All right, Okay, here we go. All right, Welcome to the
Crime Pays a Botany doesn't podcast. The fucking recorders finally hooked up. Now
I was recording without the MIC's hooked up. You know, I've had it.
I haven't been getting as much sleep lately. I'm burningley candle at both
ends, trying to do too much shit here. But uh, anyway,
welcome to that one. Yeah, welcome to the Welcome to the Crime Pace
podcast. I'm here with my friend Peter Breslin. He's a botanist who studies
the cactus family out of Arizona. He's actually been to jail much respect for
trespassing in West Texas before, because the state has some of the most ridiculous
fucking I mean, it's it's like ninety five percent private property in the state.
I didn't Doug telling me, told me, like east of the Mississippi,
it's like eighty five percent private property, which makes sense because you know,
there's it's easier to grow stuff there, a lot of the desert terrain,
you know, the Honky Death Cult. No offense of course that anyone
who might find that offensive, but it's just what I call it, you
know, kind of tongue in cheek. They had the Honky Death Cult arrived
on the West coast first. Maybe things would be different had it not been
mostly it had not been so arid in the western half of the United States,
you know, maybe it would have been different. But as it is,
it's private property everywhere, so and we'll talk about that too. But
man, thank you so much for being down to come on this podcast.
Man, I'm stoked to talk to you. Yeah, yeah, thanks for
having me. I'm uh, you know, I'm really really happy to be
here. I've been a longtime fan, longtime listener, first time caller.
Right on. Man, Well, thank you, thank you for support being
into what I do it. I'm just glad. I can, you know,
keep it semi interesting. So I'm all right. Well, first off,
okay, so we're going to talk about a lot of stuff. There
was recently a revision of the genus Mammalaria, at least a lot of the
Baja and Sonoran desert species. That makes total sense to me because if you
look at some of those fish hook Mammalaria, they totally do look like the
closely related genus coach of Miya, which I which I've seen in Baja,
which is a really cool fucking they're hummingbird pollinator, right coach Amia is Yeah,
I mean, the the theory is that because of the shape of the
flowers, you know, they look like they're pollinated by birds. They have
that sort of funnel shape, you know, and they're red. They're super
red color, which usually is like a bird attract and kind of color.
So yeah, although no formal study has been done of like, you know,
actual pollinator visits to those flowers, but anyway, that's the idea.
Yeah. Well, okay, so we'll talk about that. We're going to
get to that. I want to talk about pediocactus because that's a fucking cool
genus. Man, that's like the high Desert Arizona, and there's some really
weird cryptic ones species in that genus in a really god one of the most
beautiful landscapes in the world. I think, Yeah, it's crazy. But
first let's talk about the jail. So what happened? What tell us where
you were, Describe the habitat, describe the geology you were hiking to,
and uh, oh geez, because it's it's a fascinating stuff, right,
I mean novaculate, right, is that that's the what is no vaculating?
Uh, it's well, you know what, I'm not a geologist, so,
but it is. It's like a really weird, compressed, very lightweight
kind of rock. Like when you when you see it, it's it's wild.
It's like when you pick it up, it just feels like it's more
like balsa wood or something, you know what I mean. It's it's very
cool. And there's this area of West Texas near Big Bend National Park,
uh in in Brewster County, and the novaculate is like the major geological feature
through this little tiny area of West Texas. Oh god, you could see
it from the satellite too. It's fucking amazing. I'm sorry to interrupt that.
No, it's totally. It's got that color. Yeah, it's like
a pale beige, sort of whitish kind of color. It's very visible like
if you dry. Yeah. I mean, I've been going over to West
Texas for about thirty years, uh to check out the cacti. Because one
of my big hobbies before I got into you know, getting the PhD and
becoming more formally drained or whatever, was to just go look at cacti and
take pictures. And like be out there in their app pat. That's I've
been doing that for like thirty years or more. And so I've always been
fascinated by these uh novaculate cabios nevaculate endemic cacti. And these are cacti that
have specifically adapted to this substrate. You can grow them in cultivation in anything
like they'll grow. They're very easy. A lot of them are very easy
to grow in cultivation, but in habitat you're only going to find them on
this particular kind of rock soil. Como d say adaphic endemism. Nice almost
these say a daphic And to keep interrupting, I get through, fucking excited
questo, no problem problem. So this is biogenic silica. This is silicious
rock, silica based rock that was deposited uh in a just for anyone listening
to deposited in a marine environment. I think someone had messaged me once telling
me it was like silica sponges or something. Either way, it's a cool
fucking rocket's really weird. Concordal fracts are kind of white, kind of slippery.
Continue once yeah, yeah, So the cacti that grow in there are
closely related to more widespread cacti, but they're specific, you know, they're
special either species or subspecies of the more widely distributed cattie. So it's all
it's this really cool system. Now you know, this environment, this habitat
right meets centuries of incredibly draconian, you know, strict private property laws in
Texas and the origin Like if you look at the history of these private property
laws, they really originated around the slave trade because there was there was a
real fear, you know, around slave uprisings and slave escape slaves in this
part of the world. And connect that up with Mexico, right, because
Texas was Mexico maybe should still should be. But anyway, that's not okay.
So if anybody's offended by that, I apologize. They can take a
walk whatever, they can go take a walk to some evacuate go ahead,
right exactly. So these private property laws intersect, they have a really deep
history of really really interesting connection with with American politics and with yeah, I
mean it's not it's not super straightforward the way it gets presented, like you
know, well, we we own this land, so we have the right
to protect the land. It's got a lot of other dimensions to it.
But anyway, totally really quick on that note, really quick, just just
really quick. Yeah, I mean, yeah, people can protect it,
but it's if someone wants to go in and harvest all their okatillo, harvest,
poach the shit out of it, you know, destroy the land,
rip all the okata out of the land, because they found out they can
make money selling it to you know, rich people in Phoenix who want it
and their landscaping. They can do that too. So it's totally I mean,
there have been good things to come from from the private property, like
some protection, but not much a lot of it's really preventing people from getting
out there and experiencing it. Well, it's that it's that concept of like
ownership and freedom to do whatever you want with the land, which doesn't really
always intersect with the idea of stewardship of the land, you know what I
mean, Like totally you can you can extract all you want because it's your
land and nobody can tell you what to do. Goddamn tell me what to
do, right exactly. And that also huge conflict in intersection with the Endangered
Species Act, right because this is the federal government coming in, you know,
these damn Feds or whatever coming in and telling people in Texas what they
can and can't do on their own land. And this all sort of evolved
through the late nineteen seventies to eighties into the early nineties where a lot of
these novacuate endemic cacti are also federally listed in endangered species because they're very rare
and they grow only on you know, this substrate, and they're you know,
they're endangered. And one of the things they're endangered by is trampling like
ranching and land use. And you know, this extractive economy of Texas where
the land is for human use the most part totally. There isn't a totally
abstractive, totally extractive you know, there isn't a big culture of environmentalism in
Texas. No, No. And then the land ethic sucks too, you
know. And I would say this contrasts sharply with the idea the land ethic
that we need to have, which is a it's not your fucking land.
Actually you're just borrowing it. You're going to die at some point, that
land is going to continue going on living, and all the things that live
there have a right to live there. Too. You know, it shows
in an eight gratitude, humility and respect for the other life forms there versus
it's mine and it's you know, I can do with it what I want
because God put it here strictly for me. You know, it's a there's
a whole fucking deranged value system behind it. Go on, Sorry, I
just it's an interesting cultural conflict, you know, it's huge, it's really
complex, and there's always like this tension within that context, you know,
between the rugged individual landowner freedom stuff right, and the federal government coming in
and telling people what they can and can't do. So that's part of this
whole practice thing, right, because as soon as a species gets listed as
an endangered species under the Act, the goal becomes to be sure that that
species recovers to the point where it's no longer at risk of going extinct.
And those recovery plans specify critical habitat. And then as soon as critical habitat
is specified, you can't do anything in a lot of ways, like the
land use rules sometimes really significantly change. So that's part this is all part
of why I went to jail, and you know, so to cut to
the chase, basically, I've been. I go went out to West Texas
for about thirty years, and really, like I'm thinking back to all these
visits. I've gone almost every spring for a long time. You know,
I was a high school teacher for about twenty five years, and every spring
break I would pretty much duck over to the Big Bend area, you know,
until yeah, you know, until I started the PhD process. I
didn't have time to do it for a while there. But so I think
in all of those visits, it would be accurate to say that I didn't
set foot on fenced land once until this time when I got arrested. So
it's kind of ironic, you know, that I was like a first offender,
like in reality, because I had always always been told, you know,
when you're in Texas you can get shot, Like, don't go behind
a fence because anything fenced is private and people are hardcore, you know,
it is a religion. It's like a whole values thing here. And it's
funny too because that whole endangered species thing that you know, all the for
lack of a better word, rednecks. I don't say that in any I've
got red neck friends, you know, or whatever. I've got it's good
to have a red neck friend. You get a red neck friend who's going
to help you. You got a deer problem in your year, I'll figure
out how to shoot it. You know, maybe with botany, without without
rednecks. Botany and rednecks go together, right, and you know you might
there are some of them. They're willing to break the law for good causes
at some point, you know. So anyway, but the the the mentality
you hear at are sometimes is, you know, if they find the federally
listed and endangered species in our land, they're going to take it. But
in Texas, if they find an endangered species on your land, that's like
more incentive. They're gonna like tell you to get rid of it, you
know, like when the wall was going in. I mean, an endangered
species makes almost makes the the culture of this state go after it more to
make to destroy it, because it's so it's so the mentality here is just
so against all that. You know, it's a cultural thing. It's so
weird too, because i mean, hunters, right wingers, they should all
be for land conservation too, you know, they should all be great,
they should all be and that's cool. I mean it plays like the South,
like you know, Kyle from Native Habitat projects doing great work, and
you know the more like rightly I mean everyone's into them, but the more
right leaning side of the of the culture, you know, into land conservation,
like, hey, you want good hunting habitat plant native plants, that's
going to support the animals you want to haunt, et cetera. So it
shouldn't be a political thing, but here in Texas it is. It's like,
you know, and then when when prostrate milk we got listed as endangered
within two weeks, our pig Attorney General Ken Pexton, you know, got
really hot. He got a heart on for this land and then went after
it. And last when the wall started, Yeah it was brutal. I
was just there. I just saw the wall where we were saving all this
stuff. A few days ago, I was with some friends looking for reticulated
colared lizards out there, and yeah, oh wow, fucking weird. The
scene. It's like Jesus Christ, you know, It's it's just I've been
going there for years and now there's this giant anyway, so it is crazy.
I mean, my partner and I were just down around Lukeville on the
Arizona border where the wall is, and we saw hundreds of African refugees walking
along the wall just on the US side, probably Senegalese maybe or from Mauritania.
Just hundreds. I mean, I would estimate probably two or three hundred
African refugees walking along the wall. And you know, they just closed the
Lukeville crossing like indefinitely. You can't even at Lukeville now. It's completely closed.
