1
00:00:01,040 --> 00:00:05,400
Hello, Welcome to the Crime Pace, but Bonni doesn't podcast. I haven't

2
00:00:05,440 --> 00:00:08,279
recorded an intro for one of these
podcasts in a while, but I was

3
00:00:08,359 --> 00:00:14,119
so blown away. I was so
touched by today's conversation that I felt compelled

4
00:00:14,119 --> 00:00:17,960
to do it. And it's also
important to remind people of some of the

5
00:00:18,000 --> 00:00:23,160
concepts in Brazil, which is the
subject of today's podcast. Today's podcast is

6
00:00:23,199 --> 00:00:30,199
in interview slash conversation with Daniella Zappi, who is a researcher and botanist who's

7
00:00:30,199 --> 00:00:33,119
done an immense amount of work.
I mean, you look her up on

8
00:00:33,159 --> 00:00:40,159
Google's scholar you get like forty papers, probably more in Brazil and specialized in

9
00:00:40,200 --> 00:00:45,719
the cactus family, and more so
in the concept of biogeography and how plant

10
00:00:45,719 --> 00:00:53,280
communities change and plant community species composition
and just looking at the bigger picture.

11
00:00:53,320 --> 00:00:58,399
It's really really cool stuff, and
it's something I think that so many of

12
00:00:58,479 --> 00:01:02,960
us would gain from having an ion
and kind of keeping, you know,

13
00:01:03,039 --> 00:01:06,840
in the back of our minds.
I always notice these species occurring together,

14
00:01:07,000 --> 00:01:11,239
or this ecological phenomenon with this species, and it may not be, it

15
00:01:11,239 --> 00:01:14,439
may not be able to put my
finger right on it, but I noticed

16
00:01:14,439 --> 00:01:19,400
this, I'll make note of it
just being more observant. Brazil is probably

17
00:01:19,439 --> 00:01:23,280
one of the most diverse places.
It's the most diverse place I've ever been

18
00:01:23,319 --> 00:01:26,840
to. I mean, it's a
tie between that in South Africa, the

19
00:01:27,439 --> 00:01:30,239
habitat, the biomes. I mean, I was just in Mina seriais and

20
00:01:30,319 --> 00:01:34,640
Rio Degenerio state didn't hit the Amazon
at all. But you see this thing

21
00:01:34,680 --> 00:01:40,079
that occurs in Brazil very commonly,
this idea of an ecological island, an

22
00:01:40,159 --> 00:01:44,799
idea of you know, like,
for instance, a rocky arid microsite surrounded

23
00:01:44,799 --> 00:01:49,680
by an ocean of dry deciduous forest, and that forest would outcompete any of

24
00:01:49,680 --> 00:01:55,040
the things that live on this rocky
arid microsite. But because this rocky arid

25
00:01:55,040 --> 00:01:57,640
microsite, which might just be a
rock out cropping the size of a football

26
00:01:57,680 --> 00:02:02,239
field, because there's no soil there, you have to have a different set

27
00:02:02,280 --> 00:02:06,879
of strategies if you're a plant,
to be able to cut it on this

28
00:02:07,000 --> 00:02:09,479
site as opposed in that dry force, so that that dry forest, dry

29
00:02:09,520 --> 00:02:15,599
deciduous forest wouldn't be able to grow
on this rocky site. And that's what

30
00:02:15,719 --> 00:02:22,159
enables certain plants like many cacti and
romeliads and some of these cool drought adapted

31
00:02:22,719 --> 00:02:29,120
aeroids, and the list goes on
Siagaris, palms, Leganocarpus, Sedges,

32
00:02:29,639 --> 00:02:32,199
et cetera to grow here. Uber
Mania is a great case of that.

33
00:02:32,680 --> 00:02:39,080
Uber Mania is a cactus genus.
And this which originally got me wanting to

34
00:02:39,120 --> 00:02:46,240
interview Daniello, was this new species
of uber Mania that she described, was

35
00:02:46,280 --> 00:02:51,599
discovered by two researchers colleagues of hers, and then that she helped describe,

36
00:02:52,680 --> 00:02:55,439
and it was it's weird for the
genus because it doesn't produce spines, so

37
00:02:55,479 --> 00:03:00,680
it's evolutionarily lost spines. It doesn't
have any spines and aerials and it kind

38
00:03:00,680 --> 00:03:07,039
of grows subterranean, half subterranean beneath
this translucent sand, which is another result

39
00:03:07,120 --> 00:03:13,400
of the geology here. Brazil,
like Western Australia, has very old the

40
00:03:13,520 --> 00:03:16,039
very old rocks, very old nutrient
poor rocks, and that's what composes a

41
00:03:16,039 --> 00:03:19,800
lot of the soil there. Not
all of Brazil, but for a large

42
00:03:20,159 --> 00:03:24,199
part of it. It's quartz,
sandstone, metamorphos sandstone, very old.

43
00:03:24,360 --> 00:03:30,280
Hasn't been volcanic activity there in a
long time, volcanic volcanic vulcanism kind of

44
00:03:30,319 --> 00:03:34,599
you know, spews out the newer
geologic material. More nutrients, builds a

45
00:03:34,639 --> 00:03:38,560
healthier soil as it weathers and breaks
down by the elements, not the case

46
00:03:38,759 --> 00:03:45,560
with quartzitic sandstone or very old granite
in a case of Western Australia, et

47
00:03:45,639 --> 00:03:50,080
cetera. And so when you get
these harsher sites, you get a richer

48
00:03:50,639 --> 00:03:55,960
plant community. Generally, you get
a richer set of diversity because that stress

49
00:03:57,080 --> 00:04:01,919
is what induces speciation, that stress
in the geology. And so I was

50
00:04:02,039 --> 00:04:04,800
just I mean, Brazil is one
of the few places I literally felt like

51
00:04:04,800 --> 00:04:08,319
I was going to have a panic
attack, Like I was so overwhelmed.

52
00:04:08,639 --> 00:04:12,360
I didn't know what to take photos
of. I wanted to document everything.

53
00:04:12,840 --> 00:04:16,639
I still have unidentified observations on my
I naturalists their plants. I may never

54
00:04:16,720 --> 00:04:20,079
know what they are, probably a
few species that are new to science.

55
00:04:20,199 --> 00:04:23,800
In fact, I know there's one
or two species that are new to science.

56
00:04:24,600 --> 00:04:29,240
I was having to contact researchers and
bodanists from all the universities, you

57
00:04:29,279 --> 00:04:32,560
know, from Sapaulo, from Rio
wherever, just to figure out what the

58
00:04:32,600 --> 00:04:35,600
hell I was looking at, begging
them to go on my inn at and

59
00:04:35,639 --> 00:04:40,240
look at these foot or emailing them
photos. In some cases, there's a

60
00:04:40,319 --> 00:04:44,199
number of families that are incredibly species
rich. Aerio calls, which is in

61
00:04:44,240 --> 00:04:47,000
the order of grasses, you know, we get them here in the southeast

62
00:04:47,040 --> 00:04:49,759
of the United States. They're kind
of like, it's like a cute little

63
00:04:49,759 --> 00:04:53,279
button. Yeah, they got a
flower head that looks like a button,

64
00:04:53,360 --> 00:04:57,240
kind of like a little daisy,
no relation to daisies, but it's a

65
00:04:57,279 --> 00:05:00,439
flower head composed of many individual tiny
flowers, you know, whatever. They

66
00:05:00,480 --> 00:05:03,920
grow in swamps. They I don't
really pay much attention to them down there.

67
00:05:03,959 --> 00:05:06,439
They're insane. Some of them are
shrubs. They look there's just a

68
00:05:06,519 --> 00:05:14,199
diversity of forms. New species being
described. I saw a genus called Comanthra

69
00:05:15,000 --> 00:05:18,279
on some of these sand plains that
occur and dry desciduous forest another case of

70
00:05:18,319 --> 00:05:24,120
ecological islands. I saw Comanthra species
there that I think is new. I

71
00:05:24,160 --> 00:05:27,759
sent it to a Comanthra specialist.
They said, this species isn't even known.

72
00:05:28,319 --> 00:05:30,439
If this is the species we're thinking
of, it's not even known to

73
00:05:30,560 --> 00:05:34,759
occur in the region that you were
in. It grows a few hundred kilometers

74
00:05:34,800 --> 00:05:39,319
to the northeast. If this isn't
that species, it's a new one.

75
00:05:40,160 --> 00:05:44,120
I posted on the Instagram a few
posts back. It looks totally insane.

76
00:05:44,160 --> 00:05:47,079
It's got influorescence, p it's got
peduncles that are like a foot long.

77
00:05:47,120 --> 00:05:50,079
The whole plant is like a foot
or too tall. It's got a little

78
00:05:51,160 --> 00:05:55,319
tough it looks like a cushion plant. And then it sends up this inflorescence

79
00:05:55,319 --> 00:05:59,120
that looks like a pom pom on
a foot long stalk. And it grows

80
00:05:59,199 --> 00:06:02,399
on these sand plains with a number
of other just insane species, I mean,

81
00:06:02,519 --> 00:06:06,680
just wild wild plants, like really
bizarre. How does this evolve?

82
00:06:08,120 --> 00:06:10,959
What causes it? How do you
know? So just the great mystery.

83
00:06:12,279 --> 00:06:15,319
The whole plant itself is in enigma, you know, Philcoxia. This this

84
00:06:15,680 --> 00:06:20,199
subterranean leave, it's got subterranean leaves, grows on this white, translucent sand,

85
00:06:20,560 --> 00:06:25,480
and it's carnivorous, the only carnivorous
genus in the family Plantagena seed,

86
00:06:25,560 --> 00:06:29,240
a family of pencil I. Could
go on, and then of course there's

87
00:06:29,720 --> 00:06:33,000
cool cacti everywhere. This is in
minas you rice, uh wonder, Lichia

88
00:06:33,079 --> 00:06:36,920
mirabolis. It's a member of the
sunflower family. That's a giant tree that

89
00:06:36,959 --> 00:06:42,240
looks like a torch it's got the
it's drought dry dry, excuse me,

90
00:06:42,399 --> 00:06:46,519
drought deciduous. So when we saw
it, it was in the dry winter

91
00:06:46,639 --> 00:06:49,040
season, which is still hot as
hell, and it just looks like a

92
00:06:49,040 --> 00:06:54,000
fifteen foot tall white torch. It's
got white bark. The flower buds are

93
00:06:54,040 --> 00:06:57,560
covered in this white wool. Looks
like a you know, like a torch.

94
00:06:57,720 --> 00:07:00,040
It's not on fire, it's just
like a it's just wild man,

95
00:07:00,079 --> 00:07:04,800
and it's bat pollinated. Anyway,
there's so many cool plants on there,

96
00:07:04,839 --> 00:07:11,120
so and I kept hearing Donielle's name
whenever I was researching these things and seeing

97
00:07:11,160 --> 00:07:13,040
it in papers, and I said, when I just reached out to her,

98
00:07:13,120 --> 00:07:17,600
Thankfully she was willing to come on
the podcast, and I was so

99
00:07:17,720 --> 00:07:23,160
grateful to talk with her because Brazil
is probably one of the coolest places I've

100
00:07:23,199 --> 00:07:28,639
been to botanically. So I'll just
cut right to the chase and let you

101
00:07:28,720 --> 00:07:32,000
listen to this hour and a half
long conversation with Donielle Zappi. We talk

102
00:07:32,079 --> 00:07:41,000
about a lot of cactus species,
we talk about ecological phenomena, we talk

103
00:07:41,000 --> 00:07:45,519
about plant communities, we talk about
different biomes, we talk about that cool

104
00:07:45,560 --> 00:07:50,199
moonflower cactus subject of the movie Margaret
and a Moonflower, which is like an

105
00:07:50,480 --> 00:07:55,639
epiphytic cactus that grows. It's just
it's just weird, man. It's just

106
00:07:55,680 --> 00:08:00,800
there's so many weird plants, and
how it's most closely related to this tall

107
00:08:00,879 --> 00:08:05,319
columnar cactus that grows in tree cactus
that grows in Bolivia. It's one of

108
00:08:05,360 --> 00:08:09,560
those. Brazil is one of those
places that just makes you fall in love

109
00:08:11,079 --> 00:08:15,839
even harder with Earth's plant life and
and just really drags you out of the

110
00:08:16,959 --> 00:08:20,720
depressing pit of despair that you know. Places like the I thirty five Corridor

111
00:08:20,759 --> 00:08:24,199
in Texas puts you in, you
know, when you're surrounded by parking lots

112
00:08:24,240 --> 00:08:28,480
and the death cult and strip malls
and just the you know, streets with

113
00:08:28,519 --> 00:08:33,799
no sidewalks. And it's really hard
to for anyone not in the United States,

114
00:08:33,879 --> 00:08:41,039
it's really hard to articulate just how
depressing and lifeless many of the landscapes

115
00:08:41,080 --> 00:08:46,559
we've created in this country have become
these human dominated landscapes. They slowly kill

116
00:08:46,639 --> 00:08:50,840
me inside, they kill my soul. Places like the Sahato or the Katinga

117
00:08:52,039 --> 00:08:56,000
or or the compost Repestor's habitat in
Brazil are the antidote to that. They

118
00:08:56,279 --> 00:09:01,039
bring me life. So anyway,
whatever further Ado enjoy this hour and a

119
00:09:01,039 --> 00:09:09,440
half podcast with Daniella Zappi, researcher
botanist worked at the University of Brasilia.

