glacial

1434
01:49:43,720 --> 01:49:48,199
Maximum because a lot of the habitat
that they grow in very close to where

1435
01:49:48,760 --> 01:49:53,840
the glaciers were, you know,
at the last maximum, and as those

1436
01:49:53,880 --> 01:49:59,520
glaciers retreated, I think there was
a lot of radiation speciation. These pediocactus

1437
01:49:59,640 --> 01:50:03,880
up in the Great Basin Area in
northern Arizona, the Navajoan Desert as it's

1438
01:50:03,920 --> 01:50:06,960
called, you know, the red
doll, that red sand up in the

1439
01:50:08,840 --> 01:50:14,239
those cool, beautiful, fucking incredible
landscapes, man like psychedelic, psychedelic,

1440
01:50:14,319 --> 01:50:19,239
credible and just yeah, yeah,
And similar adaptations to the genus Sclero Cactus,

1441
01:50:19,319 --> 01:50:27,239
especially the northern you know taxa in
Sclero cactus. And yet they're totally

1442
01:50:27,479 --> 01:50:30,960
like they seem like a completely different
divergence in the family, you know,

1443
01:50:31,000 --> 01:50:33,640
there's a lot of them are really
cold tolerant too, right. I mean

1444
01:50:33,760 --> 01:50:38,399
it's very frigid in some of these
places where they grow, these high deserts

1445
01:50:38,399 --> 01:50:42,119
of Arizona and Utah, et cetera. Yeah, I mean it's like twenty

1446
01:50:42,159 --> 01:50:47,000
below. And one of the cool
adaptations that some of the tax that have,

1447
01:50:48,119 --> 01:50:54,800
and maybe all of them actually is
it a few different things. First

1448
01:50:54,800 --> 01:51:00,760
of all, they have a really
short growing season in habitats. So if

1449
01:51:00,800 --> 01:51:05,199
you're thinking about for example, peneocactus
people Zianus, which is up around Wholebrook,

1450
01:51:05,359 --> 01:51:12,000
Arizona and weird red sand, you
know, very wind blown with those

1451
01:51:12,000 --> 01:51:15,600
strange little pebbles everywhere. You know, it's like this really weird habitat.

1452
01:51:16,800 --> 01:51:24,760
These guys come up sort of out
of the sand in the spring, and

1453
01:51:24,920 --> 01:51:34,199
I would say maximum they have a
flowering and growing cycle of about five weeks.

1454
01:51:34,359 --> 01:51:39,119
Okay, you got five weeks a
year to do your thing. Yeah,

1455
01:51:39,159 --> 01:51:43,640
And then they just what they do
is they pull down. They retract

1456
01:51:45,079 --> 01:51:51,199
usually actually below the soil level,
like under the sand. As soon as

1457
01:51:51,199 --> 01:51:56,760
the temps hit about ninety or you
know, high eighties to low nineties,

1458
01:51:57,479 --> 01:52:01,640
some kind of hormone response or something
and they shrink down, pull down below

1459
01:52:01,800 --> 01:52:06,760
the surface of the soil, not
to be seen again until the next the

1460
01:52:06,800 --> 01:52:14,319
following April. So they're they're actually
they actually completely go under most of them

1461
01:52:14,560 --> 01:52:17,000
from what I can tell, because
you'll go you'll have GPS, you know

1462
01:52:17,680 --> 01:52:23,560
their locations. Even if you have
high like GNSS, you know the centimeter

1463
01:52:23,680 --> 01:52:28,800
accuracy. You won't see a single
planet. But they're there. You can,

1464
01:52:29,439 --> 01:52:32,720
like you go back the next field
season when it's growing conditions and they're

1465
01:52:32,800 --> 01:52:36,399
actually bad. They are. Yeah, God, that's fucking insane. That's

1466
01:52:36,479 --> 01:52:41,119
wild. I wondered about that with
some of the sclero cactus. Yeah,

1467
01:52:41,319 --> 01:52:44,720
like Sclerocactus nisis because I you know, that was one I went back to

1468
01:52:44,800 --> 01:52:46,680
the same spot and I was like, they're fucking gone. I was like,

1469
01:52:46,720 --> 01:52:50,600
motherfucker's poachers. And then and then
I talked to my friend Janelle,

1470
01:52:50,640 --> 01:52:54,239
who studies that species and works than
a lot, and she's like, no,

1471
01:52:54,319 --> 01:52:57,680
they just they disappear. They're still
probably still there. They're just gone.

1472
01:52:57,880 --> 01:53:01,359
That's are they just hidden. That's
great. It's one of the adaptations.