So so you know, that's another element around all this stuff is with
the private property laws. There's, uh, these guys that I met when
I was in jail. There was one guy from Guatemala who was an undocumented
you know, immigrant, and his story which I pieced together, he was
waiting to be deported actually, and so they put him in my cell because
I was in I was in a like a holding cell, separate from the
main jail community because they don't want to you know, like until they figure
out what to do with with me, weird like sixty something white guy botanists.
You know, they didn't want to put me in the main jail population,
right, So anyway, they put this dude in there because he's waiting
for for CBP to Customs Border Patrol to pick him up and take him to
the freaking airport in El Paso and send him back to Guatemala. Right,
So with my bat Spanish, his bat Spanish, he tells me that he
was arrested for trespassing after crossing you know, the border, and I think
he tried to get it was like right around Ohinaga, if you know where
that is. Yeah, yeah, of course, near for Idio Psidio.
Right, And so he got busted and he spent eight months in the Brewster
County jail waiting for his hearing, waiting for his deportation. Fucking waste money
too, man, I know, I was, God, I was.
I was in there lank tree just collecting seeds and looking at rocks. Uh
god, I must have been me like a week ago. I was looking.
I wanted to see if in Cilia Scaposa had any on it too,
And it just parked, parked on the side of the road. It's like
a little bit east of Sanderson. Maybe this this dude comes out. It's
a big white guy, looks like fucking Lurch, you know, from Adam's
family, and he's like, what are you doing. I'm like, I'm
looking for rocks. I'm just gonna I'm don't worry. I didn't cross.
He's like, all right, well, you know, we get some weird
people here, and I'm like, fucking weird people like what like like drag
queens and fucking like people dressed like like goth people like you get like teen
god, like, what are you talking about? Weird people? Like what
do you mean? You know, I know, he meant fucking migrants and
like from Guatemala, Like what the fuck is weird? What is weird about
him? They don't They're not like a perstevee. It was just so fucking
don And then this other guy came up after he's like all right, well,
I'm like yeah, and then I just started and then I just start
talking about the geology, like the fucking Chirtinlgoles and the limestone, just boring
that, you know, just trying to get this guy bored. So he
leaves me alone and uh and can tell that like I'm not it's not a
cover that I'm like, actually, legit, you know what I'm talking about.
And then this other guy comes up up and he's like this guy was
just fucking off the chain, like he must he seemed like he was on
coke or something. He's like, Ah, the Joe Biden people, they
come through the lash with Joe Biden. What the fuck. I'm like,
what the fuck is he talking about? Like it's like when you talk to
a tweaker on the street or something and you're like, you're trying they're like
telling you a story, like a homeless tweaker, and you're trying to figure
what the fuck they're talking about. Like you have to pie piece the conversation
together, cause it's like a ping pong ball all over it, you know,
Joe Biden people, Cartales they're coming to I'm what the fuck is he
talking Joe Biden? And Cartel's like, fuck, this guy is on one.
I'm getting like a contact high from time. But he was like this
old you know, he's this old fucking honky who's with these flappyjowels. And
I don't know what the fuck he was talking about. Man, He's telling
me there's Cartel going through the you know, and I'm like, man,
I've been here literally like fifty times. I've never seen fucking anyone, you
know, I've never seen any fucking migrants. I've never the cartel moves all
their drugs through the border crossings. They're not moving drugs through your fucking backyard,
you know. Just like it's the amount of fear, I mean,
the amount of fear out there that's been kind of stirred up, you know,
for for landowners, for people who already kind of had a default setting
that they had to build a fort like around their fucking catty. That's what
I was thinking about, Like, I can't imagine living like that, like
just paranoid. And I mean I would pack heat certainly, and mostly for
feral hogs. Well, you know, and I'm sure the cartel. I'm
sure there have been cartel crossing through once in a while, but maybe but
probably moving people, moving coyotes whatever to fuck, you know. And I'm
not trying to debate anyone on that ship, you know whatever, But but
it's it just it all ties into why I went to jail though. Yeah,
yeah, totally, this paranoid went to this militarization of the border,
this dystopic. Really quick, let me mention, I saw that fucking Wolverine
movie that came out. This sounds corny, trust me, it comes back
around. Don't worry. It was like five dollars movie theater, you know,
when you want some shit to sedate your brain. Used to go to
a five dollars movie theater in jack Lena Square when I lived in Oakland,
and I saw that fucking movie, and I was like, holy fuck,
I can't believe that was just a dumb ass Marvel movie. Like I thought
it was gonna be a dumb ass Marvel movie. But the world did it
portrayed? Because it takes place in like twenty thirty was so dystopic and fucking
real. There's like a scene with these frat boys driving past the migrant camp,
like you know, chanting Usa, USA. He's standing out of the
roof of a limousine. I'm like, this is fucking who wrote this?
Man? This is pretty advanced for you know, shitty Marvel. Like wow,
okay, but but that's very I mean I think of that all the
time. I'm like, this is gonna be the fucking you know, I
don't know. There's so much shit in there, and there's like robotic you
know, there's like self driving trucks just blazing in whatever anyway, But go
on, So this is why you're arrested. So tell everybody what you were
going to look at the evaculate and what species? Yeah, well, that's
you know, that's a great question. I had been tempted by these outcroppings
of nevaculate that you can see from the highway there that goes there's this Texas
I think it's Texas Highway three ninety five, might be US three ninety five,
I don't know, But anyway, it goes from Marathon, Texas straight
shot down to the northeastern entrance of Big Ben National Park. So it's like
a main drag kind of road right through the heart of this novaculate habitat,
you know what I mean, Like on either side of the road. You
just see it. You see it everywhere, and it's so tempting, you
know, but everything is a ranch, like everything is privately owned, you
know, everything's fenced, you know, et cetera. Yeah, but I've
been driving down that road, like I said, for like thirty years,
always tempted, right, and so for I don't have any idea exactly why,
but I just got this, like, you know, I have to
take a look kind of feeling, you know, And so I pulled over
right at this one area where the novaculate is really right up to the road
cut, and there are a few areas along that highway where you can still
find uh. And this is on the public right of way, so you're
allowed to be there between the road and the fence. You can still find
some of these very tiny, very rare, hard to find novaculate endemic cacti.
And you just have to know which road cut along that highway is still
publicly accessible where you can find these stopped Escobaria minima and a kind of serious
what is it Davisii? Are those two of them or veridiflorous subspecies divisik But
I think it's listed as a kind of areas divisii, like as a species
and as minima Escobari hesteri, and of course I think those were those have
both been moved now into elo CIPHERA. I'm not doing that. I refuse,
there's no fun. I think it's a good I think it's a good
paper actually, although I have more I want to say about that later,
but yeah, yeah, let's talk about that. I'm gonna write that down
so we don't forget, but keep going. Okay, But there's pholo Cactus
slavitus peness which is like this miniature form of the of the Texas rainbow cactus,
the you know, the felo cactus bicolor, which is pretty widespread down
in New Mexico, et cetera. But Flavidus penis is a miniature, a
little tiny form of that, you know. And that's one of the themes,
by the way, these novaculate endemics, so they tend to be miniature.
They're like very they're very small, they're very camouflage usually there. They
have this unusual adaptation to that substrate of being tiny like little plants. When
I was looking at escobari and minima, and I'm not saying the trespassed to
do it, but you know, of course, but someone could infer from
that what they may. I was, I was like, this almost looks
like the rabbit shit because there's jag rabbit pillots everywhere. I'm like, it's
so fucking tiny. It's like totally cryptic. And there's that cool slaginella everywhere,
you know, that resurrection fern and anyway, amazing go on. It's
incredible habitat and it you know. It's the weird thing about these little tiny
plants, right is in cultivation they get a lot bigger, So what to
really see them, like, that's the other sad thing or you know,
frustrating thing about these private property laws is to see what these plants actually look
like, you know, in their natural habitat. You have to go to
where they grow. Like if you're looking at them in cultivation, you're seeing
much larger versions than and how they grow in habitat. So, you know,
I've always wanted to see him. And you know, even after thirty
years, I've never seen Escobaria hesterai in inhabitat. It's not accessible to the
public, Like there's just no way to get to where it grows legally.
So anyway, I just I said to myself, look, I'm just gonna
pull over and just duck into this land really quick, see where I can
find real quick, do it, and then get out. Yeah, do
it. Just get in there real quick, real quick. My dad's mafia
bookie cousin used always say that real quick, real quick, just real quick,
just you know, just just for a second. So I did that.
You know, I went in right as I'm kind of behind the fence,
not too far, maybe one hundred yards. This dude drives down the
ranch road. That's right, there with a road grader, like he's one
of the workers on the ranch. He's grading the road, you know,
he's fixing up the true and I knew right away that he had seen me,
you know, So I started to head back to my car and kind
of waved at the guy, and he waved at me, and he drove
across the highway and kept on, you know, the ranch road on the
other side of the highway, and I was like, huh, maybe I
don't know, maybe this is chill. So I made the bad decision to
turn around and walk some more, you know, and do some more exploring
on this novaculate and it's like everywhere right And I got sucked in too,
because right away behind this fence, I'm starting to see dense populations of falo
cactus flavidispius and a kind of arius neo capillis. I don't know if you've
heard of neo capillos, but it's it's one of these small flower to kind
of areas related to Varida floris that or Chlorianthus, you know, and it's
called neo capillos. It's like new hairs, is what that means. And
it's like the little seedlings are these incredibly furry, weird looking things. I
have a couple. Yeah, there's another one that grows in Big Ben Ranch
State Park that does that same thing. It's got it's got hairy. Yeah,
yeah, what is that? Camus c a us casus. Definitely that
hairy seedling thing, which is some kind of weird adaptation. Then you know,
when they get older, they just they lose all that hair and they
just have spines. Right, So I was seeing those like everywhere, which
is super cool. I took a few pictures and uh, that was all
I saw, actually, was those two taxa flavidaspinus and Neo capillis. And
then I was like shit, I got to get out of here. And
I swear to god, it was like maybe twenty five minutes total, and
you know, grab some pictures, got some GPS, started heading back to
my car, and I'm on my way back to my car and there's like
four sheriff department vehicles there. Maybe I'm exaggerating. It might have only been
three, but then like we got one yeah yeah, like the county,
the actual Brewster County sheriff, I don't remember his name, but he was
there, and these deputies like three or four other other deputies, and I
was just walking up to them like what are you going to do? I
mean, you know, they totally saw me, like I can't like,
you know, pretend like I wasn't there, And you know, I thought
what was going to happen was going to be like listen, you know it's
a misunderstanding. Like I've only been here a few minutes. I just was
taking some pictures. You know, I'm a botanist, you know I I
don't mean any harm or anything like that. And in any state with a
rational culture, that's what would have that's what would have happened. Yeah,
but no, you know it was like listen, we are required to rescue.
We have to take you to jail. It's required. You know,
you're on private property. The owner. We've contacted the owner and they do
want to press charges. This was all within a twenty five minute period right
where where I got like six of the most expensive photos I've ever taken.
Well, you're bad boy. You I can't believe you because it's so weird
too, because I mean when I was all my time out West, hopping
fences was just something you did because the fences were just there to keep the
cattle in. That's all they were. They were going to keep people exactly.