120
00:09:09,200 --> 00:09:15,600
UH taught at the University of Brasilia
and has co authored and written an immense

121
00:09:15,639 --> 00:09:20,399
amount of papers on really really cool
subjects. We talk about the ironstone formations

122
00:09:20,440 --> 00:09:24,440
to talk about a deafic endemism.
That's another It's another thing I need to

123
00:09:24,440 --> 00:09:30,399
add to my list of uh,
you know, examples of of depic endemism,

124
00:09:30,759 --> 00:09:33,360
i e. A plant being restricted
to a certain soil type or a

125
00:09:33,360 --> 00:09:37,919
certain soil type, unusual soil type
inducing speciation in a plant. So anyway,

126
00:09:39,879 --> 00:09:43,399
UH enjoyed this, enjoyed us conversation. Have a good rest of your

127
00:09:43,600 --> 00:09:46,000
day, evening, morning, whatever, go fix it up by I'm gonna

128
00:09:46,000 --> 00:09:50,480
show you what it's like. Well, I'm not gonna show you uns apart

129
00:09:50,519 --> 00:09:56,000
in section. You know, on
the outside, the soft a goat nice

130
00:09:56,000 --> 00:10:00,879
soft liberal barriers and they just started
tagging each other and clause come out.

131
00:10:01,240 --> 00:10:03,759
You know, I've seen a couple
of night things in that room before.

132
00:10:03,120 --> 00:10:07,519
Get a bunch of hippies club any
charts to humorphology. We're starting to get

133
00:10:07,799 --> 00:10:13,159
the other chief of Africatist Night for
eighties. They're about to go bad,

134
00:10:13,200 --> 00:10:18,000
but they're not heading well. Okay, welcome to the Crime Payers A Bodany

135
00:10:18,080 --> 00:10:24,840
doesn't podcast today. I'm so I'm
so enthralled to be speaking with this person

136
00:10:24,360 --> 00:10:30,200
today. We're having a Danielle A. Zappi, who's a botanist and researcher

137
00:10:30,840 --> 00:10:37,279
from the University of Brasilia in Brazil
who studies cactasi and a number of the

138
00:10:37,679 --> 00:10:41,559
really just one of the most hyper
diverse places in the world next to South

139
00:10:41,600 --> 00:10:46,759
Africa. I mean, it's just
mind blowing and I guess we'll just launch

140
00:10:46,840 --> 00:10:50,360
right into it. So, Danielle, how you doing. I'm fine,

141
00:10:50,559 --> 00:10:54,840
I'm fine, I'm good. I'm
good. You know, just getting ready

142
00:10:54,879 --> 00:10:58,120
for the hurricane that's coming to South
Texas, uh, which is not good

143
00:10:58,200 --> 00:11:01,960
for a lot of cat they cacti. That's worrying. Yeah, yeah,

144
00:11:03,120 --> 00:11:07,480
but uh, anyway, I guess
the spot I want to start too is

145
00:11:07,960 --> 00:11:13,120
when most people who aren't from Brazil
or haven't spent much time there, think

146
00:11:13,200 --> 00:11:16,879
of Brazil, you know, think
of plants. When they think of Brazil.

147
00:11:16,879 --> 00:11:22,519
They think of the Amazon, but
there's a multitude of different biomes and

148
00:11:22,559 --> 00:11:28,000
habitat types there, especially in Minas
your Ice, which is the one of

149
00:11:28,039 --> 00:11:31,240
the states of Brazil, and it's
probably I mean, I was there last

150
00:11:31,320 --> 00:11:35,960
July and it just blew my mind
and I wanted to talk with you because

151
00:11:37,559 --> 00:11:41,039
your name kept coming up in research
papers I was reading, and among bodanists

152
00:11:41,039 --> 00:11:45,480
I would talk to there about some
of the plants, and so I guess

153
00:11:45,759 --> 00:11:48,759
going into this, let's just start
off, what are some of the There's

154
00:11:48,759 --> 00:11:54,279
a number of different habitat types.
Right, there's katinga sajado compost for pestres.

155
00:11:54,200 --> 00:12:01,159
What else am I missing out on? We have seek major biomes.

156
00:12:01,200 --> 00:12:05,200
We call them biomes here in Brazil. It makes more sense first because there

157
00:12:05,240 --> 00:12:11,120
are divisions of phitto geography that sometimes
don't agree with all the diversity and we

158
00:12:11,240 --> 00:12:13,799
have. So the biomes that we
have in Brazil are of course the Amazon

159
00:12:13,919 --> 00:12:20,279
Forest, then the Atlantic Rainforest,
which is a coastal strip of forest that

160
00:12:20,360 --> 00:12:24,279
runs from the north and northeastern Straits
all the way to Hugens do So,

161
00:12:24,480 --> 00:12:28,440
which is the one that's for the
south. And then we have the Sejado,

162
00:12:28,759 --> 00:12:33,840
which is I'm not sure it's my
favorite, maybe my second favorite,

163
00:12:33,679 --> 00:12:41,639
which is a savannah that is very
seasonal and is in the inner part of

164
00:12:41,720 --> 00:12:46,039
the country from Minnigeras going to the
west. We also have the Catinga,

165
00:12:46,120 --> 00:12:50,679
which is the dry forest, which
is exactly the biome where I inhabit nowadays

166
00:12:50,720 --> 00:12:56,240
I live in the Kachina. And
we also have the pumper which is that

167
00:12:56,519 --> 00:13:01,240
grassland that Brazil shares with Argentina and
Uruguay. And the pantan now, which

168
00:13:01,320 --> 00:13:07,720
is the biggest How do they explain
river basin flooded. It's not really a

169
00:13:07,840 --> 00:13:15,039
forest, It's got a multitude of
environments, but it's the pantana is very

170
00:13:15,039 --> 00:13:18,320
important, especially for a wildlife.
And when people visit they get to see

171
00:13:18,360 --> 00:13:24,000
the pantan now when they go to
the Egoso Falls for example, or south

172
00:13:24,039 --> 00:13:28,559
from that. The interesting thing is
there there are six major ones, and

173
00:13:28,759 --> 00:13:37,679
everybody keeps mentioned in the Kampo pastry, which crops up mostly in bay Yea

174
00:13:37,120 --> 00:13:41,639
and Minagueries, which are two states
that are side to side. There are

175
00:13:41,039 --> 00:13:46,360
one in the north which is by
Yea inserted in the Katina Byome, and

176
00:13:46,480 --> 00:13:52,799
they one to the south which is
Minageries which has a Kampo pastry bordering between

177
00:13:52,799 --> 00:13:58,440
the Atlantic Forests and the Sajadi,
both very rich environments. The thing is

178
00:13:58,480 --> 00:14:03,360
that we have extensive biomes and then
we have islands of different vegetations and different

179
00:14:03,480 --> 00:14:09,000
vegetation types. It's very difficult sometimes. Were we were traveling last week and

180
00:14:09,080 --> 00:14:15,440
we were between the Atlantic Forests,
there's Ajad to the west and then the

181
00:14:15,600 --> 00:14:20,960
Catinga to the north, and we
were in this zone of ekotonos vegetation where

182
00:14:20,000 --> 00:14:24,120
you have elements of all of them, and it gets very complicated to define.

183
00:14:24,240 --> 00:14:28,480
So you can imagine that those biomes, they have strips of vegetation where

184
00:14:28,480 --> 00:14:31,559
they encounter where you can be,
you know, jumping from one to the

185
00:14:31,679 --> 00:14:35,960
other, or you can have a
mixture of species from one living in the

186
00:14:37,039 --> 00:14:39,000
other. Yeah, it was that. Yeah, No, that was great.

187
00:14:39,120 --> 00:14:41,720
That was great. I was going
to say, yeah, because they

188
00:14:41,720 --> 00:14:45,279
don't it's not concrete. They all
blend into each other. And then we've

189
00:14:45,320 --> 00:14:48,639
also got to talk about the geology
that underlies most of Brazil, or a

190
00:14:48,720 --> 00:14:56,080
large part of it exactly, which
is exactly very important. Metamorphoused sandstone generally

191
00:14:56,120 --> 00:15:00,960
like hort site, right, it's
very nutrient poor in some places. Yes,

192
00:15:01,360 --> 00:15:05,039
the funny thing is that's not how
you say instinctive. But we have

193
00:15:05,399 --> 00:15:11,360
more richness of species where the soils
are poor. If you go to agronomine

194
00:15:11,000 --> 00:15:15,000
college or something like that, you
get told that to have good plants you

195
00:15:15,080 --> 00:15:18,879
have to put a lot of nitrogen
and all that. But in our case,

196
00:15:18,200 --> 00:15:24,519
through evolution and those very complicated geomorphological
situations, we have a lot of

197
00:15:24,639 --> 00:15:31,679
diversity that's very very adapted to living
in those nutrients for soils. So lots

198
00:15:31,720 --> 00:15:37,679
of species, lots of microspecies,
lots of carto species, and other interesting

199
00:15:37,799 --> 00:15:43,039
families like the same. The everlasting
flowers, for example, that are very

200
00:15:43,480 --> 00:15:46,960
very nice in Minigation must have come
across them. What do you say was

201
00:15:46,000 --> 00:15:54,000
when the velocies they ever lasting flowers? Oh god, yeah, God,

202
00:15:54,080 --> 00:15:58,279
that's insane, because yeah, they
look like pompous things. Yeah, and

203
00:15:58,360 --> 00:16:00,720
they're they're in polis, right,
they're in the order of grasses and here

204
00:16:02,919 --> 00:16:07,679
in the south grasses and yeah,
they're they're insane. They're totally insane.

205
00:16:07,720 --> 00:16:12,600
That was I mean, everywhere I
went in Minas my mind was blown.

206
00:16:12,720 --> 00:16:18,000
I just I was overwhelmed. It
was like a constant dopamine flood and serotonin

207
00:16:18,039 --> 00:16:22,240
flood of just being amazed and in
love with the plants, the aero cooles

208
00:16:22,480 --> 00:16:26,879
here and there. Most I think
they're most diverse in the American southeast.

209
00:16:26,200 --> 00:16:29,720
But they're just these little things like, yeah, they're cute, you know

210
00:16:30,279 --> 00:16:36,399
whatever. Yeah, there's swamp plants. You go to there, there's you

211
00:16:36,519 --> 00:16:40,480
go to Brazil, there's there's dryland
aerocoles. Some of them are four or

212
00:16:40,480 --> 00:16:44,960
five feet tall. Some of them
are shrubs. It's just some are meini

213
00:16:45,120 --> 00:16:47,679
and they grow in the mouth of
covers as well. Oh yeah, some

214
00:16:47,799 --> 00:16:52,320
of these amazing yes, some of
these little compact pin cushions. And I

215
00:16:52,519 --> 00:16:56,159
did do you know much? I
mean, I I was having so much

216
00:16:56,200 --> 00:16:59,960
trouble identifying some of the plants down
there because I could, I could get

217
00:17:00,120 --> 00:17:03,799
it to family, but then it
would be a completely different genus, I

218
00:17:03,840 --> 00:17:07,200
mean, And that was part that's
part of the richness of having an eye

219
00:17:07,920 --> 00:17:11,759
for plant taxonomy and plant identifications.
You go to a new place and you

220
00:17:11,839 --> 00:17:15,240
can tell somethings a certain family,
maybe even a certain genus, but it's

221
00:17:15,319 --> 00:17:19,400
a wildly different form from anything that
you're used to back home. And just

222
00:17:19,519 --> 00:17:22,680
that sense of amazement then you try
to figure out how did it adapt?

223
00:17:23,039 --> 00:17:26,480
Why is it growing like this?
How did it what caused it to grow

224
00:17:26,559 --> 00:17:30,279
this way? Why is this have
wooly leaves? The species I'm used to

225
00:17:30,359 --> 00:17:33,960
back home doesn't have wooly leaves.
Why is it growing in this monocollus habit

226
00:17:33,000 --> 00:17:37,480
where it's leafless for the bottom eighty
percent of the stem and it looks like

227
00:17:37,880 --> 00:17:41,920
this Doctor SEUs style plant. I
mean, that was a really weird thing

228
00:17:41,000 --> 00:17:44,480
I encountered down there too. What
do you call that? I mean that

229
00:17:45,200 --> 00:17:51,119
habit that so many different plants take
on on those sandstone, that corson sandstone.