1473
01:53:01,560 --> 01:53:05,800
And you see with the spines like
pedio cactus, people's giannis has these

1474
01:53:05,840 --> 01:53:12,039
weird like spongy, thick, bulbous
sort of spines you know, that are

1475
01:53:12,479 --> 01:53:16,920
sort of the trademark of the plant
thick eyes any arm to the subspecies,

1476
01:53:17,439 --> 01:53:21,520
they have the really cool spines.
And one of the things that I would

1477
01:53:21,640 --> 01:53:28,920
love to understand better is if that's
an adaptation to hale, because these these

1478
01:53:29,000 --> 01:53:34,079
habitats, you know, across northern
Arizona especially regularly get really severe hail in

1479
01:53:34,119 --> 01:53:38,960
the summer, and you know,
if you've gardened or anything in an area

1480
01:53:39,000 --> 01:53:43,159
that gets hal it can just completely
destroy the vegetation, you know. I

1481
01:53:43,159 --> 01:53:46,039
mean, hale is a very destructive
thing that happened to some of the cac

1482
01:53:46,079 --> 01:53:48,960
died down here once. Ken King
was telling me about that in South Texas

1483
01:53:49,000 --> 01:53:53,119
actually once some of the he said, of hailstorm just murked a bunch of

1484
01:53:53,119 --> 01:53:55,399
shit. I mean they were covered, but they look like shit for a

1485
01:53:55,479 --> 01:53:58,560
year or two. You know,
Yeah, they just get they get you

1486
01:53:58,560 --> 01:54:02,560
know, decimated. And so I
think those spongy, weird sort of spines

1487
01:54:02,680 --> 01:54:08,039
might be a hale defense and I
would love to look at that system.

1488
01:54:08,920 --> 01:54:14,960
So the hail has been selecting for
form in cactus exactly exactly again, but

1489
01:54:15,000 --> 01:54:17,640
hale's part of the environment. That's
all environment. Yeah, that's a amazing

1490
01:54:17,720 --> 01:54:23,720
So there's I remember I've seen pedio
cactus stylurai on gypsum in Washington County.

1491
01:54:23,800 --> 01:54:28,079
Some of them got destroyed for a
housing subdivision that probably you know, will

1492
01:54:28,119 --> 01:54:31,600
be obsolete in thirty years. That's
a nice thought. Fucking us man,

1493
01:54:31,800 --> 01:54:36,199
Washington County. They're so delusional in
that entire state about water. It is

1494
01:54:36,239 --> 01:54:41,520
just fucking laughable pedious. Oh yeah, there is, yeah, yeah,

1495
01:54:41,560 --> 01:54:44,680
but at least in Tucson people are
a little bit more aware, you know,

1496
01:54:44,800 --> 01:54:47,920
but a little bit phoenix as fucked
pedio Cactus simpsonii, that's the more

1497
01:54:47,960 --> 01:54:53,880
common one, right that things incredible
pedio Cactus dys spinyi, which I saw

1498
01:54:54,319 --> 01:54:59,560
on San Rafael Swell in southern Utah. Thats gym man. I've never seen

1499
01:54:59,600 --> 01:55:02,920
that one habitat. I went looking
for it a few times, but I

1500
01:55:02,960 --> 01:55:06,720
think, you know, again,
it's one of these really cryptic things that

1501
01:55:08,319 --> 01:55:11,159
goes underground for a lot of the
year and you just have to be there

1502
01:55:11,199 --> 01:55:14,000
at the right time, you know. I had good GPS and everything,

1503
01:55:14,039 --> 01:55:16,319
and I couldn't find it. Yeah, the photos I have only like the

1504
01:55:16,439 --> 01:55:19,720
top. You know, if you're
imagining like a globe a sphere, like

1505
01:55:19,760 --> 01:55:24,640
the top twenty percent of the globe
is above ground, the rest is.

1506
01:55:24,920 --> 01:55:27,760
Yeah, and I got I didn't
know, no pictures of it in flower,

1507
01:55:27,800 --> 01:55:29,840
but I got pictures of it in
fruit, which was cool. So

1508
01:55:30,439 --> 01:55:32,640
well, that's awesome they have they
have really cool fruit, Like all the

1509
01:55:32,680 --> 01:55:36,560
pedio caac that I have, this
that really cool, uh, sort of

1510
01:55:36,600 --> 01:55:43,199
balloon shaped fruit where the top pops
off and I guess they say it's the

1511
01:55:43,279 --> 01:55:47,199
hissing fruit, which is one of
the main characteristics that you know, it

1512
01:55:47,279 --> 01:55:53,000
kind of splits open. Oh,
most of the pedios have that short range

1513
01:55:53,079 --> 01:55:58,600
dispersal strategy where they don't really get
dispersed very far the seed, you know,

1514
01:55:58,960 --> 01:56:03,560
except maybe by water. But you
know, another really cool thing about

1515
01:56:03,560 --> 01:56:09,239
this genus is you can start out
You've probably done this circuit before, but

1516
01:56:09,800 --> 01:56:14,600
you can start out at Navajo Bridge
on eighty nine a north of Flagstaff,

1517
01:56:14,600 --> 01:56:21,560
Arizona, and drive from Navajo Bridge
to Jacob Lake or Fredonia, Arizona.