You know, you want to keep people out, put up a fucking
ten foot tall fence, motherfucker make it. You know, that's it's not
just hard work, right. But yeah, I mean most of my field
botany right has been New Mexico, Arizona, and Sonora and Baja California,
And without exception, I think, except well there's some hardcore areas of Sonora
and Baja where you don't want to go on private property. The sketch totally
you're never coming out if you and but they make that really clear. Most
of the time. They have signs that are really agro that just say,
listen, we have this, we have it under video surveillance, do not
set foot in this area. Whereas the culture in Texas, they just I
think people that grow up here are just trained, like it's just ingrained in
them. I get friends who grew up here, I remember, like you
know, botanizing with them in other states, and they're like, oh,
we shouldn't hop the fence. I'm like, no, no, it's it's
public, it's just for cattle. It's okay, it's you know, Dean
Taylor R. I P told me once about trespassing in California, like,
if they if they don't want, if it's private property, they got to
have a sign up. They have to have a no trespassing sign private property
whatever. I mean, I don't I think that's legit. I don't know.
But either way, but Dean Dean used to trespass a lot from Bidany
good, good fucking job. I mentioned to I mentioned this to the sheriff.
I was like, listen, you know, there's no sign on the
fence or anything. And there's this opening by where this gate is that was
wide open. And he was like, yeah, anything behind the fence in
Texas, you're you know, it's illegal. They don't people don't need a
sign, so you know. Uh. I was like, can I contact
the owner and just talk some sense into him, you know? And they
were like, nope, we got to take you to jail. So I
wonder if it's a thing where if the owner would have seen you. You
know. I'm been like, Oh, this guy's just a nerd, you
know, right, just a nerd, like a botany. He's not going
to like run line for a fucking grow up. He's not like running mi
gropes. He's not, you know, just something man. Because although I
got to admit, like my field outfit, I look like I'm on the
road, you know, because I have a day pack and a sun hat.
And yeah, I would know I would be they would assume the worst
of them. I'm covered in tattoos, I'm normal, pretty dirty foot.
You know, I got that face covering. I used to you know,
like I'm irish. I don't want to get freaking skin cancer, right,
so I do full coverage, and so I look I look like I've been
on the road a long time. In fact, when they booked me into
Brewster County jail, uh, they went through my whole like daypack and you
know, I had like this bottle of salt tablets in there, and they
were fascinated by that, like, you know, is this drugs? You
know? Yeah, they get excited about stuff like that. It's so cute.
W They get so excited when you've got something in the bag. It's
so cute. The police do that. They get so excited. It's just
you know, very exciting, right oh yeah, and you know, I
mean they don't know me from from anybody. And but but what about me
though. I mean, like, like I said, I'm a sixty something
botanist driving a Subaru Crosstree Irish Irish buttons. But they just loved booking me,
and they loved the whole thing. I think, like, I think
it made their I think it was very interesting to them, like like like
they weren't too where they mean like where they died to or were they just
kind of like, oh, actually they were. They were very nice the
entire time, and like I got to ride in the front of the sheriff's
truck. Oh, there you go to nice. I've been arrested a few
times is probably guess I didn't They didn't cuff me. Uh, it's always
fun when the cops have a good time. You know. A couple of
times I got arrested because I chat them up and ship. You know,
we have fun there. It's like a you know, even though I'm being
booked, and uh, they've always generally been just probably because I try to
charm them and talk them, talk to them and ship. You know,
They're always like, yeah, have some ship. I remember one time the
cops in Chicago printed out an old mugshot for me. I was like,
I was like God, that's nice, Thank you. I fucking had it
for a while too. They let me keep it, and then I lost
it. I don't know where it went. I don't know where to I
should go them all sign it, I should see it. Yeah anyway,
alright, go ahead, Yeah, so anyway, Yeah, it was a
weird scene. And then you know it's weird in Bruster County, they're they're
pretty hardcore, Like the Brewster County jail is not a place you want to
be, like it is, really, I wouldn't think so. I wouldn't
think it's that bad. Is it just a lot of methoads or what?
Well. I couldn't really tell too much about the general population because, like
I said, I was separate from them, you know. But h was
like the guys who got put in my holding cell while I was there,
because I was there for almost two days. And that's another aspect of this
whole thing that just freakd freaked me out, Like I couldn't figure out how
to get out, you know what I mean. You were in jail for
you. I was in jail for the weekend before nine to eleven happened.
I was in jail the whole weekend my friends from Chicago because we got arrested
in San Francisco. I was just doing graffiti. They got out. They
were in jail when nine to eleven happened, so that must have sucked.
You'd be like, oh, fuck either, never let me out, they're
gonna hear yeah exactly. Well so yeah, So the guys that got put
in my holding cell were foreign nationals who were either being deported or extradited to
other states in the US due to other charges that they had. So that
was really eye opening. You know, like this dude who's being flown back
to Goosi, Galpa in the Honduras right at taxpayer expense, Like I mean,
he's going to be deported back to his old country. And then this
other guy being extradited to Louisiana because he was selling drugs over there and got
and you know, had a warrant, et cetera. So it was pretty
crazy. You know. Then this young guy too, who was actually from
Ohinaga on the other side you know the river. He was in there because
he had veteran heroin at a border checkpoint. That's a bad one. So
he was not only an undocumented guy, but he also you know, had
a possession charge and he'd been in the Brewster County jail for like two and
a half years, which is just crazy to think about. I mean,
for county jail to be in that long. Yeah, that's crazy, man.
That's not the way it's supposed to work. Jail's not supposed to be
for that prison is you know, you know, I mean I got the
sense that it was super crowded. Man. You heard a lot like it
felt to me like there were a lot of people in there, and they
book you in, they take all your civilian clothing and stuff and everything,
and then they then because they want to be hardcore right and show like the
that they're tough on crime or whatever, they put everybody in a pink jumpsuit,
which which was you know, I'm like, what the hell jumps Yeah,
sink jumps It was not so bad, That's that's funny. I But
man, they're probably trying to do that because they're like, oh man,
you know, some macho shit like I gotta be embarrassed to wear this.
I'd be like, fuck, yeah, do whatever. Let me draw on
it, let me draw some ship on it. I'll get, I'll get
I'll make a fucking festivity out of it, you fucking assholes. Let me
give me a fucking sharpie. Let me get on this thing. You know,
Yeah, I think it was. I think it was that guy what's
his name, r Paio in Phoenix, in Maricopa County. Is that guy's
still alive by what miracle? And of fucking cholesterol drugs? Is that piece
of shit's still alive? Amazing? Like like Henry Kissinger, Right, yeah,
they fucking lived till there are one hundred. Man, these pieces of
why only the good die young? But anyway, this guy started the pink
jumpsuit thing. I think in the tent city that he ran, you know,
the sheriff in Mayracopa County in Phoenix, and I think Brewster County was
like emulating this guy because they think of him as like a hero, you
know, so fucking morny. It's so corny, man, these fucking what
doors. I was in for a couple of days and then but they gave
you. Everyone was wearing pink jumpsuits though, everybody except the guys who were
getting deported. Of course, they were back in their civilian clothes, which
I envied. I was like, shit, I've always wanted to go to
to Goosey, Galpa. You know, there's some cool catti in Honduras.
Yeah, I don't know if you want to go there now, you know,
a little hot. I had a friend who went that was there twenty
or thirty years ago and said it was fucking gratty at a great time,
but now it's all controlled by criminal gangs and shit. So well I got
that impression for sure. But yeah, anyway, so I was in for
a while. I saw the judge about twenty four hours after I was booked
in, and he set my bond at like two thousand dollars because I was
at the time, you know, I was teaching high school in California.
Actually, I was on spring break from my private school teaching job in Los
Angeles. And I guess they I, you know, was made of money
or something. So they set the bond, and I didn't know how that
all worked. You have to actually get a bondsman, you know, to
bond yourself out of jail. So the guy, the dude who was like
the front desk guy, helped me out with all that, you know,
and helped me contact the bondsman. They came down at the last minute.
It took this woman six hours to drive from like Echoes or something to bruce
you County to bond me out. I didn't get out of jail until like
seven pm. And yeah, so jes so, I you know, my
Cactus network like went into effect. And Mike Powell, doctor Powell at Saul
Ross, who's like one of the great cactus botanist. Yeah, well he
he rounded up an excellent criminal defense attorney who named Liz Rogers, and I
really want to put a plug in for her if you ever need you ever
need criminal defense in West Texas. Liz Rogers is incredible. She's totally connected.
She knows everybody. She grew up there right the CRIMEA podcast we do
free advertising for good criminal defense attorneys were more than you go exactly. But
anyway, she came through for me. You know, it turned out she
knew the ranch manager of the land that I was on and we worked out
a deal where the charges that you dropped and that's how it all kind of
went away. She just made it go away. Did this guy chill out?
I mean, it just seems so silly that this couldn't be Like,
listen, man, this is totally chilled out. You know a little bit
of the local connection. Liz knew like the guy's wife and helped out the
daughters with some equestrian stuff and you know how it works. Yeah, yeah,
I mean it just it just seems so silly. You're not really everybody
knows everybody, You're not really doing anything wrong. You know you're going to
exactly though, I think that became really clear, you know that that I
had no nefarious intention of any kind, right, and uh so fortunately right
the uh the charges were dropped and and I you know, I really appreciated
that. But the sad thing is, I mean, okay, so there's
an upside that I saw directly to these really severe like private property laws,
and that is that as soon as I was on the other side of that
fence, there were rare plants were just everywhere. They were really very like
densely populated within this small area, right the check poachers haven't hit hit them
yet exactly, whereas if you're on the road cut, you're never going to
find them. Everybody's dug them out. And I would say, you know,
without with some evidence, I will say that it's most sleep people from
other countries who come over and extract these rare plants from publicly accessible areas and
smuggle them out of the country. Yeah. I had Jared Martin, this
guy Jared Marbles that wrote a book called The Cactus Hunters on my podcast Cactus
Hunters. Yeah, and we're reviewing that for for the Cactus and second journal
that's coming out, which i'll you know, i'll talk about that too.
But anyway, so that there's an unintentional upside for ranches where people are leaving
the plants alone anyway that it looked to me like they're just everywhere, and
so there's this weird like conservation side effect of these private private property laws,
you know. But on the other hand, you know, there's no opportunity
to gather any data or do any actual studies or it's just if the culture
was just a little different if some of the landowners because I know landowners here
in South Texas that are cool, you know, that will let you on
that likes science, that they are very few and far between. They're certainly
not the majority by any means, but you know, it just seems like
the thing like, man, no one's gonna take you know, no one's
gonna take your land because you have rare plants on it. It's fucking Texas.