230
00:17:52,079 --> 00:17:56,680
Yeah, you cannot really say one
habit. You will have to think

231
00:17:56,799 --> 00:18:00,960
in the way of their adaptations.
Despite the fact that you and there in

232
00:18:00,039 --> 00:18:03,799
July, you probably think it's very
dry, but it's not very dry throughout

233
00:18:03,839 --> 00:18:08,599
the year. So you have a
regime of rains that come in October all

234
00:18:08,680 --> 00:18:14,079
the way to March April, and
in the y because it's high we have

235
00:18:14,160 --> 00:18:18,599
the Atlantic weather influencing it. So
the clouds from the Atlantic will reach as

236
00:18:18,640 --> 00:18:23,440
far in as miniature eyes in the
highlands, and you have a lot of

237
00:18:23,720 --> 00:18:27,559
water and a lot of mist,
and those plants. A lot of their

238
00:18:27,599 --> 00:18:33,400
adaptations are to capture dismissed a bit
like the cactipe from Chili. They don't

239
00:18:33,440 --> 00:18:37,119
get any precipitation, but they are
they're prepared to capture dismissed. So you

240
00:18:37,200 --> 00:18:44,920
have a lot of those hairs stell
It has. You have geometric shape that

241
00:18:45,039 --> 00:18:48,680
you said that like doctor Zuyah,
they can be in spirals and all that

242
00:18:49,000 --> 00:18:53,480
is to do with rosettes that will
accumulate water in the in the cup a

243
00:18:53,519 --> 00:18:59,240
bit like bromelias. But some of
the recordase you have similar behaviors. You

244
00:18:59,319 --> 00:19:04,279
also have a lot of variation in
terms of the indumentum of plants, and

245
00:19:04,400 --> 00:19:10,960
you also have insectivorous plants like rosers
and incredible things like that. So the

246
00:19:11,119 --> 00:19:15,039
diversity is amazing. And the other
thing is like sometimes I studied plants for

247
00:19:15,519 --> 00:19:19,599
more than thirty years now, and
you have to have another life if you're

248
00:19:19,599 --> 00:19:26,079
going to enter a family like aero
colasy, because the size of the number

249
00:19:26,119 --> 00:19:29,480
of species, you know, you
need another life for the ieroclasy, for

250
00:19:29,599 --> 00:19:33,759
the daisy family, for theraci and
another life also guess for the for the

251
00:19:33,880 --> 00:19:37,680
poesy, for the grasses, because
those are very specialized. So what we

252
00:19:37,839 --> 00:19:42,319
try to do is to team up
generalist people who will be able to spot

253
00:19:42,440 --> 00:19:48,880
things in one in one location and
do more or less a good job of

254
00:19:48,039 --> 00:19:53,359
collecting generally. But we also have
to bring in people who have the speciality

255
00:19:53,519 --> 00:19:59,480
much more in their training, so
people who study poeesy, people who study

256
00:20:00,039 --> 00:20:04,160
ay or or legumes or asy.
We do need those people because once they

257
00:20:04,160 --> 00:20:10,279
are joined joining the expedition, you
get a multiplication of the number of collections

258
00:20:10,559 --> 00:20:14,920
of those families that you get if
you just went yourself there. Okay,

259
00:20:15,039 --> 00:20:21,319
one daisy, next daisy, fourth
days you close the press and say enough

260
00:20:21,400 --> 00:20:26,160
of you because it's just too many, far too many. But it's because

261
00:20:26,240 --> 00:20:30,759
we have the biggest diversity of plants
in the world. We forget to make

262
00:20:30,880 --> 00:20:33,640
a big deal of this. You
know, our neighbors in South America they

263
00:20:33,680 --> 00:20:37,160
get a bit cross because every time
a Brazilian walks in the room, they

264
00:20:37,240 --> 00:20:44,440
have the biggest days and the largest
death and it can be quite irritating.

265
00:20:44,559 --> 00:20:48,440
But humbly I can say that we
did database, then we did count them,

266
00:20:48,519 --> 00:20:52,480
and in terms of recorded species,
we're still in the lead in the

267
00:20:52,799 --> 00:21:00,680
worldwide for the number of plants.
The state you went to is the top

268
00:21:00,759 --> 00:21:04,759
state more than South Africa. You
went to the state with more diversity of

269
00:21:04,839 --> 00:21:10,599
plants recorded. I keep saying recorded
because we have the problem of unrecording in

270
00:21:10,759 --> 00:21:14,319
the Amazon. So if you look
at the size, I don't know how

271
00:21:14,400 --> 00:21:18,039
much you like numbers. I quite
like numbers when I have to explain this

272
00:21:18,160 --> 00:21:22,599
to my students. But in terms
of size, the Atlantic strip that that

273
00:21:22,839 --> 00:21:29,000
forest I explained about has more species
in that small biome that doesn't make more

274
00:21:29,079 --> 00:21:33,799
than twenty percent of the territory.
It has more species than what is recorded

275
00:21:33,880 --> 00:21:37,160
in Seja Dou or in the Amazon
forest. The Seja Do and the Amazon

276
00:21:37,279 --> 00:21:42,119
Forest. Despite of the difference of
size, the smaller in area than the

277
00:21:42,160 --> 00:21:47,119
Amazon forest, the Seja Do has
gotten as many plant species as the Amazon

278
00:21:47,200 --> 00:21:53,359
forest recorded so far. So we're
about thirty eight thousand, forty thousands of

279
00:21:53,559 --> 00:22:00,920
plants plants species recorded, but we
still have unrecorded diversity. They we went

280
00:22:00,039 --> 00:22:06,160
and discovered the new or bill mania. We're getting of that we're gonna I'm

281
00:22:06,160 --> 00:22:07,799
gonna ask you about that, don't
worry. That was like top of my

282
00:22:07,960 --> 00:22:11,759
That was the paper that finally pushed
me over the top, and I got

283
00:22:11,839 --> 00:22:15,440
to reach out to this lady.
This is this is insane, the diversity

284
00:22:15,519 --> 00:22:18,319
down there. I mean it was
I was. I felt like I was

285
00:22:18,359 --> 00:22:22,480
about to get heart palpitations because I
was just so overwhelmed. I was standing

286
00:22:22,559 --> 00:22:26,079
in a Campos repastorous habitat with my
friend Dylan. He was looking for some

287
00:22:26,240 --> 00:22:32,720
rare bromeliad and I'm just sitting there
looking at plants that they're asked racey when

288
00:22:32,759 --> 00:22:36,480
I see the flower, but they
look if there weren't flowering that I wouldn't

289
00:22:36,519 --> 00:22:40,319
think they were asked racy at all. They've got this this aroquoid leave thing

290
00:22:40,440 --> 00:22:44,240
going on. These you know,
no, these sessile leaves. Uh,

291
00:22:44,359 --> 00:22:47,440
they're leafless for the bottom eighty percent
of the stem. It's just a single

292
00:22:47,519 --> 00:22:49,599
stem coming up. They get about
six feet tall. They're kind of blowing

293
00:22:51,279 --> 00:22:55,599
gently in the breeze. Uh you
know they start to branch maybe you know,

294
00:22:55,720 --> 00:22:59,279
three quarters of the way up the
stem. They've got these arochoid leaves.

295
00:22:59,759 --> 00:23:03,039
You know, they are just sasile. No petioles are lickno for us.

296
00:23:03,119 --> 00:23:06,759
I guess what you think. Yeah, I mean, like not for

297
00:23:06,920 --> 00:23:11,519
us and everything. Then there were
also have other giant days. It's like

298
00:23:11,119 --> 00:23:18,720
like like that's called god that was
Yeah, a fifteen foot tall, dry

299
00:23:18,799 --> 00:23:23,720
deciduous white torch. It just looks
like a white torch. And what pollinates

300
00:23:23,720 --> 00:23:29,920
that is it bats? It's a
large large I think it's a lot.

301
00:23:30,039 --> 00:23:32,759
For a lot of the things we
do not know yet, we don't have

302
00:23:33,279 --> 00:23:36,799
We have hints, isn't it.
We can tell the syndrome. But for

303
00:23:36,920 --> 00:23:40,720
a lot of the plants in Brazil, we still don't have the empirical demonstration

304
00:23:40,880 --> 00:23:45,799
of what is pollinating them. Yeah, and you're sometimes we have we have

305
00:23:45,279 --> 00:23:52,960
different things, different pollination pollinators visiting
the same plant. We have nectar robberies.

306
00:23:52,039 --> 00:23:56,079
So there's quite a lot to investigate. You can just you know,

307
00:23:56,160 --> 00:24:00,119
say, oh, that looks like
it smells bad, so it's probably at

308
00:24:00,200 --> 00:24:02,599
pollinated flower. Well, I don't
know. We have to sit there in

309
00:24:02,720 --> 00:24:06,599
the dark. Yeah, yeah,
yeah, I mean wait, but you're

310
00:24:06,640 --> 00:24:08,240
right though, I mean the specialist
thing. I didn't even think of that,

311
00:24:08,319 --> 00:24:12,519
because there's some of these families,
christ some of these tribes in asta

312
00:24:12,640 --> 00:24:18,519
Aci are so hyper diverse that you
need someone that's dedicated, just like aero

313
00:24:18,599 --> 00:24:22,880
caoles. You need someone that's dedicated
just aerocoles. I kept trying to find

314
00:24:22,920 --> 00:24:26,119
somebody by the way when I was
down there. Well, there are people

315
00:24:26,240 --> 00:24:32,839
here, Yeah, there are many
people. This fabi Is is a friend

316
00:24:32,880 --> 00:24:37,240
of mine, Fabiani in Giamanchina.
She's an expert of Ercolese. There's another

317
00:24:37,559 --> 00:24:42,920
lady expert in Herio cole in University
of Brazilia. At the moment she just

318
00:24:44,200 --> 00:24:48,279
started her tenure as a lecture.
And my supervisor, of course is an

319
00:24:48,319 --> 00:24:53,400
Aerocolese expert doctor and Juliac the mother
of most of the botanist in Brazil.

320
00:24:55,079 --> 00:24:59,000
Yeah. And the thing that's cool, there's so many I mean, it's

321
00:24:59,079 --> 00:25:03,240
not just speach is that you can
talk about like individuals. There's there's so

322
00:25:03,359 --> 00:25:08,839
many ecological phenomena that you can talk
about that are just exactly so much going

323
00:25:08,920 --> 00:25:14,240
on at the same time. Because
you see the camp Who Pesty that they

324
00:25:14,319 --> 00:25:19,839
have been published as a as a
biogeography geographical province. Now, so we

325
00:25:19,960 --> 00:25:23,079
have a southern one that is where
you were, and the northern one,

326
00:25:23,440 --> 00:25:27,519
which is the one where I am. Now, so those those provinces of

327
00:25:27,680 --> 00:25:33,640
camp who Pastry, I don't like
to say to use the name Kampo Hoo

328
00:25:33,720 --> 00:25:37,839
pestry for a vegetation type because for
me, it is a mosaic. So

329
00:25:37,960 --> 00:25:41,880
it starts when you're reaching the part
of the highland at above nine hundred one

330
00:25:41,920 --> 00:25:48,640
thousand meters altitude above sea level,
and then you can have an echo ton

331
00:25:48,160 --> 00:25:53,039
or a transition between a forest or
between Sejado and this camp hoo pest.

332
00:25:53,160 --> 00:25:59,920
And then as you move higher you
may have also gallery forests that are really

333
00:26:00,279 --> 00:26:03,920
to the rivers that come down and
have nebular forests that are on top of

334
00:26:04,000 --> 00:26:11,160
the tips of the mountains facing generally
west. You can have swampy fields,

335
00:26:11,640 --> 00:26:17,720
rocky fields, and sandy fields,
all those different things where you find yourself.

336
00:26:17,920 --> 00:26:22,039
It's very difficult to distinguish. Sometimes
they share species between each other.

337
00:26:22,160 --> 00:26:26,640
Sometimes they have very distinct species.
So it's all very how do you say,

338
00:26:26,960 --> 00:26:29,880
like we were saying at first,
it's so diverse that it's very difficult

339
00:26:30,160 --> 00:26:33,759
to distinguish. When you are in
a habitat there in Texas, you will

340
00:26:33,839 --> 00:26:38,839
have several different cactie that grow there
and some cross bushes or whatever you have

341
00:26:38,960 --> 00:26:42,400
in the desert there, and you
will be able to say this is a

342
00:26:42,480 --> 00:26:51,160
plant community which these ten fifteen species
that are representing the majority of the biomass

343
00:26:51,200 --> 00:26:55,559
here, But it's very difficult to
do that in the Kampohupesti because we have

344
00:26:55,720 --> 00:27:00,720
such high diversity and we don't really
have enough experts that can sit down in

345
00:27:00,839 --> 00:27:07,000
a parcel of you know, three
by three meters and count how many grasses

346
00:27:07,039 --> 00:27:11,039
and how many and how many of
different species sterile and then be able to

347
00:27:11,119 --> 00:27:15,240
put names on those things. Yeah, so it's very difficult to do so

348
00:27:15,519 --> 00:27:21,160
our studies of plant community get hindered
by this year difficulty and the volume of

349
00:27:21,319 --> 00:27:25,319
different plant names that you have to
deal with when you're in one of those

350
00:27:25,359 --> 00:27:27,279
areas. Yeah, there was,
there was. I mean you like the

351
00:27:27,359 --> 00:27:33,440
campos propaestoras, like you could be
on compost repastorates looking at a rock out

352
00:27:33,519 --> 00:27:37,200
crop with very thin no soil and
in the cracks of the rocks or growing

353
00:27:37,519 --> 00:27:42,160
like twenty different species of astracy,
one of which looks almost like a woolya

354
00:27:42,240 --> 00:27:45,599
gave. Looks like a woolya gave, but it's just tinically a sunflower.