1518
01:56:21,680 --> 01:56:29,119
Just go up the Kaibab Plateau just
about to Utah Cannap. You know,

1519
01:56:29,199 --> 01:56:36,479
you're you're just south of the Utah
border and within that drive there's thick Eyeseni

1520
01:56:36,640 --> 01:56:45,279
arm brady I, Aridini silurai.
So four species. It's a seventy it's

1521
01:56:45,279 --> 01:56:51,359
a seventy mile drive, but it's
the habitat for four federally listed in danger.

1522
01:56:54,359 --> 01:56:59,199
They've had a radiation there. Then
in the high deserts of the exactly

1523
01:56:59,399 --> 01:57:03,439
southwest, that's fucking it's a great
trip, you know, and they're hard

1524
01:57:03,439 --> 01:57:08,439
to find, like it. Oh
really, I went out, Yeah,

1525
01:57:08,479 --> 01:57:12,239
I went out to help Mark Baker
and Michelle Cloud Hughes on a survey they

1526
01:57:12,279 --> 01:57:17,600
were doing for the BLM of Fake
Isaami Orum out that way, and we

1527
01:57:17,600 --> 01:57:20,840
were, you know, we were
it was three of us expert well,

1528
01:57:20,920 --> 01:57:27,560
two experts in me U field botanists, and we were only finding like thirty

1529
01:57:27,600 --> 01:57:31,359
and forty a day, uh,
you know, total survey around areas where

1530
01:57:31,359 --> 01:57:34,760
they were known to occur. Uh. But it was a cool trip because

1531
01:57:34,760 --> 01:57:38,479
we were there when they were flowering, so it was awesome. And then

1532
01:57:38,760 --> 01:57:42,159
there's there's another tax on that I
really want to see that's way up in

1533
01:57:42,399 --> 01:57:48,600
Washington and Oregon that Nigru's bin us
and those are wild and they grow on

1534
01:57:48,720 --> 01:57:56,319
like black lava. Uh you neocactus
species way out separate from the range of

1535
01:57:56,359 --> 01:58:01,640
the rest of the genus up there
in eastern Oregon and Washington. And I've

1536
01:58:01,640 --> 01:58:05,520
never seen those in habitat either.
I would love to see that. I

1537
01:58:05,560 --> 01:58:09,960
wonder I've never seen that one.
I think my friend Matt has seen it

1538
01:58:10,039 --> 01:58:15,600
before. Plants are cool, cool
man. Plants are just softy for for

1539
01:58:15,720 --> 01:58:17,920
I mean, and they get you
in everything else, you know, meteorology,

1540
01:58:18,039 --> 01:58:23,600
chemistry, geology, I just you
know, anyway, I got it.

1541
01:58:23,720 --> 01:58:26,479
Yeah, there you go. Jail. They get you into jail sometimes,

1542
01:58:26,880 --> 01:58:29,279
I take it. That's fine on
mind going. I'm not too good

1543
01:58:29,319 --> 01:58:30,880
for the jail. I'm not too
good for the jail. I'll go to

1544
01:58:30,880 --> 01:58:34,560
the jail. I'm not. I'm
not doctor, doctor Bresling and jail.

1545
01:58:35,760 --> 01:58:40,119
You're too good for you out there
listening. Do good for the jail,

1546
01:58:40,439 --> 01:58:43,920
huh, I don't think you are, no fuck Get into jail. Go

1547
01:58:44,199 --> 01:58:45,960
go do you love Bonnie, you
love plants? Go do go do some

1548
01:58:46,079 --> 01:58:50,119
time in it. You know the
time for it anyway, So okay,

1549
01:58:50,119 --> 01:58:56,000
on our next episode we'll cover cylindro
punch. You do they fuck the cylinder

1550
01:58:56,079 --> 01:58:58,960
punch a bang? Or is it
all clonal? And that's coming up next.

1551
01:58:59,000 --> 01:59:01,279
Peter President. Thank you so much
your time. Thanks for having me.

1552
01:59:01,319 --> 01:59:03,560
Yeah, I owe you a burrito
or a pizza sometime. Man.

1553
01:59:03,640 --> 01:59:06,439
You know, Hey, I'll come
down to South Texas and see you sometimes.

1554
01:59:06,439 --> 01:59:10,039
Oh yeah, please do. You
can crash up my place whenever.

1555
01:59:10,159 --> 01:59:14,119
You're welcome here anytime. Just before
March because it gets a little hot after

1556
01:59:14,159 --> 01:59:16,159
that, understood. Okay, all
right, take care of men. Thanks

1557
01:59:16,199 --> 01:59:19,119
again, you two. Bye,
okay bye, all right, everybody else,

1558
01:59:19,119 --> 01:59:20,319
have a good rest of the Exampy