If anything, they'll just you know, it's more incentive for them,
the state to destroy it or tell you you know exactly, but you know,
at least like help people out. Like there's no reason, you know,
especially if you just because you've got different politics or whatever. Like,
come on, man, like we don't just don't talk about that shit,
like let us on to come look at plants, you know, like,
you know, let us come study this stuff. It's really cool. You
should be into it too. There's a cool story here. This isn't a
fucking greeny environmentalist thing. This is just studying the life on earth. You
know, you could even put like a religious twist on it. It's God's
you know, it's God's, God's creation wherever the fuck you want to say
it for people, you know what I mean? Come on, man,
why can't we get around this? You know? Well, you know,
coincidentally, I am hoping still to actually get like official permission to go back
to this exact same I was gonna ask, Yeah, did the dude do
you think the dude like softened up like you could order him? You know
what edible arrangements are you know the fruit basket. It's like a you order
him one of those or some fucking they like, right, they wanted to
eat. Let them meat. Get him some brisket exactly, you know,
pounds of like wagy beef for something. There's a good barbecue place in Marathon.
Be like, listen, sir, I'll buy you a fucking you know,
three pounds of brisket. Let me in your land. They go,
look at did it seem like that's an option at all or what? I'm
not sure, but you know, like I said that the attorney who I
was able to hire because of Mike Fowl, who who knew This person,
you know, is pretty well connected and knows like all the ranchers knows,
and and she herself owns a ranch that I visited, and just hundreds of
Aria Carpus fischeradus there Jesus, you know, like not dug up at all,
so many of them like on on her ranch. Unfortunately, her ranch
is not on the Novacu late that Lis. It's just forever in the limestone.
Man I could spend I let a free plant walk here in the Rio
Grande Valley on Sunday and towards the end of it. I felt like one
of those beady eyed graffiti kids is just looking at everything, you know,
not not making an eye cut someone's talking to him. He's not looking them
in the eye. He's looking around at all the other ship, trying to
fit, you know, see if there's anything cool around. Like just I
was, I just am like, I'm going into a wormhole here. I
came here like teach basically a free class. Now I'm fucking distracted and looking
at all this stuff. It's Powell. I mean, go ahead, sorry,
Oh go ahead say first, I was gonna say Powell. You know,
Powell told me that. Doctor Powell told me that the it's the culture
in Texas used to be so different, like thirty forty years ago. And
he said, I said, what changed? He said, yeah, the
Endangered Species actors. It became this thing where everyone's paranoid that the government's going
to come take their land, which again was probably hyped. You know,
all this divisive shit is divisive shit on either side of the political special degree
is hyped by social media, and it's got to be fucking foreign entities partially
responsible. I mean, I saw our Facebook shut down like five thousand fake
Chinese accounts, that we're all networked together, that we're posting all this divisive
both right left and right comments, you know, to try to stir ship
up totally. But to be fair, I think everyone is so miserable and
depressed right now in our culture anyway, you know, because we don't have
decent healthcare. Education sucks. You spend most of your life in these car
slums. You can't interact with people. It's lonely everything. Everybody's afraid of
everybody else, right, right, You just go into the fucking endless parking
lots, you know, spend most of your time in a car when you're
not at work, and then you come home, you watch Netflix or some
dumb shit just to sedate your mind. Crazy as shit, you know.
And I spent the entire summer traveling. I was able to get July and
August off from the postdoc that I'm doing, and I was camping a lot,
like twenty eight or well thirty days of camping altogether July and August,
and I just saw this kind of desperation out there, like even in national
forests or over all these beautiful, beautiful areas where people like the energy was
just really negative and a real drag up in Glacier National Post Dark. Well,
it's imagine. I mean, that's what I'm saying is if you're already
in a bad place and someone's putting all this shit in front of your the
screen, you're looking at it in front of your eyes, everything's terrible,
world of everything's going to shit. Fuck these people, look, they want
to destroy you. You know, these people are out to get All that
shit is just fucking poison, and it just that becomes your thing. I
mean, I've got friends who I love dearly, who's like they're unhappy in
their lives and they focus on like all the news events and external shit and
and like everything's fucked, and god, the world is so terrible. Man,
the world's always been fucking terrible. Now there's just eight billion people,
like people have been putting. Yeah, people have been fucking doing horrible shit
to each other for millennia. And it's not a justification, it's just the
truth. We're a fucking crazy species of primate. I'd like to hope at
some point our culture, you know, we become somewhat more enlightened. But
again, the only way you do that really is through culture. But I
just it's a really dark time now, and I think it's a lot of
it is like people you know, are intentionally pouring gas on the fire too,
and social media is a perfect venue to pour gas on the fire,
you know. So anyway, it's good, good to protect yourself from all
that. And I think botany, you know, botany is an actual very
you know, like healing like amazing, oh yeah, sort of oasis right
for me. I mean, I know, like you feel the same way
because I can pick it up from all the work that you do. But
there's nothing like just being out there, you know, looking at what's growing
on the land, checking out the floor of a particular area, whether you've
been there a thousand times or if it's your first time there, it's a
complete like bomb e a l m uh healing soothing Baum exactly. I agree.
You know, if there's a if there's balm in Gilliad, it's probably
botany. But anyway, for me, anyway, it's always been that way,
you know. Yeah, So the whole West Texas thing, like even
with all that, I I as soon as I got out of jail,
I just like went camping for like three nights. Memory, Yeah, put
the fucking phone down. Stop doom scrolling, stop just gating, cause I
see people doing that all the time. It's like, man, what are
you reading? Like what do you look at? I see people in line,
like what are you staring at on the phone? Ten ten dollars says
You're not staring at like good interesting shows. You're not reading fucking paper,
You're not reading a PDF version of a textbook. You're looking at stupid shit
on Instagram or some fucking moron twisting and twirling on TikTok or like and these
these apps are designed too, like I'll I'll log into something to like post
something or to look at a message. I got it, and then I
am like, ten minutes later, I'm like, nah if like shake my
like when I just got the striped looking at pictures of fucking some dude skydiving
or fucking you know whatever, like I just parachute doesn't open or right,
like God, this ship is infecious. It's so it's such a mind fuck
anyway, Okay, well, well that's why I got to get out,
Like I mean, you know, right after I got out of jail in
Bruster County and went over to Big Ben Ranch State Park, which you know
is just incredible, uh, you know, incredible botany over there. It's
so many epiphilantha oki and yeah, all kinds of crazy, you know,
beautiful plants like all over. So that was cool. I was good to
be able to go from jail to this like totally remote camp site. It's
good. You knew what to do for yourself too. You weren't like,
man, this sucks, I just want to go home now. You were
like, you know what, I'm going to keep it. I want to
keep it at this I gotta like, I gotta. Yeah, I really
feel like, you know, it's a saving grace for sure. And I
think that was what kind of attracted me to get the PhD in the first
place. Was some of the happiest times I had, you know, especially
toward the end and my teaching career, was that I would just take every
break that I had, like spring break, you know, winter break,
the summers, and I was just botanizing, like I was out looking for
cacti, you know, and taking pictures and going to I was already going
to Baja. I've been going down the air for a long time, and
and it sort of occurred to me suddenly you know, like, well maybe
you should just like try to do this full time rather than you know.
So that's kind of what got me into the PhD was an attempt right to
to go so like all in, yeah, yeah, on the work that
I had already been doing. That's all I was doing. I was working
for the railroad, and just like, man, I gotta get time off
and and it just be the job. I didn't, you know, I
didn't have any obligations yet, so I was It's like the job just became
a thing to enable me to go out there to these places that felt so
good. And then I was just like I want to know everything about them,
you know, same thing like it takes takes over, you know.
Yeah, yeah, the same way you find anything you love or you fall
in love with and you're like, I want to know everything about it.
I want to know everything, you know. Yeah, well, you know,
regarding Baja, like I didn't know when I started the PhD, I
had no intention. In fact, I sort of had the opposite. I
was resisting the idea of working with Mammalaria the genius. I see what you
do. You're doing a good segue here, sir, Thank you am I
okay, because I were talking about mammalari and coaching me and I yeah,
let's do it. Yeah, I mean, like people said to me,
there's a lot of questions right about the evolutionary relationships of these cacti, the
mammalaria, which Charlie Butterworth years ago two thousand and five at least might have
been earlier than that. He called that whole group of cacti the mammaloid clade,
right, and so that was like Mammalaria, Corythanta, Escobaria, Cachmea,
you know, I was ciphero, which is really a controversial, but
anyway, that was the mammaloid clade, this huge group of cactasy you know,
like probably I mean even conservatively right, people estimate like one hundred and
sixty four species or a taxa, which is almost ten percent of the whole
cactus family. And when he said this, I mean, did it turn
out that was actually a true clade like the DNA you know, look,
molecular ANA analysis showed it was indeed, all these things were pretty closely related
or what. Yeah, it's a really well supported clayde and that goes back
almost twenty years of DNA work, which is that like the leading edge of
doing molecular phylogy right is like twenty to twenty five years ago, especially kactas,
and he started, like he found he and Rob Wallace you know from
Ioway, they were working together and they found some weird things that they didn't
fully expect, which for example, the plashyphers nested you know, in that
clade, and that like the delineation among the genera the genuses was not as
strong as they expected. There was some really kind of interesting preliminary unexpected results
going on. Or is it what I mean now? Probably not introgression,
probably not ridiculate evolution, which is when new species arise through spontaneous hybrid events,
which happens probably all the time. In Opuntia, for example, like
the prickly pairs, they are often described as being promiscuous, you know,
but apparently not so much in the mammaloid clade. I think what they started
to uncover there about twenty years ago was that these taxa are all way more
closely related than people realized, and like in evolutionary terms, super recent divergence,
you know, like that they really haven't been separate all that long.
What are we talking? A million years? Two million five? Great question.
Apparently the mammaloid clade as a whole, Mammalaria Corthantha escobaria, the whole
deal diverged about seven and a half million years ago. Oh it's decent.
I mean, it's still some recent, but it's decent. Okay, How
old is the cactus Family's been estigated and estimated at what thirty million years somewhere
between? I would say thirty to thirty five million years? Yeah, which
again, like if I'm not mistaken, then I could be. I think
the andrewsperms that is the flowering plants, right that reproduce according to flowers and
seeds seed plants. I think they as a whole like group are one hundred
and eighty million years old. One hundred eighty. I know it's one twenty
five, but there's but there's you know, microfossils of pollen from before that.
But there's been those smoking gun from the Jurassic yet. Okay, so
one twenty five, so we'll go. I just will lose the other fifty
five million years and just say what's twenty fo Well, I'm sure they evolved
a little bit before that because again I think there's pollen, but I know
that this fossil flowers all right, So we say one twenty five hundred,
twenty five million years ago, so the cactus family is already comparatively like,
relatively recent at thirty to thirty five million years. Yeah, and it's it's
a remarkable, incredibly you know, diverse family of plants. If you think
about it, you have packy serious WEBERI like this gigantic organ pipe style cactus.
I got one in my yard. Yeah, I just wrapped it in
frost cloth last year when it got a little cold. But I mean it's
it's still it's not it doesn't have sixty stems, and it's not you know,
eighty feet wide yet. But one day and then you have Blasphelia litla
putana right, the little tient it's not even a centimeter across, and it's
flowering. And those grow in those rock cracks right in I think Argentina.