355
00:27:45,640 --> 00:27:49,799
It's in one of the Vernonia's Vernonia. Try then you'll see little phytic orchids.

356
00:27:51,160 --> 00:27:53,240
Then you'll see a little pittic romeliad. Well, now one you see

357
00:27:53,319 --> 00:27:56,880
like five. Then you'll see a
weird aero call ac, and then you'll

358
00:27:56,920 --> 00:28:03,559
see a philodendron, and then it's
just it's don't forget the pillows that you

359
00:28:03,720 --> 00:28:07,079
find as well, and right,
don't forget the cattyches. So that's a

360
00:28:07,119 --> 00:28:15,880
good and you're forgetting the velow.
Romantically, of course, things that are

361
00:28:17,319 --> 00:28:21,440
they are related to pandams, and
they are such beautifully and they can some

362
00:28:21,559 --> 00:28:25,079
of them can They have those lovely
petals and some of them can completely dry

363
00:28:25,160 --> 00:28:29,599
out, which is insane for an
Yes you think that, yeah, you

364
00:28:29,680 --> 00:28:34,200
think that that. And the those
stems that they have are not really woody.

365
00:28:34,799 --> 00:28:41,240
The roots run inside the leaf sheets
into the soil where or the substrate

366
00:28:41,319 --> 00:28:44,799
where the plant is attached, so
it doesn't really form a stemp. Do

367
00:28:44,960 --> 00:28:48,519
you look at it and it's like
a like a drassina isn't like a cordelini.

368
00:28:48,160 --> 00:28:52,240
But it's not. They are those
roots in there. It's technically roots.

369
00:28:52,400 --> 00:28:57,480
Yes, the roots running inside the
leaf sheets is a massive dry leaf

370
00:28:57,559 --> 00:29:03,119
sheets and roots. God man,
it's very interesting. And the flowers are

371
00:29:03,200 --> 00:29:04,640
huge. I mean, yeah,
they look like lilies. They're beautiful,

372
00:29:04,839 --> 00:29:11,039
they're not they're not tiny. They're
not inconspicuous. They're large, and I

373
00:29:11,119 --> 00:29:12,799
mean it's like something that someone would
put in a bouquet or something. I

374
00:29:12,880 --> 00:29:17,440
mean, fancy got it. Oh
yeah, anyway, Okay, I'm getting

375
00:29:17,480 --> 00:29:19,920
off. Try but this is talking
speaking of Pelosi serious and cactye. This

376
00:29:21,039 --> 00:29:25,160
is a nice segue to move in
to. Well, I want to talk

377
00:29:25,200 --> 00:29:30,079
about this new species of uber Mania
that was that you helped describe that you

378
00:29:30,200 --> 00:29:34,279
described, which is a genus of
cacti. But the uber mania that I

379
00:29:34,440 --> 00:29:41,839
saw there grow Speaking of ecological phenomenon, they grow entirely surrounded by dry deciduous

380
00:29:41,920 --> 00:29:44,480
forests. So you got a wet
season that lasts a few months and then

381
00:29:44,480 --> 00:29:48,880
a dry season that's very long and
it's and of course, at least at

382
00:29:48,000 --> 00:29:52,920
least those seasons are predictable. When
you come to the biome to the north

383
00:29:52,000 --> 00:29:56,119
of where you were, the seasons
are not so predictable. Right, But

384
00:29:56,200 --> 00:30:00,039
let's go in the se handle until
until a lot of this struction finishes it

385
00:30:00,160 --> 00:30:04,880
off and there's no more water in
the Amazon that rains onto do we have

386
00:30:06,000 --> 00:30:11,240
this phenomenon that is there hob of
range with regularity. So this is what

387
00:30:11,519 --> 00:30:14,839
makes the difference between the comple who
passed in the south and the comple who

388
00:30:14,839 --> 00:30:18,640
passed in the north. But the
cacti like bull because the cacti they like

389
00:30:18,759 --> 00:30:23,599
those azonal habitats where they are growing
in a crack of a rock. Right,

390
00:30:23,880 --> 00:30:30,599
and we say they like it's not
that they like cacti cannot compete out

391
00:30:30,680 --> 00:30:34,480
compete exactly leaf plants. Right,
You've got so they actually are pushed into

392
00:30:34,640 --> 00:30:38,519
those habitats. Yes, that's right. You've got these ecological islands. An

393
00:30:38,559 --> 00:30:44,079
ecological island of like a massive rock
out cropping surrounded by dry deciduous forests and

394
00:30:44,160 --> 00:30:48,559
the forest that rainfall regime, generally
speaking, is caused by the it c

395
00:30:48,799 --> 00:30:52,759
Z and the latitude that this region
is that you know, you get a

396
00:30:52,839 --> 00:30:57,079
summer wet season and it's just like
in Mexico. Yes, but so let's

397
00:30:57,119 --> 00:31:00,119
sEH, but we get go ahead. Sorry, but we are more tropical

398
00:31:00,200 --> 00:31:04,440
than Mexico. Mexico is more subtropical. So there is the code factor as

399
00:31:04,480 --> 00:31:08,680
well there that we don't have so
much of in the altitude a little bit,

400
00:31:08,799 --> 00:31:15,839
but it's not a factor that affects
Brazil in its tropical part, which

401
00:31:15,920 --> 00:31:18,680
is most of it. So we've
got we've got this island effect. This

402
00:31:19,079 --> 00:31:25,319
you know, it's a different plant
community and these rocky microsites surrounded by dry

403
00:31:25,519 --> 00:31:27,960
deciduous forest, you know than you
would get in the dry situs forests.

404
00:31:29,000 --> 00:31:30,880
Two different plant communities, but they're
grown right next to each other. One

405
00:31:32,000 --> 00:31:36,160
is i mean any other. But
then you've got this other kind of ecological

406
00:31:36,240 --> 00:31:41,319
island effect that these sand openings in
certain areas in the yes, because the

407
00:31:41,759 --> 00:31:48,119
the substrate is so old and weathered
that we don't really have you know,

408
00:31:48,279 --> 00:31:56,119
volcanoes and mountains in Brazil, we
have the the the modern rock, the

409
00:31:56,240 --> 00:32:00,559
rock, the bedrock being erolded in
differential way. So despite place where you

410
00:32:00,640 --> 00:32:04,920
went in the Camp of Pesty is
one of those areas where the rock was

411
00:32:04,960 --> 00:32:12,680
at its hardest and is being eroded
slowly. So those sound banks that you

412
00:32:12,799 --> 00:32:16,039
saw have to do with the erosion
of those of those rocks, and those

413
00:32:16,079 --> 00:32:23,319
are very specific habitats for some of
the are coming as more basil in the

414
00:32:23,359 --> 00:32:29,799
philogenies we're working with at the moment, which is very interesting. Those sand

415
00:32:30,000 --> 00:32:35,880
patches they seem to be places where
because Monia comes basil to the whole tribe

416
00:32:35,920 --> 00:32:39,440
Theirea, which is a tribe of
cacti with laws of species and the two

417
00:32:39,480 --> 00:32:44,960
cups throughout throughout the Americas. So
it's very interesting to see that whatever money

418
00:32:45,079 --> 00:32:50,640
is one of those reliced general.
Yeah, I read like something left over

419
00:32:50,799 --> 00:32:53,720
there, poor thing, I read
that. Yeah, So uber Mania is

420
00:32:53,759 --> 00:32:59,640
one of the more early branching lineages. And it's it's again the fact that

421
00:33:00,039 --> 00:33:02,240
hers and these weird ecological islands of
these sand openings. I mean, that's

422
00:33:02,240 --> 00:33:07,759
where we saw Philcoxia, that speech, that genus that was just described twenty

423
00:33:07,839 --> 00:33:13,000
years ago, that carnivorous genus and
disco cactus everywhere, and which you know

424
00:33:13,119 --> 00:33:16,799
that half the disco cactus were growing
almost underground, like they were growing beneath

425
00:33:17,200 --> 00:33:21,559
the sand, and they grow on
their ground and the sand is trans germinate

426
00:33:22,279 --> 00:33:27,039
at about we could say, between
one centimeter and an inch and john half

427
00:33:27,480 --> 00:33:31,920
centimeters, and the seiblings will germinate
in there because otherwise they'll be too exposed

428
00:33:31,920 --> 00:33:35,799
to the light. And when they
grow like that, they are quite deep

429
00:33:35,880 --> 00:33:38,680
purple. Did you ever did you
notice how how dark they are when you

430
00:33:39,599 --> 00:33:44,119
know on Earth one of those ceilings, they are very dark because they are

431
00:33:44,519 --> 00:33:49,119
concentrating all the pigments in order to
absorb as much sunlight as gets through the

432
00:33:49,240 --> 00:33:52,799
stones. That's why. Yeah,
I always assume that those pigments were like

433
00:33:52,920 --> 00:33:58,480
stress pigments or those those beetline pigments, that there were stress pigments and disco

434
00:33:58,599 --> 00:34:01,599
cactus. And this is a mouth
poule needed genus too, right, So

435
00:34:02,039 --> 00:34:07,599
yes, the ecology of disco cactus, I mean, what happens in the

436
00:34:07,640 --> 00:34:09,960
wet season in these sandy islands,
because it probably rains a ton there,

437
00:34:10,039 --> 00:34:14,320
but again it's just sand, so
it doesn't really get absorbed. Yea,

438
00:34:15,199 --> 00:34:19,199
it is very it doesn't retain.
And I think a lot of the cacti

439
00:34:19,320 --> 00:34:22,119
that we lose. We grow a
few cacta in the backyard here. We

440
00:34:22,280 --> 00:34:27,440
lose them if we put them in
pots and it range too much, and

441
00:34:27,840 --> 00:34:32,519
the roots are very sensitive to water
logging. M Yeah, I don't think

442
00:34:32,559 --> 00:34:37,360
the heaven of the fences. You
know, they're very vulnerable to bacterial infection.

443
00:34:37,519 --> 00:34:40,079
And from in they wrote, oh
I bet they just they're they're like

444
00:34:40,159 --> 00:34:45,119
a dry sponge. They're so adapted. They're soaking up moisture whenever they get

445
00:34:45,159 --> 00:34:46,280
it. That yeah, it's really
easy to give them too much. So

446
00:34:46,280 --> 00:34:51,960
okay, so this new uba mania
is similar to disco cactus. Correct,

447
00:34:52,239 --> 00:34:55,559
do you want to tell tell us
about this new mind? Well, my

448
00:34:55,679 --> 00:35:00,320
friend Fabi she sent me a photograph
saying, oh, what is the thing

449
00:35:00,440 --> 00:35:02,760
that we found? Because she could
tell that it was something very strange.

450
00:35:04,039 --> 00:35:07,039
And I looked at it in the
phone. We do communicate by mobile and

451
00:35:07,280 --> 00:35:10,440
looking at what's happened? This thing
looked like a disco cactus. I said,

452
00:35:10,679 --> 00:35:15,639
oh, what a fantastic disco cactus. Can you can you send a

453
00:35:15,760 --> 00:35:19,400
specimen for me to have a lot
to see what it is, And she

454
00:35:19,599 --> 00:35:23,000
promptly sent me a specimen to look
at. And when it arrived on the

455
00:35:23,079 --> 00:35:27,599
post, I looked at the epidermis
and I could see that it wasn't disco

456
00:35:27,719 --> 00:35:32,639
cactus. But I will build money
species. That's fascinating how this thing just

457
00:35:32,719 --> 00:35:37,159
tricked us, you know, for
for for the time it took for the

458
00:35:37,280 --> 00:35:42,639
post to arrive, we were like
fooled by the plants. And then when

459
00:35:42,679 --> 00:35:45,760
it arrived, you could see if
the epidermis of weil Monia is very rough.

460
00:35:46,679 --> 00:35:51,000
We don't really know why it's very
cause if you looked at it under

461
00:35:51,079 --> 00:35:54,320
the lenses, you see that it's
called bumps that the disco cactus normally doesn't

462
00:35:54,400 --> 00:36:00,079
have, so that was that was
what gave it away. And maybe be

463
00:36:00,199 --> 00:36:02,400
those those bumps or something to do. It's not allowing the sun to be

464
00:36:02,519 --> 00:36:06,599
too close to it, pushing the
sun a little bit. I don't know.

465
00:36:07,000 --> 00:36:09,320
There are so many things that we
don't know about about So she sends

466
00:36:09,320 --> 00:36:13,199
me this thing, and just know, we got it in a in a

467
00:36:13,840 --> 00:36:17,679
in an inspection we were doing with
the environmental agency. We went by helicopter,

468
00:36:17,840 --> 00:36:23,039
so it's it's quite quite a remote
place. Hopefully people won't find it

469
00:36:24,000 --> 00:36:28,880
because there is malicious trade going on. Oh yeah, there's a van full

470
00:36:28,920 --> 00:36:35,280
of checks already en route. I'm
sure you know. Or so collection.