Those are high elevations. Yeah, so you have this like morphological diversity in
a relatively young plant family that's just astonishing. And then they're the adaptations are
incredible too. I mean the number of ecoregions even way down to like level
four ecoregions that host members of the Baptist family is huge. I mean,
it's like tons of ecoregions, right, So it's pretty cool. It's a
great family to study, as you know, I mean, you know,
there's a lot of plants that we're studying. But anyway, when you look
at the mameloid played diverging in that context right about seven seven point five million
years ago, that gives a little perspective on the kind of recent you know,
divergence. And then what we found was that the way things shake out,
the most like species rich within that group, especially like a Baja California,
seem to have diverged within the last five hundred thousand years to even as
recently as two hundred and fifty thousand years. We can't get more specific than
that because two hundred and fifty thousand years is like within the error limits of
the model that we use. You guys do molecular clock dating, like just
calibrated rate of mutation or what. Yeah, we used We used a pretty
common technique these days, which is to do a time calibrated molecular phylogeny with
a using Bayesian statistics. You know, and you run the model and it
runs forever, and then you get a sense of you know, where they're
Like if you look at a tree, the tree is basically these intersection points
and then branches, and the intersection points are called nodes, right, And
the time calibrated phylogeny estimates when those nodes like diverged into different species all just
based on the rate of you know, mutation of ATC and G. Yeah,
you know, you there's this prior work you have to do with your
data set where you find the best available model of nucleotide substitution for your particular
data because it varies, you know, there's different different rates of substitution,
and actually it varies across the nucleo types. And by substitution we mean one
of those DNA one of those four DNA letters. We're putting this out there
so anyone who wants to read more and doesn't know what that we're talking about
can can research it, you know, preferably in line at the DMV instead
of staring at their phone and doom scrolling the can look this shit up anyway.
The substitution you're talking about, the change up in the letters, right,
the rate of mutation in a genetic barcode. Yeah, so like nucleotide
what are called polymorphisms. So you have a column of data for all of
your species or you know, plants that you're looking at, and you might
have like let's say you have one hundred samples, one hundred different species,
and let's say eighty five of them in that column have the letter A,
but the other theme right have the letter C. So that's an example of
a polymorphism for that nucleotide. And if you have enough of those accumulated in
the right way and the Bayesian engine, you know, statistics kicks in and
it analyzes all this data. The hypothesis you spit out right is how these
sample as you've collected are related to each other, how they have descended.
It's like a family tree basically. Y Yeah, you know, you get
you get some kind of a tree, and you get an estimate of when
different events occurred, and you get you get a cool picture with Maloyd clade
too that is completely related to geography. Oh wow, So when you map
these things out, it's like an Aha moment. It makes sense exactly.
You take your taxa where they show up on the tree and their evolutionary relationships
with each other, and you map them on the actual Earth, and all
of a sudden you just see, like wow, one, you know,
a huge driving force right of the of the evolution of this group of cacti.
If only you could show guys like that rancher in West Texas, you
know, like, this is what we do, maybe a chance, So
fucking cool, this is what we do. We're understanding life. We're looking
back at, you know, at deep time, at what's happened by life.
It's so fucking cool. So okay, so what But anyway, the
short of this is that I want to talk about is that there were some
species in the genus Mammalaria that turned out actually be more closely related to the
genus Coachmea, which is a Baja species that looks notably different from Mammalaria's.
I mean, I've seen them in Baja there. They tend to look like
worms, like you know, or caterpillars draping off these cliffs near the ocean,
with these fish hook spines and prominent tubercles and fucking bright red flowers.
And it turns out plants like what like Mammalaria tetran sista is that now,
But Mammalaria brandigi is still Mammalaria, right, right, exactly, so because
it looks more you could see that, Yeah, you could see mammalary brand
it looks like hydride. It's a baa species bradig anyway, go yeah,
sorry, no, but it's you know, so, I don't know,
like it's one of these funny things, right because I think like ninety nine
point nine percent of humanity, the people on the planet right, don't really
care whether this group of plants right is in the genus Mammalaria or separated out
into an expanded circumscription of the genus coach a man like you know that we
get down to this level where people who are going to sit up and take
notice of this are already aware of the genus Mammalaria, Like they have their
favorite plants, their hobbyists or their researchers. They've been dealing with this genus.
And it's an interesting thing, you know, with this specialty consciousness in
our culture right now. On the other hand, you know, my like
I okay, so frankly, I didn't really care what genus they were in.
What I was interested in was this evolutionary story that that came revealed by
our molecular phylogeny. And what for me, that's what's fascinating about life on
Earth is the story of that life, Like how is it tied to the
landscape, how was it? How did it evolve over time? Where did
these species come from? Why are there so many of them? These kinds
of questions, you know, which I'm just endlessly fascinate. The taxonomy is
boring to me, like, and what's funny is that it's the one thing
that upsets people like the most is oh god, you know, they change
the names all the time. But for me, the goal as an evolutionary
biologist is really to reveal the evolutionary story and to have the names reflect the
evolutionary relationships. To the degree that we're able to do that totally, I
agree to. The only thing I agree with those some of these changes are
just due to taxonomic rules, you know, like like as happened with h
oh that dry mark is what was the fucking shooting star? I can't remember
the the primela and the shooting stars. It's like, well, we just
lumped them in, even though they're buzz pollinated notably different from the genus Primula
do to Kathion, because otherwise we'd have to create a whole bunch of other
you know, genera and blah blah blah. And it's like, okay,
well, but but I'm totally with you, like I want I want the
name changes. Like they just split up Miski's you know, uh to now
Tuma and I forget the other one. But it's like, fuck, yeah,
I do that because they're obviously if that's what the DNA shows, there's
a different story there. I want the story. I don't just want the
ease of remembering a name. I want the fucking context. I want the
story. I want to know. And that's what people seem to miss is
there's a story there. You know, I haven't read I haven't read the
Pilocifera paper yet, but it's a good paper. But you know, there's
some stuff I want to say about that. But yeah, but with nol
Tuma, for example, that was something that Britain and Rose did in nineteen
twenty eight. It was almost a hundred Yeah, that was one hundred years
ago, and they knew just by looking at certain like things you could observe
that weren't in the genome. Yeah, exactly, without looking at the genome.
I mean, yeah, I mean because phylogenetics used to be, as
you know, totally based on morphology, because that's all people had, right.
It took Carrie Molis taking acid and driving down Highway one to visualize how
PCR would work, right, exactly, thank god. But you know,
anyway, so I think we live like in really exciting times around understanding the
evolution of the flowering plants. You know, there's been incredible advances and great
insight into the way these groups of plants are related to each other. And
what's funny is like we have more data in many cases now than we've ever
had to support a lot of these changes. And you know, for example,
with the coachamea situation coming out of mammalaria, we had a data set
that was almost the entire chloroplast genome. It was ninety three thousand nucleotides long,
which prior studies of the mammaloid clade used individual markers from PCR that were
then concatenated, you know, put together as the data set. And I
think like Butterworth and Wallace, for example, had a total length of their
alignment of maybe five hundred nucleotides, maybe eight hundred somewhere in there, maybe
I'm remembering incorrectly. Data and we had ninety three thousand base pairs, you
know acgen he sequenced, and it was they were shallow reads like it's you
know, it's this genome skimming method that we used where you don't get a
lot of depth of the read, but get a huge data set. And
we you know, it took me four months to get that alignment, uh
worked out, like because it was so long. Like there's these statistical ways
of doing the alignment that are automated. Now you know that you throw your
sequences into this into an algorithm and it eventually takes a while spits out like
an automated alignment of your And by alignment, what I mean is all the
columns of the data. If you just imagine these columns of letters, right,
it's kind of like that movie the Matrix, like the software they show
on the screen right of the all these letters. An alignment attempts to create
a set of data where the the codes are aligned, basically, where where
the columns are aligned with each other in a in a way that reflects the
organization of the data itself. So like so so it would be like,
oh, look at this same region of the genome between species A and species
B. You've got uh gce T whatever code and like, oh, this
appears in a numer in the these same two species at the same point.
That must imply shared ancestry or that they're more closely related because there hasn't been
a mutation exactly. Yeah. Yeah, And that's the thing about DNA is
that the is that where the nuclear tide is is actually very important. The
location of the nuclear tide on the actual chloroplast genome is an important, you
know, or crucial part of the genetic code. It's not as if all
the letters are the same, but they're all jumbled up. They're actually in
what you know, a sequence. So when people talk about it a genetic
sequence, that's what they mean. These are actual This is the actual physical
location of that nuclear type that chemical like on the actual genetic material. It's
a spatial reality and really quick, you know, you know, you know,
what's mind blowing to me too, is that that the fact that we
can have computers do this stuff now that you don't actually there's to be a
human like you just pump the data into a computer and it boom, just
you know, gets it all together like that, rather than if you had
to actually go in there. Can you imagine how fucking tedious and brutal that
would be to do. I mean, the technology is like, it's only
going. It's gonna be cool to see where the technology for this stuff goes.
And it's also you know, people might not be interested in this innately,
or they might be like, what's interesting about it? The same Well,
look at what they do with humans. I mean, you can look
at human DNA and see the migration patterns that human populations have had over you
know, the last two million years. It's fucking really cool stuff. You
get the whole story there. There's a story, like a literal story there
of how people moved. So yeah, totally, you know, and it's
getting even I mean, it's getting even more amazing with people researching what's called
the transcriptome instead of the genome. You know, the genome is like a
static snapshot of the genetic sequence, but the transcriptome is dynamic through time and
switches on and off based on environmental factors. So you know, you can
do an actual experiment for example, where you have a cactus plant in low
light and you get the material you know, and you sequence it, and
then you have a cactus plant in very highlight, like the same species or
even the same plant moved to much stronger light. And then you can look
at how the genetic code has changed. So you'll get a different readout on
the trumpscriptome even on the same individual plant of the same species move from you
know, different environmental conditions. Yeah, so what you can begin to do
is get a bead on why the plants look different, like across their habitat
or you know, like because they'll punt you for example. I mean you
know how it is if they grow in the shade, they look different from
if they're in really strong life. You could almost call them two different species.
Oh yeah, and with low FAFROA that'd be cool to see. You
know how the production of wax of farmactly changes from plants growing in the shade
of a miskeat to plants growing out you know, sandwich between two big limestone
boulders in cool man that is such which part like which part or parts of
the genome are switching on and off the mescaline production. Yeah, there you
go. You get all the all the cactus bros on Instagram interest in it.