471
00:36:35,840 --> 00:36:39,360
I hope people have a bit more
sense. I have the best collection in

472
00:36:39,400 --> 00:36:45,679
the world I had. I had
a letter from a type person, an

473
00:36:45,719 --> 00:36:50,119
email from a type person wanting seeing
of the thing, and I said,

474
00:36:50,360 --> 00:36:54,480
I've never seen the seed of this
and it's true, we haven't seen the

475
00:36:54,559 --> 00:37:00,639
seed of this pot yet. It
is very providential that we have a team

476
00:37:00,960 --> 00:37:09,239
of colleagues that work with philogeny in
Sorocaba, their geneticists Professor Evandre and Fernando

477
00:37:09,320 --> 00:37:15,880
and other students, because that way, we could very speedily get a DNA

478
00:37:15,960 --> 00:37:21,760
analysis so we could check where those
where this plan to come up in the

479
00:37:21,840 --> 00:37:24,920
phylogeny, so we don't need to
have all the elements of the plant and

480
00:37:25,039 --> 00:37:30,320
delay, and this thing gets discovered
and poached and all those things before even

481
00:37:30,519 --> 00:37:34,159
it has a name. Yeah,
yeah, so I'm hoping it doesn't get

482
00:37:34,239 --> 00:37:37,320
pugd anyway. It's nuts they got
I mean, yeah, they go this

483
00:37:37,800 --> 00:37:42,000
huge market now and social media makes
it, you know, all the more

484
00:37:42,280 --> 00:37:45,559
easy to get out. Yeah,
because it's like that with animals as well,

485
00:37:45,719 --> 00:37:47,719
isn't it. It's something that we
have to be so careful with.

486
00:37:49,119 --> 00:37:52,320
Sometimes we're looking at some some cute
cats. Okay, cute cats are fine,

487
00:37:52,320 --> 00:38:00,719
but that is a cute sloth or
a cute say snake or lizard that

488
00:38:00,800 --> 00:38:05,400
shouldn't be in somebody's house. It's
this monkey brain, you know, it's

489
00:38:05,440 --> 00:38:08,280
this we're we're primates, right,
monkeys as well, we're social primates.

490
00:38:08,360 --> 00:38:13,280
Yeah, monkey is the right but
but no pun intended. But it's this

491
00:38:13,440 --> 00:38:15,280
monkey brained I you know, thing
that you have to own it. It's

492
00:38:15,320 --> 00:38:21,239
like these obsolete evolutionary impulses because we're
you know, human primates and I've got

493
00:38:21,280 --> 00:38:22,800
to own it. I've got to
collect it. It's like this, you

494
00:38:22,880 --> 00:38:28,360
know, but there's no appreciation for
the habitat or the evolution or any of

495
00:38:28,400 --> 00:38:30,760
that. So yeah, it gets
I've seen it with so many cacai.

496
00:38:30,840 --> 00:38:36,639
It's notts and vermeliads and orchids and
whatever. But but the ecology of this

497
00:38:36,800 --> 00:38:39,280
uber mania and this is uber Mania, and Newda is the new is the

498
00:38:39,320 --> 00:38:43,920
special Team, right, Yeah,
because it doesn't the areos don't have any

499
00:38:43,960 --> 00:38:47,000
spine, so it was the easiest
name to give it without too many fights.

500
00:38:47,039 --> 00:38:51,599
And try not to put names of
people on the plot. Yeah,

501
00:38:51,840 --> 00:38:54,320
good good, that's oh god,
that's awesome. I love you. Okay,

502
00:38:54,360 --> 00:39:00,400
Well, so this but this thing
grows subterranean like disco cackte yes,

503
00:39:00,800 --> 00:39:07,559
yes, semi interred in the sun. They're very it's kind of a at

504
00:39:07,599 --> 00:39:13,599
the course sound or very fine gravel. It's transparent or translucent white. When

505
00:39:13,599 --> 00:39:17,039
you're trying to photograph those things,
it's help because the camera over exposes the

506
00:39:17,199 --> 00:39:22,199
sun, so you have to to
choose your moment and and the settings of

507
00:39:22,239 --> 00:39:24,039
the camera as well. Yeah,
I was there. I was when we

508
00:39:24,119 --> 00:39:28,760
were doing Phil Coxy. I kept
having that not helpful because the flower is

509
00:39:28,880 --> 00:39:32,320
yellow as well, and you know
yellow with the white sund in the background,

510
00:39:32,639 --> 00:39:37,400
the whole thing was over exposed,
so you have to be controlling the

511
00:39:37,440 --> 00:39:44,119
situation very firmly. So those those
those colleagues of mine Fabi and Cemoni and

512
00:39:44,199 --> 00:39:50,920
Paula, the latter ones worked for
the environmental Agency Ibama no Semi, and

513
00:39:51,239 --> 00:39:55,159
those were the people who actually discovered
the plant. I just had a look

514
00:39:55,239 --> 00:40:00,280
and I knew it was new,
so we publish it as a as a

515
00:40:00,400 --> 00:40:04,639
consort of lots of collaborators. This
is becoming more and more common. I

516
00:40:04,719 --> 00:40:07,079
think back of the times when I
started botany. It was just me and

517
00:40:07,199 --> 00:40:12,079
my plants, and I would publish
them, and I would write about them,

518
00:40:12,119 --> 00:40:16,599
and and I didn't interact very much. And luckily nowadays we have opened

519
00:40:16,599 --> 00:40:22,719
our eyes to the to the advantages
of interacting and people having different roles in

520
00:40:22,800 --> 00:40:29,480
the paper makes more solid, more
robust papers, and more satisfying experience.

521
00:40:29,519 --> 00:40:34,480
If you're a person's persona if you're
one of those loners that only likes to

522
00:40:34,599 --> 00:40:38,519
do their whole thing, that and
the spirit of cooperation, sorry right now,

523
00:40:38,760 --> 00:40:44,079
yes so, but but so what
other species tell us what other species

524
00:40:44,119 --> 00:40:46,360
were growing in this habitat, like
what are there a number? Like how

525
00:40:46,400 --> 00:40:53,360
many other? Because again this this
ecologic growing and that one is one is

526
00:40:53,400 --> 00:40:57,639
the disco characters we probably have seen. If you want to to grown more,

527
00:40:57,679 --> 00:41:04,239
go or to or to the places
nearby. Dise Cocaccus cell doing sickness.

528
00:41:04,679 --> 00:41:08,239
It grows in sand as well.
And the other one is simple Cereus

529
00:41:08,280 --> 00:41:13,360
crassi sepalus, which also grows in
sand. It's got funny blue fruits.

530
00:41:13,679 --> 00:41:17,440
Sprus as a genus has got why
what what is the adaptive benefit of that?

531
00:41:17,599 --> 00:41:21,400
Is that a sun protection? Do
you know? No, they're very

532
00:41:21,480 --> 00:41:27,119
tasty. I eat everything happened.
I think if you if you put your

533
00:41:27,199 --> 00:41:30,679
hand on those things, your fingers
and your finger to them, you find

534
00:41:30,760 --> 00:41:37,239
that the color is mostly conferred by
this glaucus wax that's on top of the

535
00:41:37,360 --> 00:41:40,880
fruits. And like you said,
it may have to do with scorching from

536
00:41:40,960 --> 00:41:45,920
the sun. Yea, what is
they probably are protecting themselves. What is

537
00:41:45,960 --> 00:41:53,840
the it's not summer temperature that's the
problem. In summer it rains, so

538
00:41:54,440 --> 00:41:59,840
the temperature goes up and the rain
will bring it down. The temperature that

539
00:42:00,360 --> 00:42:04,599
it's got. The biggest amplitude is
the winter temperature that can easily go from

540
00:42:04,639 --> 00:42:08,880
twelve degrees at night just as a
dawn you get twelve degrees and then it

541
00:42:08,960 --> 00:42:14,360
goes up up up until thirty.
So you have a huge amplitude of temperature

542
00:42:14,400 --> 00:42:16,960
those plants have to put up every
day. Yeah. Yeah, so they

543
00:42:17,000 --> 00:42:22,440
are sometimes that are coming slowing down
because there are ten degrees that slows the

544
00:42:22,519 --> 00:42:25,239
plant up, and then when they
when the sun comes, it starts hitting

545
00:42:25,320 --> 00:42:30,719
them up steadily until they reach you
know, thirty degrees. Yeah. I

546
00:42:30,760 --> 00:42:34,519
always tell people, and that's too
much because people, again, people in

547
00:42:34,599 --> 00:42:38,400
the US normally think of cacti as
desert plants. But cacti didn't evolve in

548
00:42:38,480 --> 00:42:45,599
deserts. They evolved in these these
you know, seasonally dry biomes, correct,

549
00:42:45,639 --> 00:42:47,239
I mean where it's not really quite
a desert because you've got a wet

550
00:42:47,320 --> 00:42:52,840
season, but then you've got this
long dry season too. Yeah. People

551
00:42:52,960 --> 00:42:59,719
think I don't need water, isn't
it out there? It's true and it's

552
00:42:59,800 --> 00:43:05,440
not true that they don't need water. So you have catti in all like

553
00:43:05,599 --> 00:43:09,639
all environments of the Americas. You
start from Canada with pedio cactus and things

554
00:43:09,679 --> 00:43:15,440
like that, and you go all
the way to the Andean and Patagonian area

555
00:43:15,559 --> 00:43:22,039
with ma huenia, so you have
you have an amplitude of climates. Those

556
00:43:22,079 --> 00:43:27,800
plants put up with a lot of
them go under below freezing, like the

557
00:43:27,880 --> 00:43:34,599
Andean puntioids and other cacti goes below
freezing. So you have you have this

558
00:43:35,079 --> 00:43:38,119
this tolerance of all sorts of environments. You have plants in the most humid

559
00:43:38,719 --> 00:43:45,800
areas of the Atlantic Forest, like
the the Christmas cactile, those epifittic cartie

560
00:43:45,480 --> 00:43:50,239
and they can put up with with
daily drought, but then with lots of

561
00:43:50,360 --> 00:43:52,920
torrential rain and they are fine.
I was so they live on top of

562
00:43:53,800 --> 00:43:59,199
trees. I was impressed too when
I saw rips lists just growing like weeds

563
00:43:59,239 --> 00:44:02,360
in the trees in uh like Nova
free Burgo, Like there's rips lists in

564
00:44:02,400 --> 00:44:08,559
all the street trees and some of
them are like dangling down from the Yeah.

565
00:44:09,320 --> 00:44:15,960
So yeah, that's Limbergian. It's
like a cut. It's so cool.

566
00:44:15,000 --> 00:44:20,280
It's like they've just and it's very
tolerant or pollution as well, because

567
00:44:20,440 --> 00:44:23,239
it grows all the way real as
well, getting real with all those buses

568
00:44:23,280 --> 00:44:27,719
and cars and traffic I have evolved
everything. Yeah, that's why. I

569
00:44:27,880 --> 00:44:30,480
just I mean the other you know, succulents and carry offy lelies too,

570
00:44:30,559 --> 00:44:35,920
like anacamp sarra tasty are really cool. Some Portula casey, but uh they're

571
00:44:36,039 --> 00:44:38,880
just they're just so robust and they
they seem to speciate pretty readily. But

572
00:44:39,280 --> 00:44:43,159
this uber mania, what do you
think the adaptive benefit? Like, how

573
00:44:43,199 --> 00:44:47,840
could it evolutionarily lose its spines?
I guess because nothing can see you if

574
00:44:47,920 --> 00:44:52,880
you're growing half underground anyways, what
do you think that's about? Yeah,

575
00:44:52,119 --> 00:44:59,559
this habit, this habit much is
much as a lot of cactile from Mexico,

576
00:44:59,639 --> 00:45:05,880
the group growing flooded planes and underground. There are general like achino Cereus

577
00:45:06,400 --> 00:45:09,800
where you find things without any spines
whatsoever. And I think it's to do

578
00:45:09,920 --> 00:45:16,239
with living in a in a geo
geophytic, in a in a subterranean way,

579
00:45:17,320 --> 00:45:22,760
the benefit of spine is very very
little. There is also disco cactus

580
00:45:22,880 --> 00:45:29,119
horst in Grandma Good that is almost
completely under the gravel for most of its

581
00:45:29,199 --> 00:45:34,400
life, and it's got spines that
are very different from normal spines. They

582
00:45:34,400 --> 00:45:37,320
are they're not punging. They thought
they look a bit like propullant really,

583
00:45:37,840 --> 00:45:42,840
and they work a bit like sponges
and they absorb water from the environment.

584
00:45:42,960 --> 00:45:46,639
So spine I think they are the
spines of disco cactus. Horst is being

585
00:45:47,079 --> 00:45:54,199
has been proven with with water that
is marked with radioactive elements. You can

586
00:45:54,280 --> 00:45:59,760
see it entering the spines and then
going to the vascular Oh my god,

587
00:46:00,119 --> 00:46:02,360
this is blown my mind. So
there's a cat that's a particular one.