Exactly. You take my trich is serious and stress it out and it'll
produce more mescaline exactly. So that there's my to create mescaline by splicing this
gene fragment. So that might be I mean so that there might because you
hear that sometimes. I've I've heard some of these cactus ers be like,
oh yeah, if you're growing like drikes or payoty, you know, you
stress it out more. You want to stress it out before. Actually,
my friend Damon Tai even mentioned that to me. I never heard that before,
and he's not. I'm but but well, that's that's what the myth
is, because you get you know, it's and I whatever, I'm into
if that's what gets people into bodany, and I hope it eventually does they
stop just caring about the psychoactive plants. But it is an interesting thing,
and I guess there is kind of a rational theory there that the production of
these secondary metabolites might increase under times of stress, the same way that you
know, red pigments like and cacti beta aanes do and when they're stressed out
either by soil or excess light. You know, it's really cool stuff to
think about, you know. And if getting back to the mamaloid clade,
another segue, the you know, one of the key and we analyze it
as kind of an ancient morphological character. That is a something you can actually
see that's part of the shape or like character of the plant. You're looking
at it, You're like, oh, yeah, that's almost universal for the
CHAMEA concept that we came up with is those hook spines, and you know
a lot of groups of organisms developed the same character independently. That's our parallel
evolution or you know, convergent evolution. And usually those characters or not,
I don't know about usually, but often they have like a specific function of
some kind of that's why they evolve repeatedly. It's a you know, it's
a response to the environment that emerges as a result of selection. And so
one of the fascinating things that I would like to understand better with the coach
of Maya separated out because one of the things I tell people is, you
know, to remember what's a coach a maya and what's a mammalarian. Now,
one thing to keep in mind is does it have hook spines or not?
And then you have to combine that with is it to the west of
the distribution of the mammaloid played for the most part, is it Sonora and
Baja. So if you put the hook spines together with the biogeography, then
you're really safe calling it a coach a maya because that's you know. Now,
there are some exceptions as always, you know, organisms are are sneaky
things, and you know, like coach a Maya Haley eye, which was
like one of the original species that where there were five taxa in the original
genus that has straight spines. And then these guys, these uh lex Garcia
and some other cactus friends of mine described a brand new coach Maya from the
mainland of Mexico. Uh that that fits with the old concept of the genus
way down around Sinaloa. I believe, uh coach may and TOMASI I like
like the hardcore, like the core coach may You know, it has it
has the stem form and has the funnel form flowers, you know, the
weakly like coffee pot shaped spout shaped flowers that are obviously bird or look like
bird pollinated uh, coaching may and Tomasia. I that that new species came
out like two months before I had to put my dissertation in, so it
was like, all right, I got to include at least a footnote on
that. But but anyway, so there are straight spine plants and there are
some plants that went directly north that are also orphologically different from the hooks pine.
One of the one of the groups of catti that we found completely included
in the coach Maya plade that we recovered is Neoloidia. And I know it's
beautiful plane. Actually when it's flowering, people resist that pretty heavily. Like
our finding was that that's really a coach Maya coacha Canoidia. Uh. And
I think of our out of our results, that is probably the least accepted
like change that we made because it doesn't look you know that if you show
me the DNA, then I'm like, all right, man, I mean
they're right there. I mean they're totally there. And you know what's interesting
about that too is it's the same as what Butterworth and Wallace found almost twenty
years ago. But you know a lot of these guys in the early molecular
phylogeny work, including a woman named Bonnie Sue Krozier who got her PhD at
U T. Austin. I was going to say a name like Bonnie Sue
had ladies from Texas man Bonnie Sue and she published her whole dissertation was on
the Mameloy clay and she made the informal recommendation of moving a whole bunch of
taxa from Mammal area to coach A Maya Wow. And that was That was
also two thousand and five. That's cool. They saw it earlier. She
never published for some reason, and I've never been able to reach her or
find her. I've been trying. Yeah, I've been trying to find Bonnie
Sue Crazier for for like six years now. And I you know, the
last did you try one of those ten dollars internet things you could sign up?
You know people used to find their old old Facebook or high school friends,
you know, right, I mean I've been stocking I mean his scientists
for six years. I should come and Bonnie Sue. Bonnie Sue, if
you're out there, Peter Breslin's looking for you. Please you can reach out
to me or him directly. I'll put you in touch with him. Wait
really quick, really quick. Okay, So Coach of Miya formerly Mammalaria tetran
sistra. Uh, that's a b pollinated flower. It's pink, but it
certainly looks be pollinated. So yeah, general yeah or generalists whatever. But
but either way, it looks much of him from the flowers of Coacha Maya.
But everything else. I mean, when I heard that happened, I
was like, oh, yeah, that's totally a coach Maya. The hook
spines, the fucking it's kind of close to Baja totally. And that was
actually, yeah, that was maybe we were I was just in Arizona.
I brought up here. It made me think he was like, oh shit,
he Breslin did that? No ship, I should reach out to him.
So, so, what what happened there? Is that a? Do
you think that's an older species or did the generalist pollination evolve outside? Because
there's no rules in evolution, right, Shit can she can evolve independently,
Shit can evolve again, it can go back, it can revert, you
know, to Wales, went back to the ocean from the from the from
the land, you know. So there's no rules buddy, that a lot
of stuff can happen here, right, it gets complicated, So we're yeah,
but that's a great question. Actually, you know, if you look
at our time calibrated phylogeny that we did, you got, uh, coach
Maya tetran sistra, this somewhat distant taxon that's called coach A Maya gween Zawiyana.
Uh, that's a Mexican. It's like I think like San Luis put
to sea or Chihuahuan, you know, desert endemic, and uh, these
guys diverged a long time ago within the coach of Maya clade and they didn't
go west much. Although these are species then, right exactly. So sometimes,
yeah, sometimes you get a sense from your time calibrated tree of taxa
that adapted you know, a long time ago, like three to five million
years ago, and they've just sort of been sitting there since then, you
know what I mean, Like there's successful enough that there hasn't been a lot
of selection pressure to change their morphology or their you know, biogeography very much.
And then you get this explosion of species much more recently in the bah
California environment, which you know you could get like five or six PhDs out
of out of just looking at endemism in the cactus family, right, endemism
and you know, the biogeographical restriction of an organism is what an endemic is
so amazing, man, Yeah, five minimal whole cactus five or six million.
They've had five or six Every plant there has had five or six million
years to diverge from mainland Mexico's that's when because the San Andreas runs right through
right between Baja and mainland Mexico. Yeah. Yeah, the current you know,
the current uh historical geographical theory, right, it is that the peninsula
started to split about five million years ago and coincidentally or like conveniently, almost
too conveniently. I'm a little uncomfortable with this result. But that also is
when the Baja California coach Maya and Mammalaria because they're also real, like you
said, Mammonalaria brandigii, they show a rapids divergence in speciation series of events
about five million years ago. So they just started to take off after that.
As soon as the peninsula started to drift away. Would you call it?
Would you call it a radiation or is it not yeah, yeah,
and it's it's a total it's a remarkable radiation actually, and I think it's
still happening. That's the other thing is we're with the cactus family in the
north especially, Uh, you get the impression that you're witnessing evolution, like
in real time, that the cactus family in many general, the cylinder Puntia
puntia, the kind of serious uh you know, the enameloid clay, that
it's still diversifying and radiating, you know, and you're good. I can't.
I can't love this family anymore, man, I can't check criminal.
So I'm running out of space for tattoos. My fucking brain it's just stoked
with They're just so fucking cool. They're just such testimony. I mean,
it's amazing variations on a stem like that's all it is. It's just it's
just variations on a fucking stem. And and they've been so successful, and
they've occupied every niche in North and South America. They've got all kinds of
different fucking pollinators. I don't know if any mammal pollinators yet. I'm sure
there's a case out there somewhere, probably in South America. Probably they're just
but anyway. So, but but why the hummingbird pollination, which I'm a
bird pollinated. I'm just gonna call it what it is. I mean,
I know I was. I'm surprised there's no one's done pollination studies in Coachamea.
Those are those are fucking totally bird pollinatd flowers. There's no other way
around it. They're narrow, they're elongated. You look at like Schlamburger aka
the Christmas cactus, bird pollinated flowers. I had one blooming in my just
you know, on my front yard in Oakland. It was the bird perfect
size for a birdhead bilatterally symmetrical. Uh you know, why do you think
that took off? Like? When was there a great question? Was there
a bunch of hummingbird diversity five million years ago in that area or what?
Nobody knows. A friend of mine from Asu, Rick Simpson, was a
hummingbird specialist. He did a bunch of hummingbird stuff for his peach. It's
not the same Rick Simpson that came up with the with the wheed oil?
Is it? Because I had someone at once and I was high for like
a day and a half, I hit the fly. It was this ship
called Rick Simpson Oil. It's fucking real. Look it up, anyone listening.
I just forgot sorry, I just saw a niche. I just saw
an area to get this joke in there. But it's fucking that shit was
brutal. I someone said take a little dime size. They said take a
little bit, So I took a little bit. They meant like a grain
of rice size. I took a fucking dime size. I was. It
was terrible. I was watching that video with the lady, you know,
the You're too high lady, really sweet, really sweet video, sweet old
grammar. You're not gonna die, You're just too high, you know that.
But it was terrible. I was calling I was calling my GP because
I had held in shirts at the time. Look, man, I know
I'm gonna be fine, but the how to fuck do I? How do
I get this to stop? You know, any tricks? He's like fifty
years old, He's probably never smoked weed in his life. I'm like,
it's gotta let the time pass. But I like, what am I gonna
do? Lemon water does that help? Like the stuff stay hydrated and you
know, lie down? Okay, sorry, sorry, okay, So Rick
Simpson but anyway, Rick, it's a different Rick Simpson. But yeah,
hummingbird evolution in the Baja California area, that's a great question. I'm not
entirely sure of that literature. I haven't really dug into that yet, but
I do know, or I suspect I should say, should be a little
more cautious there, that the whole Coachman clade, not just the core taxa
that have those funnel shaped flowers, but the whole clade uh seems to have
floral significant floral differences from the mammalaria, you know. Yeah, I mean
that's the study that John Redmond and I should probably do. John. You
know, he's at San Diego Natural History Museum. I know John, I
love, you know, and he he's really interested in this relationship between the
morphological characters right of clades and that old sort of alpha taxonomist you know,
if you can't see it and you can't diagnose it, then it's it doesn't
matter what the mole kyles say kind of thing, you know what I mean?
Hey, can I pause really quick? I ran out of p jars
and I got to go again. So yeah, okay, one a second.
Well, I'll be right back, Yeah, no problem, hung up
the phone by is he really ping and bottles on his own podcast? Your
god, damn. I'm doing it for the I'm doing it for them so
people could get science, good science education out there. Okay, So what
were we talking about again in general? Said yeah, yeah, and the
idea that the coach of maya clade uh separate from the malaria, actually has
some measurable like floral differences across the whole claate, not just the obvious like
huntingbird polymed flowers of the of the core coaching mana that were the five taxa
that we originally described, but the whole clay. And I think the stigma
loobes are longer, like for for folks who don't understand, like flower anatomy,
you have the style that has stigmas attached to it and you can kind
of see those. They're like little fingers that stick out and they're the things
that capture the pollen. Uh. And so we're seeing some patterns that seem,
you know, like worth analyzing a little more formally, of a longer
style than the usual mammalaria and bigger stigma lobes for a lot of these taxa,
right, I think for I think that's important to a degree, but
it's you know, there's like I said, there's no rules. Stuff can
go back, stuff that the environment selects. Five Well, I guess if
it's only, however, many hund of thousands or millions of years of selection
that that does something, they can bring flowers back to like a normal totally.