588
00:46:02,559 --> 00:46:07,760
There's a yeah, oh no,
I'm familiar. Yeah, I've seen I've

589
00:46:07,800 --> 00:46:10,119
seen people growing it here. They
have to graft them because they wrote too

590
00:46:10,159 --> 00:46:15,159
easily. I saw some guy in
too. But but it uses its spines

591
00:46:15,199 --> 00:46:21,519
to absorb moisture. That's insane,
exactly. Yeah, So you can see,

592
00:46:21,719 --> 00:46:24,960
but you can see other things like
for us, they don't have any

593
00:46:25,039 --> 00:46:30,880
spines. Look a bit more like
like like animal spoos, don't they.

594
00:46:30,360 --> 00:46:35,280
Yeah, and you I mean you
know, yeah, it was just you

595
00:46:35,360 --> 00:46:37,519
know, like you have you have
this thing is a plant economy. If

596
00:46:37,599 --> 00:46:42,519
the spine is not going to be
very useful, it becomes becomes I mean,

597
00:46:42,800 --> 00:46:46,440
you know, evolution have to talk
properly. But the spines, they

598
00:46:46,480 --> 00:46:52,239
are an adaptation that is no longer
selected by the environment, and they may

599
00:46:52,360 --> 00:46:58,920
disappear right and they can be evolutionary
evolutionarily lost without any any negative impact to

600
00:46:59,039 --> 00:47:02,440
the lineage, you know, yes, or maybe even some positive impacts,

601
00:47:02,559 --> 00:47:07,320
because if if they were spining,
maybe they'll be noticed by by a rodent.

602
00:47:08,599 --> 00:47:13,320
I don't know. We don't don't
have roof, but we have these

603
00:47:13,440 --> 00:47:17,400
more cod would be like a like
a like a large guinea pig that that

604
00:47:17,519 --> 00:47:23,679
goes and choose on on on things
as spiny as the singers, which areoids

605
00:47:23,679 --> 00:47:31,840
from the cutting of them doing it. Macy Is is a rodent, but

606
00:47:32,079 --> 00:47:36,679
like a large rat with with short
tail. Because we have here in South

607
00:47:36,719 --> 00:47:43,360
America have lots of creatures related to
guinea pigs. Yeah, it's something of

608
00:47:43,440 --> 00:47:46,360
that they can just take cactus spines, just chew on them. Yeah,

609
00:47:46,599 --> 00:47:51,960
yeah, Yeah, there's that.
There's that small peote that was just discovered

610
00:47:52,039 --> 00:47:57,199
that Alberto void Techi however you pronounced
that that grows in Yes, and you

611
00:47:57,280 --> 00:48:00,719
know places mud flats will be inun
data for three or four days underwater,

612
00:48:01,440 --> 00:48:04,480
you know, and you'll see it
here in South I mean I live in

613
00:48:04,559 --> 00:48:07,639
South Texas. We just we have
a conservation property with a bunch of loa

614
00:48:08,199 --> 00:48:12,679
on it and kind of serious Poselgora
and any you can't that's all these all

615
00:48:12,719 --> 00:48:15,679
these wonderful plants and that. Yeah, they'll grow in mud. I mean

616
00:48:15,719 --> 00:48:21,320
they grow in really thick clayey soil
and it's just so hot that it dries

617
00:48:21,360 --> 00:48:23,719
out relatively quick, so they could
take it. But okay, so let's

618
00:48:23,840 --> 00:48:29,159
let's talk about because I know there
was the tribe Ciri, which is the

619
00:48:29,559 --> 00:48:35,800
tribe of Sirius and a number of
other cool cactus species, right right,

620
00:48:35,880 --> 00:48:37,920
Oh god, we got to talk
about close series too. I read in

621
00:48:38,000 --> 00:48:42,719
one of the papers that it was
kind of it was hard to target.

622
00:48:42,840 --> 00:48:45,119
It was hard to get a good
phylogeny using genetic sequencs, so you had

623
00:48:45,159 --> 00:48:51,639
to use something called target enrichment sequencing. Can you elaborate on this. Yeah.

624
00:48:51,719 --> 00:48:55,360
The problem with with those plants it's
a little bit like with the saprophyte

625
00:48:55,559 --> 00:49:00,679
or the plants that don't have chlorophyll
I have lost their leaves, so they

626
00:49:00,719 --> 00:49:06,920
have big deletions in there in the
DNA, and that's problematic for you to

627
00:49:07,000 --> 00:49:09,960
do an analysis because you cannot compare
absence with absence. You have to compare

628
00:49:10,039 --> 00:49:15,639
things that are similar so when you
start looking at the fine grain of the

629
00:49:15,760 --> 00:49:20,800
family Cartsi, you had a lot
of contradictory information because they were looking at

630
00:49:20,880 --> 00:49:29,400
only a few sites of locky lossy
of chromosomes. And these people in Soroka

631
00:49:29,519 --> 00:49:35,239
but have developed a probe called Probe
five nine one Cates five nine one that

632
00:49:36,039 --> 00:49:43,000
is more tailored for the cacti and
the particularly particularity of their genome. They

633
00:49:43,039 --> 00:49:46,679
have about thirty eight lossy rather than
two or three, and the lossy are

634
00:49:46,719 --> 00:49:52,760
from the chloroplast, from the nucleus
of the cell as well, and I

635
00:49:52,800 --> 00:49:58,760
think mitochondri as well. So you
have because other things that we're discovering even

636
00:49:58,840 --> 00:50:02,800
with this wonderful probe five nine one, is that there's so much hybridization that

637
00:50:04,000 --> 00:50:08,000
is very difficult to retrace the history
of the of the plants. The hybrid

638
00:50:08,079 --> 00:50:14,159
is not only now but also a
long time ago. So we have a

639
00:50:14,280 --> 00:50:19,760
lot of problem to understand how these
plants evolved because while they were evolving and

640
00:50:19,880 --> 00:50:23,159
then there were separations of the of
the biomes where they were leaving and they

641
00:50:23,280 --> 00:50:30,400
became isolated, and then with the
changes in the climate, those habitats became

642
00:50:30,480 --> 00:50:35,360
together again. So the bats did
naughty things. The hummingbirds did naughty things,

643
00:50:35,719 --> 00:50:39,199
and when up with species that have
you know, parts of the genome

644
00:50:39,400 --> 00:50:44,519
of others, and they can be
quite quite dramatic like that. So we're

645
00:50:44,559 --> 00:50:50,360
having we're having three weeks go quite
a lot of discussions with the genetics team

646
00:50:51,639 --> 00:50:55,360
that because the good thing about geneticist
they are much more worried about the process

647
00:50:57,559 --> 00:51:01,760
and it doesn't go into this battle
of name things, which is a problem

648
00:51:01,880 --> 00:51:07,840
because it's much more important for me
to understand the concept of species we're using

649
00:51:07,000 --> 00:51:12,960
and how where do they stop?
How can you circumscribe them in a way

650
00:51:13,000 --> 00:51:21,280
that's both practical for people and that
translates the evolutionary process. But it's very

651
00:51:21,320 --> 00:51:25,239
difficult to do. Having a good
time at the moment, it's very instig

652
00:51:25,519 --> 00:51:30,599
it's instigating, so it's good.
It seems like a spaghetti bowl of genetics.

653
00:51:30,679 --> 00:51:34,599
Man of DNA barcodes. I mean, it's with that much hybridization and

654
00:51:34,639 --> 00:51:37,239
yeah, you've got range contraction and
then habitat change and they come back.

655
00:51:37,280 --> 00:51:43,280
Yes, So some things they get
together when they're not even formed the species,

656
00:51:43,360 --> 00:51:49,639
so they enter contact again in a
way that sometimes in the cloudograms in

657
00:51:49,719 --> 00:51:53,719
the in the phylogenetic trees. Instead
of retrieving a branch of related plants,

658
00:51:53,800 --> 00:52:00,960
we retrieve the branch of similar locations. So a lot of species that are

659
00:52:00,079 --> 00:52:06,840
growing together sympathically tend to qualless or
appear at the end of a branch together.

660
00:52:07,159 --> 00:52:09,880
If you look at them, they
have nothing to do with each other.

661
00:52:12,320 --> 00:52:15,079
So it's yeah, well, but
I think what is what is good

662
00:52:15,119 --> 00:52:19,679
in our favors that we've been working
with the taxonomy and distribution of those plants

663
00:52:19,719 --> 00:52:22,599
for more than thirty years, So
it's not like there are things we just

664
00:52:22,719 --> 00:52:30,960
met. Yeah, yeah, and
we can try to come to a reasonable

665
00:52:30,599 --> 00:52:35,239
taxonomy even with all this difficulty.
Yeah, it's I mean, it's either

666
00:52:35,280 --> 00:52:39,960
way. It's it's really mysterious and
cool and just you know, I just

667
00:52:40,159 --> 00:52:44,400
because I always think about that whenever
I meet a new plant, is why

668
00:52:44,559 --> 00:52:47,360
is this like this? Why did
this evolve this? What other forms has

669
00:52:47,440 --> 00:52:52,880
this taken? You know, in
deep time in the last five six million

670
00:52:52,960 --> 00:52:58,239
years? You know what lineage is
when extinct? What other species in this

671
00:52:58,360 --> 00:53:01,599
genus when extinct? However, were
how many things that are missing that we

672
00:53:01,719 --> 00:53:07,199
cannot see and that make the link
between things? Like we were talking with

673
00:53:07,360 --> 00:53:13,960
nudge about Strophocactus, the moonflower that
Margaret me painted in the Amazon and the

674
00:53:14,079 --> 00:53:21,119
other the other species here in northeastern
Brazil is called stropho Cactus braziliencis and is

675
00:53:21,400 --> 00:53:25,559
related to a thing called nel Ramondia
from Bolivia and Chili, which is an

676
00:53:25,719 --> 00:53:30,440
enormous capture. So this this thing
is a big scrambler and the moonflower is

677
00:53:30,440 --> 00:53:37,920
an epiphyt, and then it is
related to this tree like things. How

678
00:53:37,000 --> 00:53:43,480
many things are not there that we're
not seeing. We're in the other valleys

679
00:53:43,559 --> 00:53:49,880
and went extinct for anybody listening that
that moonflow what was there was a film

680
00:53:49,920 --> 00:53:52,960
they made about that called Margaret and
the Moonflower. Yeah, yeah, really

681
00:53:53,039 --> 00:53:58,960
cool. That was lovely artists.
And what is that that grows? That

682
00:53:59,079 --> 00:54:04,519
grows that leaves in the ega Po
forest. It's a flooded forest, then

683
00:54:04,599 --> 00:54:08,719
epiphyt of the flooded forest, and
it's got adaptations on its fruit and seed

684
00:54:09,320 --> 00:54:15,239
by which the seed floats, and
it's very viscus and attaches to the stem

685
00:54:15,320 --> 00:54:21,559
of the tree when the water is
flowing between those tree trunks, attaches itself

686
00:54:21,679 --> 00:54:27,440
and Germini's and starts growing upward to
avoid being underwater because the river goes open

687
00:54:27,519 --> 00:54:32,639
down it must have like a musilaginous
fruit, like a glue kind of then,

688
00:54:34,760 --> 00:54:37,840
yeah, well many of them do. If you if you're used used

689
00:54:37,880 --> 00:54:40,880
to cleaning seeds of cacti, you
find that there are some that are totally

690
00:54:42,039 --> 00:54:45,840
going very difficult to get rid of. The of the mucilage. And you

691
00:54:45,920 --> 00:54:50,000
know, those are the things that
are the active principles of so many medicines

692
00:54:50,360 --> 00:54:58,199
because they use them here Brazil for
coughs and as emollients and as skin treatments

693
00:54:58,360 --> 00:55:05,039
because very popular the local people.
Really doesn't go so much to the pharmaceutical

694
00:55:05,159 --> 00:55:09,199
industry, but because they have these
mucilage that retains water just like all of

695
00:55:09,320 --> 00:55:16,639
the so that principle that the plant
developed to keep the moisture in because you

696
00:55:16,719 --> 00:55:20,920
think of a cactus, a barrel
cactus is full of water, but it's

697
00:55:20,920 --> 00:55:24,000
not as full of a tissue that's
very sticky and gooey and doesn't let the

698
00:55:24,559 --> 00:55:30,960
molecules that don't let the water molecules
to be on the loose there. They

699
00:55:30,039 --> 00:55:36,280
have to be attached otherwise they evaporate
through the stomata. Right, So this

700
00:55:36,559 --> 00:55:39,760
this mechanism is very important, very
important for the plant, and it's very

701
00:55:39,840 --> 00:55:45,119
useful for human beings as well.
Yeah that mucilage, Yeah I didn't even

702
00:55:45,199 --> 00:55:47,159
yeah, yeah, I mean I
cleaned a bunch of cactusy. I just

703
00:55:47,239 --> 00:55:52,719
smash them on paper. And it's
always that mucilagis and mucilaginist stuff is always

704
00:55:52,800 --> 00:55:55,880
like, oh god, how do
I how do I get rid of your

705
00:55:55,960 --> 00:56:00,039
fingers? And it's a little bit
like like that that the cartoon where you

706
00:56:00,159 --> 00:56:06,199
get stuck to the thing, and
the thing is every moment it becomes worse.