That's part of the problem, like with with folks who've done groups of
plants, you know, and tried to understand evolution before the advent of molecular
stuff, is they would choose characters that may or may not have been really
informative from from an evolutionary point of view, because you you can have the
appearance of something really significant, but if you really look at like the evolutionary
history, it's it's just a minor character. Actually it's not a yeah man,
I mean that's the thing like thank God for again, thank God for
Carrie Mullis taking acid on Highway one. Fuck right, fucking mad man,
because I mean I've seen you know, I did that video on astropight them.
It's perfect example of how much you can fuck around with with morphological plasticity
in a single species. I've seen I've seen, you know, these Japanese
growers and tie growers breed astrophy them that look like fucking lofafra. And they've
done that in fifty years. Like you're telling me if humans can do that
by selected britty in fifty years, you're telling me, you know, why
couldn't quote unquote the I was gonna say nature, but why couldn't the environment
do that in five million? Man? It totally, there's totally. I
mean there's there's Yeah, you need that DNA. That's the smoking gun.
That's the real shit. That's what you know, that's what it is to
be all end all. But I'm still not ready to accept philisiffery. Well
I'll talk about that now, actually if you want, Yeah, let's talk
is that just the taxonomic rule thing is that just like well these are nested
in, so we've got to call it. Otherwise we'd have to split up
everything else. Because if it is, that's stupid. I'm not going to
do it. But if it's you know, go ahead, Well it's it's
two, it's like two things at once. I mean, first of all,
Daniel Sanchez and others, you know, I forget all of his co
authors on this one. It's in Fido keys. You can look it up,
you know, pelisipher escobar. All you have to do is just search
for, uh like, phylogeny of Escobaria and Pela cipher. And we're talking
for anyone listening. We're talking about Escobaria and a couple other genera being lumped
in with Pelas cipher, which formerly was only a few species, which looked
totally different from most from Escobaria from what was and from and actually from almost
all cat guys. Yeah, is weird, really weird cool plants. Yeah,
and quite quite rare too, uh, I guess, And I think
pretty threatened in habitat as far as I understand. Oh yeah, sul Ross
got a box of them that customs caught that were totally shipped. They're collected
and being shipped to China or Eastern Europe or something. Nauseating humph But anyway,
Yeah, so it's been a long standing question since, you know,
Corey Fantha was split into Corey Fantha and Escobaria. Like people, some people
think Escobari is legit. Other people are like, no, you know,
they're all just Corey Fantha. I think the American botanists in general have leaned
towards just Correy Fantha, like Corey fanth Vivipora, you know, Corey phantham
Minima, Corya Esteri, and I think UK and maybe European botanists have gone
for Escobaria and Corey Fantha has two separate genera and there were some supposedly some
characters that frankly I don't even remember what they are, that separate these two
groups of plants, right, so Sanchez at all. In last year twenty
twenty two, you know, they published a molecular phylogeny, but it included
morphology as well, which I always really appreciate. You know that they have
both in their tree, like it's a they call a total evidence tree because
it has molecules and morphology. But anyway, they did find support for a
clade that is that you know, roughly congrument with the old idea of Escobaria
separate from Coreythanta. But the problem is that it contains pelasiphera uh and and
Pelia cipher has priority, and in in naming it was it was named about
oh god, I think like twenty years before ooh okay, So Pelis cipher
is technically in Escobaria. Since most of the species in that clade are Escobaria,
it should kind of be in Escobara. But because of the rules of
priority. Yeah, these fucking rules are so stupid. Go ahead, you
know what what No, it's I agree actually, And actually we ran up
against that with Coachameha too. I had wanted to name come up with a
new name because Coachumeya is so well known as a little mini genus of like
five very distinct taxa, which it is a super well supported clade by the
way. I mean, they really are very closely related to each other,
which is no big surprise. But but anyway, you can't really just come
up with a new name because the clade contains that previously describe genus coach Maya.
So so we you know, that's where Coacha, Canoidia and Coachameya,
like Tetra and Sistra come from. And a lot of people object right to
those combinations, like coach a grammy, I because that thing doesn't look like
ora, you know, but it's those hook spines though, Like that's another
one I saw. Yeah, but some of these floral modifications too. If
you ever see the stilopes on coach me and grahamy there really quick. When
we're done with this, can you send me that that Sanchez article isn't available
on scihub yet so I can't steal it. Can you send it to me
when we're happy. Phylogenetic relationships in Kora Panta and Implications on Pelaciferan Escobaria Sanchez,
twenty twenty two. Sanchez at all So so okay, So I thought
it was open access. It's you know what, maybe that it might be
that might be like it's not on site of I don't know, I didn't
Yeah, let me look. Yeah, I'm just you know, I'm trying
to do a bunch of stuff here at the same time. And problem.
Yeah, it's never mind, it's all on Oops. I think it's right
there. Oh and I got some lovely photos. I love these fucking these
research papers. They get the the collage photos so really quick. So so
Pela ciphra, what what seems like happened is Pela ciphra actually is its own
clade, but it evolved out of Escobaria. Is that sound correct? It's
not like it's not like one Pella cipher's over here in the phylogeny and the
others over here, like there's still sister to each other. They're still next
to each other, right, but they're nested within Escobara, So it could.
I mean, you know, fuck, I wish the rules a love
for it, because that's still technically it's own unique thing, you know.
It's not like it was polyphyletic. No, but you can, I mean,
you can apply to the committee to conserve a name, and so it
might be an interesting project to apply to conserve the name Escobaria, and that
they don't always approve that, but sometimes, you know, for a name
that's been in circulation for a long time, and I think Escobari has been
around for maybe eighty years or something, you know, that they do approve
that, you know, and and so maybe that maybe that'll happen down the
line. But but but either way, I mean, I'm still gonna call
a pill of cipher because it is still a good clade and it's still you
know, it's I mean, I try to follow the rules, you know.
Yeah, well you can always even though I got arrested, right,
No, I don't know a you know what, I think that's pretty fucking
I think that's pretty impressive. You got arrest. I'll tell you what you
got. You got a couple other chevrons on your fucking h lapels compared this,
I want all the good botanists to spend some time in jail. It's
good. I mean, not like that, you know what I mean.
I mean, just like an overnight, a harmless thing. It's funny.
I go to jail with them. It's fun, you know, go to
jail with some friends were I remember I was in a fucking prison cell,
a jail cell in Brooklyn once because I didn't do shit. I I some
fucking idiot that I was on the roof with. There was a roof party.
Threw a forty at a cop car from the roof and they the cops.
The cops just came up and arrested all of us and it was like
one of those like eighties sitcoms, you know where they got like all all
your friends in a jail cell. I had the piss and there wasn't a
where they wouldn't let me out. I was so bummed. It was kind
of funny though. It was like and like the black enamel paint job on
the fucking jails. It was fucking hilarious, but anyway. So okay,
so I'm looking at this so Cora, phantom, macro Marius on this phylogeny.
Where does that Where does that come out? Because that's what I'm it
comes out in Pela cipher. So that is technically now supposed to be Peli
cipher it too. Macromraus. Yeah, I'm not going to do that,
but it's good to know what the rules are while you're breaking them. At
least, you know. I always know what the rules are. Just that's
just good life advice here. So I will say I will say as a
qualifying you know, secret, this inside information that you will not hear any
anywhere else is like top secret cactus evolution info. That uh that a coworker
and I Lucas Majore who was also on my HD committee, who's out at
Florida I had on a podcast a year ago. Yeah. Cool. So
we're working on, uh, this huge sample of the mammaloid clade, and
we're looking at the Caribbean biogeography of some of the mammaloids, like how the
hell did they get dispersed to where they're at, Like what used to be
called Escobaria cube beensis for example, which is a cute, you know,
Greater Antilles endemic that only grows on serpentine, by the way, and it
turns out it's most closely related to freaking I was sad for a Missouriensis,
believe it or not. This is in Cuba. This is on Cuban serpentine.
Yeah, and it's it's pretty rare, you know, it's a pretty
rare species. So anyway, part of what we're finding repeatedly is some different
results from what Sanchez had all got, where apparently it depends on what you
want to call it, corfanto or at scobaria or whatever is actually not monophyletic,
and so down the line, the concept of pelicipher that you know,
that's in Sanchez at All in twenty twenty two might need some tweaking or revision,
and the clade structure actually looks pretty different. The main difference between the
two studies is that Sanchez at All we're still using concatenated markers from PCR,
and their DNA data set is a little bit not as you know, it's
not as big as a chloroplast genome. They weren't looking at a broad enough
section of DNA, so we're looking, We're looking at the whole floroplast genome.
Wow, man, do you think, I mean, how far away
are we from full genome sequencing being much easier than it currently is, because
that'll be the final stay. Then you're looking at everything. You're not leaving
anything out. You got the whole fucking barcode. You can hold them next
to each other. You know, that's a great question. You know,
there are some idealistic evolutionary biologists who think we'll go beyond the Linnean system entirely
and we'll just have Filo codes. Yeah. I think that ship is corny.
I think it's goofy, but I get it. But you got to
have some ship that's, like I said, idealistic, right, Yeah,
Well it also is so niche, like it's it's just going to be you
know, it's only a few, only a handful of people are gonna be
able. It's just going to be more elitist and kind of gate cap that
seems like this is at least a Latin name. It can be intimidating in
some people, but people can still learn it, you know, So schmuck,
who's just right? Yeah, Yeah, a Filo code you can't put
on a label, but I think anyway, Sorry, I yeah, I
kind of hate that ship, but I get it. I mean I think
it could be included with you know, like an flora with the Latin name,
but you can't move away from the Latin names. It's just it's so
it works so well and it's so accessible. But getting back to your question,
Yeah about you know, whole genome analysis like genomics rather than phylogenetics like
philo genomics. I think we're very close for a whole lot of Andrew spurns,
Like, you know, the the data is increasing, I would say
exponentially. It's following that rule of you know, increase in data. That's
like an exponential rule that somebody came up with a while back, and you
know the boom, Yeah, you get a couple of the it takes a
minute to get going, but then when it does, then it's just yeah,
takes off. I mean that's like you know, Alan Rockefeller, my
the friend of mine who's my collegeist. He was carrying a fucking I think
he had a thermocycler in the trunk of his car. Like they were doing
this ship for mushrooms. Just don the fucking field what yeah. In the
field, they're like, fuck it, let's do it. Let's you know,
he just lives for it. I'm like, I want I want that
to be I know with plants it's a little harder, but I want that
to be a reality. Like I'd love to have something and that you know,
oh I collected this stuff. Let's go back to where we're camped out,
you know, car camped and just throw it in there. We'll make
some food while it's you know, sequencing getting you know, printed out.
Awesome. Can you imagine it's like, oh, look at that and you
just upload it to gen bank and now it's publicly accessible data and be amazed.
Well, and that's what's cool, you know actually is that uh pretty
early on in all this work, the decision was made just collectively, I
guess that that all of these sequences are going to be publicly available, like
you know, uh you can. It's incredible right now. I mean you
can actually go up and just download like sequences like for astrophite, for example,
there's there was a study uh you know study uh back and there's all
this DNA info on astrophy them up on uh you know, publicly available gen
bank or whatever, and you can just download it and do the analysis yourself.