707
00:56:06,599 --> 00:56:07,920
Yeah, that you know that.
The thing with cacti and I,

708
00:56:08,320 --> 00:56:13,360
it's I always kind of like because
it's there's such a weird sect of the

709
00:56:13,480 --> 00:56:15,320
cactus nerds, and I love it. I'm excited that people are obsessed with

710
00:56:15,400 --> 00:56:20,599
plants. But there's always, yeah, there's always it's always generally male,

711
00:56:20,760 --> 00:56:22,920
and it's always like the collector mentality, and I always want to get people.

712
00:56:22,920 --> 00:56:24,639
I'm like, come on, look
at the ecology and the evolution.

713
00:56:24,719 --> 00:56:28,840
It's so much cooler, it's so
much more fascinating. But but when I

714
00:56:28,960 --> 00:56:30,239
talk about cacti, people like,
why do you like cacti so much?

715
00:56:30,280 --> 00:56:35,239
And I'm like, because they've just
they're just is a case study and evolution

716
00:56:35,840 --> 00:56:39,519
and adaptation. They're just so remarkable, like there's so much, there is

717
00:56:39,559 --> 00:56:44,480
a model system. They're just insane. And that to learn that this thing

718
00:56:44,559 --> 00:56:47,320
that evolved in this flooded humid forest, which is the last place that you

719
00:56:47,440 --> 00:56:52,000
think a cactus would live, Yes, what is it doing that? And

720
00:56:52,119 --> 00:56:55,719
it doesn't just grow epiphetically. It
grows oppressed like someone glued it to these

721
00:56:57,119 --> 00:57:00,400
yes, like the height against these
trees. And then it produces this huge

722
00:57:00,440 --> 00:57:05,719
flower. Is it mouth pollinated or
bad pollinated? It's a mouth pollinated flower.

723
00:57:05,920 --> 00:57:10,320
It's very fragrant, and it flowers
around the moment when the moon is

724
00:57:10,400 --> 00:57:15,440
full, because it's a visual clue
for the moth to have a flower reflecting

725
00:57:15,519 --> 00:57:20,360
them. Yes, I didn't actually
watch it is that movie Margaret and the

726
00:57:20,400 --> 00:57:22,239
Moonflower, but I will now I
just know about it. But I mean

727
00:57:22,320 --> 00:57:28,800
to learn that that's that somehow is
related to neo Romandia or perhaps speciated out

728
00:57:28,800 --> 00:57:32,199
of it, or shares a common
close common ancestors as wild Man. I

729
00:57:32,280 --> 00:57:37,679
mean they have. I'm not sure
it's the close common ancestor. I think

730
00:57:37,679 --> 00:57:43,719
it's far far away because they're very
isolated clades of plants, but they have

731
00:57:44,000 --> 00:57:47,199
a common ancestor. As there's a
few missing links in there. Yeah,

732
00:57:47,400 --> 00:57:52,920
probably, yeah, some missing links
of many. Imagine maybe we should send

733
00:57:52,960 --> 00:57:54,840
those nerds, those captose nerds back
in time, you know, to do

734
00:57:54,960 --> 00:57:59,239
a collection of things that nobody ever
saw. I think we need to do

735
00:57:59,440 --> 00:58:04,840
some get them to studying genetics and
evolutionary biology. But you know, but

736
00:58:05,079 --> 00:58:08,079
also if you think of landscape designs, I have this. I had this

737
00:58:08,280 --> 00:58:14,360
boss in Singapore, genius guy called
doctor Tan, and he he saw the

738
00:58:14,440 --> 00:58:20,960
similarity between the capti and succlents and
and creatures from under water from sea from

739
00:58:21,000 --> 00:58:23,639
the scene, you know, like
urchins and aug and things like that.

740
00:58:24,039 --> 00:58:29,199
And he made a corner of one
of the greenhouses in Singapore Gardens by the

741
00:58:29,280 --> 00:58:32,079
Bay into a kind of marine display. But it was all of cacti and

742
00:58:32,719 --> 00:58:37,000
circlings with weird and wonderful shapes.
Oh that's kind of cool. Yeah,

743
00:58:37,239 --> 00:58:40,559
yeah, he's a very cool guy. So many times, yeah, this

744
00:58:40,679 --> 00:58:44,320
looks like it should be underwater.
I've heard that so many times. Looks

745
00:58:44,360 --> 00:58:47,199
like something it's seen in a coral
reef. But okay, we'll moving on

746
00:58:47,320 --> 00:58:52,880
to pelosis. Serious let's talk about
this genus, because this is another pretty

747
00:58:52,920 --> 00:58:58,639
diverse genus in Brazil and South America
in general and in the Caribbean. Yeah,

748
00:58:58,800 --> 00:59:00,440
yeah, yeah, exactly. And
we have pollination, which is the

749
00:59:00,519 --> 00:59:04,960
states in Florida, keys, right
right, exactly, yeah, and there's

750
00:59:05,599 --> 00:59:07,760
quite a few in Mexico, I
believe too. Okay, but this is

751
00:59:07,880 --> 00:59:13,679
yes, yes, but this is
uh pollination by beetles, bats, bees,

752
00:59:13,840 --> 00:59:19,159
hummingbirds, moths, butterflies. And
then it's got this uh all the

753
00:59:19,280 --> 00:59:22,239
tri coombs, I mean, pulos, so serious, What what do you

754
00:59:22,320 --> 00:59:25,320
have to say about this thing?
With them? They are primarily pulling it

755
00:59:25,480 --> 00:59:31,400
by bats. There are opportunistic beetles
that tenter flowers. Butterflies I don't think

756
00:59:31,480 --> 00:59:37,440
so, but maybe ten percent of
the pollen exchange may be carried out by

757
00:59:37,599 --> 00:59:42,440
moths in some of the species.
Hummingbirds are funny because they visit just when

758
00:59:42,480 --> 00:59:45,239
the flower is starting to open at
the end of the day, when the

759
00:59:45,320 --> 00:59:51,760
sun is setting. Sometimes the hummingbird
visits those flowers as well. They have

760
00:59:52,079 --> 00:59:58,719
a very big reservoir full of nectar
in the in the just above the ovary

761
00:59:58,800 --> 01:00:01,719
of the flower. So it's fantastically
But if you when you ask me,

762
01:00:01,760 --> 01:00:06,079
oh is it but is it moth? Well, those pilos a series and

763
01:00:06,800 --> 01:00:10,920
the bat pollinated cactile, they have
more stout structures because to westand the visit

764
01:00:12,000 --> 01:00:15,000
of a bat's quite something, you
know. They are quite violent flyers,

765
01:00:15,079 --> 01:00:20,840
and they come, they invest against
the flower, put their tongue out and

766
01:00:21,000 --> 01:00:23,480
suck the fallen and go for the
next one. So they are rapid and

767
01:00:23,639 --> 01:00:28,239
they are heavy compared, for example, with the hawk moth. So the

768
01:00:28,320 --> 01:00:32,880
flower for the hawk mot's much more
delicate, slender, with very satile stamens

769
01:00:32,960 --> 01:00:37,199
that just touch the head of the
mouth, and everything is done in a

770
01:00:37,280 --> 01:00:40,679
more delicate way. But with the
butts it's a fast and furious business.

771
01:00:42,320 --> 01:00:46,400
So the bat flowers are more stout. They have all the pollen presented as

772
01:00:46,440 --> 01:00:50,760
a pompound as you know, as
a structure. So when the animal goes

773
01:00:50,800 --> 01:00:53,760
there, ends up with the beard
or with the head or the belly or

774
01:00:53,840 --> 01:00:59,159
even under the belly full of pollen, and goes and goes to the next

775
01:00:59,239 --> 01:01:05,320
one to deliver this pollen and does
a trapline behavior, which means it visits

776
01:01:05,400 --> 01:01:09,199
the same flower every so many minutes, and there's a trail of flowers,

777
01:01:09,639 --> 01:01:15,199
allowing the flower to replenish the nectar
chamber. Wow, so this is all

778
01:01:15,440 --> 01:01:20,760
things we learned from watching the plants
at night and seeing all the all the

779
01:01:20,880 --> 01:01:24,440
behaviors and all the all those interesting
things. And how many species of Pelosa

780
01:01:24,559 --> 01:01:30,639
sirius are there? And what's the
biogeography of that? They come from the

781
01:01:30,679 --> 01:01:37,239
Florida keys. They go to Mexico, west and east and north of South

782
01:01:37,320 --> 01:01:42,519
America, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, but not so many species. But

783
01:01:42,679 --> 01:01:45,239
when it gets to Brazil, it's
a boom of more than thirty species of

784
01:01:45,280 --> 01:01:53,400
pilowso cereus in the compoupestri in the
Catinga, in the Sejad proper always almost

785
01:01:53,440 --> 01:01:57,840
always, when it's not in the
Katinga, which is a dry twenty forest.

786
01:01:58,199 --> 01:02:04,639
They are almost always associated with rockout
crops with aizonal habitats because of the

787
01:02:04,719 --> 01:02:08,159
competition problems. And some of them
grow very beautifully in the in the coast

788
01:02:08,239 --> 01:02:14,280
of huge genera and spiritual santos,
so they can be found in the in

789
01:02:14,440 --> 01:02:19,800
the coast of vegetation as well.
It's very it's a very wide distribution,

790
01:02:20,320 --> 01:02:23,920
but whenever you go to one place, you find you can find sometimes two

791
01:02:24,039 --> 01:02:29,039
or three species sympathically, and that
seems to be when the problem happens with

792
01:02:29,159 --> 01:02:34,000
the bats and the hybrids and the
genetics going bud. Yeah, yeah,

793
01:02:34,039 --> 01:02:37,480
I can see that. Yeah.
We saw peloso serious full volnatives in northern

794
01:02:37,559 --> 01:02:43,360
Minas. Yeah, yeso, yeah, yeah. What's up with that species?

795
01:02:43,480 --> 01:02:46,159
Is that relatively restricted? What's the
distribution? Like, yes, it's

796
01:02:46,280 --> 01:02:52,719
endemic, endemic to those two or
three municipalities with I think one there is

797
01:02:52,880 --> 01:02:59,719
one sister species called brown new Orum
or yeah, somethings like that more towards

798
01:02:59,760 --> 01:03:04,760
the but it is nandemic to the
municipality of Gradool in Christanlia. And it's

799
01:03:04,800 --> 01:03:10,119
a very iconic cactus, isn't it. It's got bright blue skin and the

800
01:03:10,320 --> 01:03:19,280
hairs from pillows on the Pillowso hairs
are these occur and rusty colored that contrast

801
01:03:19,360 --> 01:03:22,159
with the kind of pale green flower
that opens in the evening. Yeah,

802
01:03:22,199 --> 01:03:28,480
and presumably just beautiful. Those hairs
are just protecting the flowers and the fruits.

803
01:03:28,559 --> 01:03:30,800
I take it from the sun,
is it? Yes, From from

804
01:03:30,880 --> 01:03:35,400
the sun that is ever so strong. If you went out there without sunscreen

805
01:03:35,480 --> 01:03:38,760
you remember, m hm, Yeah, And so what what is the very

806
01:03:38,840 --> 01:03:43,639
punish pseudo cephalium. I mean,
what what is the correct yes in the

807
01:03:43,760 --> 01:03:50,800
case in the case of of Pillowso
cities we have the floriferous regions may not

808
01:03:51,000 --> 01:03:55,159
be specialized, so the flowers may
appear anywhere from the middle to the tip

809
01:03:55,239 --> 01:03:59,400
of the stems, or they may
be more specialized, and we call it

810
01:03:59,679 --> 01:04:03,719
sell the cephalium when they're very hairy, very hairy around the floor flowers,

811
01:04:03,760 --> 01:04:10,679
so the area produces a lot of
hair and the bud forms inside those hairs.

812
01:04:11,119 --> 01:04:15,800
And then you have more specialized situations
where it's a full cephalion that obliterates

813
01:04:16,000 --> 01:04:19,719
the sunlight. So in a side
of the plant, like in coleocephalosis,

814
01:04:20,480 --> 01:04:26,599
you don't the plant doesn't receive some
rays, that doesn't have photosynthetic tissue in

815
01:04:26,760 --> 01:04:30,480
the part of the plant where it
flowers. And if you know the text

816
01:04:30,519 --> 01:04:35,400
Turban the the mellow cactus, you
can see that in action, that's the

817
01:04:35,480 --> 01:04:41,079
plant that is in fact monocarpic.
It grows to a certain point, then

818
01:04:41,119 --> 01:04:45,480
develops the cephalium and it starts really
growing the vegetative part. The cephalum becomes

819
01:04:45,519 --> 01:04:50,119
taller and taller and around in the
area of the cephalim there is no photosynthesis

820
01:04:50,159 --> 01:04:55,960
happening, right right, It's just
it's just a definition for a true cephalium.