Uh, you know, the software is free, the data is free.
It's pretty amazing. So where would you recommend? So say, there's
like a uh, you know, a team, there's someone in her twenties
who's doom scrolling on TikTok and they want to learn about this shit instead.
What is you got a good recommendation for? Like a book? My book?
My recommendation book is always that for introduction to this stuff is Carl Zimmer's
Evolution Textbook, which you can download on lib gen for free. You got
one, Yeah, you got a recommendation. That's a great resource. I
don't really have a recommendation. I haven't really thought about it that way,
even though I've taught in high school like for years. That's a great question,
you know. Now you have to be inspired to go dig in a
little bit and put a bibliography. People always ask me too, They're like,
they're like, well, I want to I want to learn about geology.
What's the good what's the good thing to read? Should I get a
roadside geology? Now? Fuck that? Don't don't bother with that. There's
gonna be shit in there. You don't understand. You want you want to
grasp the basic concepts. You know, buy or or get on lib gen
just a basic geology textbook within the last ten years, learn like the three
different rock types. Of those three rock types, igneous has then broken up
into two other rock types, uh, you know, and then you're just
expanding on those theories plate tectonics, learn that concept, what the the oceanic
versus continental crust, deduction zones, all that shit, different kinds of fun.
Just these basic concepts. That's really there's only a handful of them,
and that's what all of geology is built on. And and learn that those
you know, those the textbooks. Seriously, that's what I was doing when
I was, you know, working for the Rare and I was just reading.
I was carrying fucking textbooks in my my railroad grip, like my railroad
bag, you know, with all the fucking track warrants and all the other
ship we had to have. And you know, anyone can do this.
There's you don't need to doom scroll. You don't need to you know,
fill your head with poisons so well, and you know it's there's so much
open source software and data now that once you start digging and exploring. There's
so much spatial data. There's so much weather and climate data from Noah,
you know, and from all these other organizations, and all you have to
do is just get up there and download it and start playing around with it.
You can you can put R, the whole program R, you know,
on your laptop, which our toten R is a program for statistical analysis
that it's been under it's been under development for maybe thirty thirty five years or
so, and it's completely open source and you can do anything on there.
You can do molecular phylogenies, you can do all kinds of incredible you know,
statistical analysis of data, and you can do incredible figures and represent the
data visually, and there's animated figures you could do, and all kinds of
web plug ins stuff you can run on your website that you can actually develop
and in the software where it's really cool and you know, learning curves a
little bit steep. It's not exactly user friendly, but once you sort of
get in there and get used to it. And I mean a lot of
younger people these days are way more they have way more facility with coding than
we ever will because they you know, they got up in there early,
and they got used to command line stuff where they got used to, you
know, doing certain things that we just you know, we weren't raised that
way. Well, okay, really quick, because I got this fucking guy
supposed to come by and look at that. I'm supposed to get my house
painted because the fucking heat down here just beats the piss out of it.
I got only got fifteen twenty minutes. If this fucker comes back before that,
I told him twelve fifteen. If he comes before that, I'm not
answering the fucking door, and I don't care. We're gonna gave then I'm
gonna go with a different parent anyway. Okay, So, but really quick,
we didn't talk about pedio cactus. You got ten minutes to talk about
pedio cactus because it's a cool fucking genus high desert northern Arizona, southern Utah,
very cryptic, beautiful fucking plants, and very hard for some of the
cactus nerds to grow in cultivation as well too, right, which is all
the more protect the habitat, all the more ambises on that. Let's talk
about pedeo kegs because he did some really cool work with that. Yeah,
I love that genus. It's a really weird group of cacti. I mean,
you know, cacti can be weird, and then pedos are one of
those groups that's like super weird, you know. And I say that in
reference to their morphology, the way they look, the spines, the biogeography
where they're distributed. You know, they're probably relatively recent radiation post last Glacial
Maximum because a lot of the habitat that they grow in very close to where
the glaciers were, you know, at the last maximum, and as those
glaciers retreated, I think there was a lot of radiation speciation. These pediocactus
up in the Great Basin Area in northern Arizona, the Navajoan Desert as it's
called, you know, the red doll, that red sand up in the
those cool, beautiful, fucking incredible landscapes, man like psychedelic, psychedelic,
credible and just yeah, yeah, And similar adaptations to the genus Sclero Cactus,
especially the northern you know taxa in Sclero cactus. And yet they're totally
like they seem like a completely different divergence in the family, you know,
there's a lot of them are really cold tolerant too, right. I mean
it's very frigid in some of these places where they grow, these high deserts
of Arizona and Utah, et cetera. Yeah, I mean it's like twenty
below. And one of the cool adaptations that some of the tax that have,
and maybe all of them actually is it a few different things. First
of all, they have a really short growing season in habitats. So if
you're thinking about for example, peneocactus people Zianus, which is up around Wholebrook,
Arizona and weird red sand, you know, very wind blown with those
strange little pebbles everywhere. You know, it's like this really weird habitat.
These guys come up sort of out of the sand in the spring, and
I would say maximum they have a flowering and growing cycle of about five weeks.
Okay, you got five weeks a year to do your thing. Yeah,
And then they just what they do is they pull down. They retract
usually actually below the soil level, like under the sand. As soon as
the temps hit about ninety or you know, high eighties to low nineties,
some kind of hormone response or something and they shrink down, pull down below
the surface of the soil, not to be seen again until the next the
following April. So they're they're actually they actually completely go under most of them
from what I can tell, because you'll go you'll have GPS, you know
their locations. Even if you have high like GNSS, you know the centimeter
accuracy. You won't see a single planet. But they're there. You can,
like you go back the next field season when it's growing conditions and they're
actually bad. They are. Yeah, God, that's fucking insane. That's
wild. I wondered about that with some of the sclero cactus. Yeah,
like Sclerocactus nisis because I you know, that was one I went back to
the same spot and I was like, they're fucking gone. I was like,
motherfucker's poachers. And then and then I talked to my friend Janelle,
who studies that species and works than a lot, and she's like, no,
they just they disappear. They're still probably still there. They're just gone.
That's are they just hidden. That's great. It's one of the adaptations.
And you see with the spines like pedio cactus, people's giannis has these
weird like spongy, thick, bulbous sort of spines you know, that are
sort of the trademark of the plant thick eyes any arm to the subspecies,
they have the really cool spines. And one of the things that I would
love to understand better is if that's an adaptation to hale, because these these
habitats, you know, across northern Arizona especially regularly get really severe hail in
the summer, and you know, if you've gardened or anything in an area
that gets hal it can just completely destroy the vegetation, you know. I
mean, hale is a very destructive thing that happened to some of the cac
died down here once. Ken King was telling me about that in South Texas
actually once some of the he said, of hailstorm just murked a bunch of
shit. I mean they were covered, but they look like shit for a
year or two. You know, Yeah, they just get they get you
know, decimated. And so I think those spongy, weird sort of spines
might be a hale defense and I would love to look at that system.
So the hail has been selecting for form in cactus exactly exactly again, but
hale's part of the environment. That's all environment. Yeah, that's a amazing
So there's I remember I've seen pedio cactus stylurai on gypsum in Washington County.
Some of them got destroyed for a housing subdivision that probably you know, will
be obsolete in thirty years. That's a nice thought. Fucking us man,
Washington County. They're so delusional in that entire state about water. It is
just fucking laughable pedious. Oh yeah, there is, yeah, yeah,
but at least in Tucson people are a little bit more aware, you know,
but a little bit phoenix as fucked pedio Cactus simpsonii, that's the more
common one, right that things incredible pedio Cactus dys spinyi, which I saw
on San Rafael Swell in southern Utah. Thats gym man. I've never seen
that one habitat. I went looking for it a few times, but I
think, you know, again, it's one of these really cryptic things that
goes underground for a lot of the year and you just have to be there
at the right time, you know. I had good GPS and everything,
and I couldn't find it. Yeah, the photos I have only like the
top. You know, if you're imagining like a globe a sphere, like
the top twenty percent of the globe is above ground, the rest is.
Yeah, and I got I didn't know, no pictures of it in flower,
but I got pictures of it in fruit, which was cool. So
well, that's awesome they have they have really cool fruit, Like all the
pedio caac that I have, this that really cool, uh, sort of
balloon shaped fruit where the top pops off and I guess they say it's the
hissing fruit, which is one of the main characteristics that you know, it
kind of splits open. Oh, most of the pedios have that short range
dispersal strategy where they don't really get dispersed very far the seed, you know,
except maybe by water. But you know, another really cool thing about
this genus is you can start out You've probably done this circuit before, but
you can start out at Navajo Bridge on eighty nine a north of Flagstaff,
Arizona, and drive from Navajo Bridge to Jacob Lake or Fredonia, Arizona.
Just go up the Kaibab Plateau just about to Utah Cannap. You know,
you're you're just south of the Utah border and within that drive there's thick Eyeseni
arm brady I, Aridini silurai. So four species. It's a seventy it's
a seventy mile drive, but it's the habitat for four federally listed in danger.
They've had a radiation there. Then in the high deserts of the exactly
southwest, that's fucking it's a great trip, you know, and they're hard
to find, like it. Oh really, I went out, Yeah,
I went out to help Mark Baker and Michelle Cloud Hughes on a survey they
were doing for the BLM of Fake Isaami Orum out that way, and we
were, you know, we were it was three of us expert well,
two experts in me U field botanists, and we were only finding like thirty
and forty a day, uh, you know, total survey around areas where
they were known to occur. Uh. But it was a cool trip because
we were there when they were flowering, so it was awesome. And then
there's there's another tax on that I really want to see that's way up in
Washington and Oregon that Nigru's bin us and those are wild and they grow on
like black lava. Uh you neocactus species way out separate from the range of
the rest of the genus up there in eastern Oregon and Washington. And I've
never seen those in habitat either. I would love to see that. I
wonder I've never seen that one. I think my friend Matt has seen it
before. Plants are cool, cool man. Plants are just softy for for
I mean, and they get you in everything else, you know, meteorology,
chemistry, geology, I just you know, anyway, I got it.
Yeah, there you go. Jail. They get you into jail sometimes,
I take it. That's fine on mind going. I'm not too good
for the jail. I'm not too good for the jail. I'll go to
the jail. I'm not. I'm not doctor, doctor Bresling and jail.
You're too good for you out there listening. Do good for the jail,
huh, I don't think you are, no fuck Get into jail. Go
go do you love Bonnie, you love plants? Go do go do some
time in it. You know the time for it anyway, So okay,
on our next episode we'll cover cylindro punch. You do they fuck the cylinder
punch a bang? Or is it all clonal? And that's coming up next.
Peter President. Thank you so much your time. Thanks for having me.
Yeah, I owe you a burrito or a pizza sometime. Man.
You know, Hey, I'll come down to South Texas and see you sometimes.
Oh yeah, please do. You can crash up my place whenever.
You're welcome here anytime. Just before March because it gets a little hot after
that, understood. Okay, all right, take care of men. Thanks
again, you two. Bye, okay bye, all right, everybody else,
have a good rest of the Exampy