821
01:04:56,119 --> 01:05:00,159
Yeah. The definition of a truceive
valium is a structure that obliterates that

822
01:05:00,360 --> 01:05:04,119
sundlight, so you don't have a
chlorophyl inside it is that That's what this

823
01:05:05,000 --> 01:05:12,320
does. Go cactus does to disco
cactus has been recently been found to be

824
01:05:12,519 --> 01:05:16,119
the sister species of melo cactus.
Not so recently, but when we first

825
01:05:16,159 --> 01:05:19,360
started selling the cacti, we all, no, disco Caacus has something to

826
01:05:19,440 --> 01:05:24,039
do with the gym local lisium,
and we put it that way and so

827
01:05:24,119 --> 01:05:28,760
on. But now it all came
to pieces and disco cactus and mellow characters

828
01:05:28,840 --> 01:05:32,599
are related to cacta. And there's
a student that we know called Millionaire who's

829
01:05:32,679 --> 01:05:36,960
doing philogeny of those two groups in
tandem. To to do a bit of

830
01:05:38,039 --> 01:05:42,920
comparison, because it's very interesting how
melo cactus is much more while the distributed

831
01:05:43,199 --> 01:05:46,320
than the disco cactus. Yeah,
yeah, there's it's just when you look

832
01:05:46,360 --> 01:05:49,320
at the distribution of some of these
plants, and not just cacti, but

833
01:05:49,400 --> 01:05:53,079
you can see, you know,
especially like some of the tribe Ornonia.

834
01:05:54,800 --> 01:05:59,760
Yes, you know, you look
at going up the Caribbean islands into the

835
01:05:59,840 --> 01:06:01,440
end Hillies. I mean, oh
yeah, those are just stepping stones to

836
01:06:01,519 --> 01:06:05,199
South America. You know, it's
there's probably a land bridge at some point

837
01:06:05,840 --> 01:06:11,199
when sea levels were lower or close
enough. You know, the islands were

838
01:06:11,679 --> 01:06:15,599
the wind because those plants are wind
wind dispersed. In the case of mellow

839
01:06:15,679 --> 01:06:21,880
cactus, they are dispersed. They
can be dispersed locally by lizards, but

840
01:06:23,079 --> 01:06:27,519
maybe also by birds. And the
thing that makes this go characters. So

841
01:06:28,119 --> 01:06:33,119
mellow cacter saw so much more widely
dispersed that, unlike the majority of cacti,

842
01:06:34,079 --> 01:06:41,719
is a plant that is able to
self pollinate. Yeah, so no,

843
01:06:41,880 --> 01:06:45,679
mellow cac cactus is unable to do
that. Yeah, that's why mellow

844
01:06:45,719 --> 01:06:49,199
cactus occurs in the Caribbee and in
cool By's everywhere, I think, even

845
01:06:50,000 --> 01:06:58,239
Peru, yeah, Mexico, even
and throughout south throughout Brazil, very hot

846
01:06:58,320 --> 01:07:01,039
place. The adaptive benefit of that
cephalium is that you don't have to create

847
01:07:01,159 --> 01:07:05,400
more stem to flower. You've just
got this basically division of yes, you

848
01:07:06,360 --> 01:07:11,119
do it millimetrically, isn't it.
Every millimeter there will be another flower and

849
01:07:11,199 --> 01:07:16,800
it goes firally inwards and and it
grows taller. Every grows a bit taller,

850
01:07:16,920 --> 01:07:23,840
so you have another batch of flowers
to to to to surge from there.

851
01:07:24,320 --> 01:07:27,880
It's very good. Okay, good
design. Can I can I ask

852
01:07:27,920 --> 01:07:31,480
you? Can I ask you something
about a non cactus related plant? Is

853
01:07:31,559 --> 01:07:36,920
that? Okay? Family? Okay? And I might even be mispronouncing this.

854
01:07:38,239 --> 01:07:43,280
It's in order mertiles, So the
order of Eucalyptus and gabo vo chiesy

855
01:07:43,320 --> 01:07:50,920
a vocizi voc Yes, the tails
and they only have one stamen each.

856
01:07:51,360 --> 01:07:56,119
Yeah, the flowers only have one
stamen. If you look at mertailis in

857
01:07:56,239 --> 01:08:01,239
general, like pomegranateo or marta or
calyptus, you have or the attractiveness that

858
01:08:01,440 --> 01:08:05,679
is based on the presence of stamens. And yet in the same plade we

859
01:08:05,840 --> 01:08:14,159
have occasias with a single statement,
and the stamens are placed alternately in the

860
01:08:14,280 --> 01:08:18,680
flower so that when the pollinated lands, it gets you know, it gets

861
01:08:18,840 --> 01:08:23,560
the falling in one side of the
body, and then the next flower where

862
01:08:23,600 --> 01:08:28,439
he visits or the other will have
the stigma in the mirror positions, so

863
01:08:28,600 --> 01:08:33,640
that this pollen can be transferred.
So it's to promote outcrossing basically yes,

864
01:08:34,560 --> 01:08:41,439
crossing, but with major economy comparing
with with the other members of the clade.

865
01:08:41,720 --> 01:08:45,560
Yeah, these were These were really
cool to come because I had never

866
01:08:45,640 --> 01:08:47,880
heard of the family before and I
was just standing, you know, on

867
01:08:47,960 --> 01:08:50,840
the side of the road looking at
one of these things in the blazing sun.

868
01:08:51,159 --> 01:08:56,840
Just mind blown. It's got this
scleorophylous leaves, you know, really

869
01:08:56,920 --> 01:09:02,159
hard pleaves are amazing. Yeah,
it feels like plans. And the flowers

870
01:09:02,359 --> 01:09:05,399
of most of them, if I'm
not wrong, they have a calker like

871
01:09:05,800 --> 01:09:10,920
like a spur, So that's also
related to the pollination. Very different from

872
01:09:11,000 --> 01:09:16,680
the flowers of all the other metals
that are mostly radially semmetric. Those ones

873
01:09:16,720 --> 01:09:23,640
are zygomorphic and they have this spur. And if you really go to the

874
01:09:23,920 --> 01:09:27,800
to the floral formula very carefully,
you find that they are not even zygomorphic.

875
01:09:27,920 --> 01:09:31,800
They are irregular because they don't have
this You cannot even cut it into

876
01:09:32,039 --> 01:09:39,399
plants into house because they only have
one standing. So I was I was

877
01:09:39,479 --> 01:09:41,960
looking at it. You know what
they look like. They look like from

878
01:09:42,000 --> 01:09:46,479
the you know, the the Sigourney
Weaver movie Aliens flowers, and the flowers

879
01:09:46,560 --> 01:09:50,479
kind of look like the alien head. They're really they're so weird. It's

880
01:09:50,520 --> 01:09:55,439
such a weird shape of it' very
weird, but very beautiful as well.

881
01:09:55,800 --> 01:10:00,399
We call them powerdy to come because
something about the flower looks a bit like

882
01:10:00,479 --> 01:10:05,920
the beak of a token. Yeah, and some of these to canoes are

883
01:10:05,920 --> 01:10:12,760
always puzzling to They seem to be
flying backwards, don't they. I wish

884
01:10:12,800 --> 01:10:15,560
I would have seen one, and
we didn't see any two cans down there.

885
01:10:15,600 --> 01:10:18,479
But but the but so you've got
which is the genus, and there's

886
01:10:18,520 --> 01:10:26,920
another pretty daminant quality as well,
with a big flag shaped petal. Very

887
01:10:27,000 --> 01:10:30,840
beautiful. Some of them, yes, some of them are. The majority

888
01:10:30,920 --> 01:10:36,279
is woody. We don't have any
herbaceous. They always have wood That's something

889
01:10:36,359 --> 01:10:42,439
to do with that clade of of
the of the tail is the dominance of

890
01:10:42,600 --> 01:10:46,279
predominance of plants are woody. Of
course you have bush, bushes and trees,

891
01:10:46,560 --> 01:10:53,199
but don't have herbs. Salverdia convalerio
dora. Yeah, that was a

892
01:10:53,319 --> 01:10:58,520
common one. So vertia, Yeah, that one they called. Yeah,

893
01:10:58,520 --> 01:11:03,199
it's very used meditionally, it's very
widespreading in its distribution and it can be

894
01:11:03,319 --> 01:11:09,359
something that you can say is related
to the whole of the biome of the

895
01:11:10,000 --> 01:11:14,920
because of course from Mario and Pa
all the way down to minus ice and

896
01:11:15,039 --> 01:11:17,199
sometimes and what pollinates? What pollinates
these? I mean, what are some

897
01:11:17,279 --> 01:11:24,000
of the dominant pollinators? You know
those are bees, bees of different size,

898
01:11:24,119 --> 01:11:28,760
sizes and shapes. Some some of
our bumblebees are quite big carpenters as

899
01:11:28,800 --> 01:11:30,600
well. God, they were so
cool. Yeah, I think it's a

900
01:11:30,680 --> 01:11:34,399
large bee. Yeah. These plants
were and the habitats they occurred and were

901
01:11:34,399 --> 01:11:39,079
always incredibly rich and cool too,
and they were you know, some of

902
01:11:39,119 --> 01:11:43,439
these they were really common, really
dominant plants there was. Yeah, they're

903
01:11:43,520 --> 01:11:47,479
very abundant in that habitat, but
once you live that the habitat, they're

904
01:11:47,520 --> 01:11:51,279
also common. Are they do they
what about the I mean, do they

905
01:11:51,439 --> 01:11:58,239
are they like semi succulent? Do
they have any kind of like storage mechanisms?

906
01:11:58,680 --> 01:12:03,119
A lot of the plant have rootstocks
that have reserves. I don't know

907
01:12:03,239 --> 01:12:06,159
particularly about the book, is whether
the don't have that kind of thing.

908
01:12:06,439 --> 01:12:10,479
I know, the asteracy the days
is, especially the tribe you mentioned,

909
01:12:10,560 --> 01:12:16,119
the Venoni, they have those wood
the rootstocks that have storage in them so

910
01:12:16,279 --> 01:12:24,479
the plants can survive fire. The
ability, Yes, xylopodium and the fire

911
01:12:24,600 --> 01:12:27,960
passes and burns most of the area
part of the plant, but it can

912
01:12:28,079 --> 01:12:31,520
risprout from the body. Yeah,
yeah, that's another Yeah, so we

913
01:12:32,000 --> 01:12:36,199
see that like that, you know, really, you know I can do

914
01:12:36,359 --> 01:12:45,159
that, you like, what's what
species? What are some examples. Caulis

915
01:12:45,439 --> 01:12:54,920
has a tuber like formed by the
base of the cloud and also class semples

916
01:12:55,000 --> 01:12:59,920
you may have seen and in the
habitat of Wemonia go mifa that one has

917
01:13:00,239 --> 01:13:04,600
like a carriage, like a nappiform
route. So a lot of them they

918
01:13:04,680 --> 01:13:10,600
can withstand fire because of that,
because the fire is a natural process in

919
01:13:11,079 --> 01:13:15,800
a had it's not as it doesn't
happen as often as the man putting fire

920
01:13:15,840 --> 01:13:18,960
on it, but is a natural
phenomenon. So plants have adaptation. So

921
01:13:19,039 --> 01:13:23,920
there's a lot of fire adaptation in
saharow environments. A lot of plants have

922
01:13:24,000 --> 01:13:28,479
evolved in adaptation to fire. Is
there any seed dormancy that needs fire to

923
01:13:28,600 --> 01:13:33,680
germinate or anything like that? There
is evidence of seed dormancy and lots of

924
01:13:33,760 --> 01:13:39,880
the families they need to be exposed
sometimes to smoke, or they have to

925
01:13:40,000 --> 01:13:44,920
be scarified. You have to break
into them open, make little openings on

926
01:13:45,000 --> 01:13:47,640
the side of the seed to be
able to allow the water in, which

927
01:13:47,640 --> 01:13:53,439
would be things that are similar to
what happens in Australia. In Australia,

928
01:13:53,439 --> 01:13:57,039
it's easier to find fruits that have
to be fired or there was nothing will

929
01:13:57,039 --> 01:14:01,520
happen in Brazil, is not so. I mean, it's not that we

930
01:14:01,600 --> 01:14:06,640
don't have adaptations. We don't have
a list of very obvious adaptations as we

931
01:14:06,800 --> 01:14:13,359
have in Australia. We also have
plants that will come to flower after a

932
01:14:13,399 --> 01:14:18,000
few this burned. Every plant comes
in synchronic flowering and those could be from

933
01:14:18,119 --> 01:14:23,479
many different families, very very easy
to do it, Iery Dasy as well.

934
01:14:24,079 --> 01:14:28,680
So you have you have this flower
synchronicity which helps in the in the

935
01:14:28,760 --> 01:14:33,520
process of pollination, cross pollination and
production of fruit. H Okay, how

936
01:14:33,600 --> 01:14:36,279
much time do you have to know
that you got enough? You got like

937
01:14:36,319 --> 01:14:40,279
half an hour, lefter. I
don't want to take your whole afternoon.

938
01:14:40,359 --> 01:14:45,039
But I'm having a blast there,
just so you know. So I'm very

939
01:14:45,119 --> 01:14:49,239
shacking. You're okay, People tell
me you're okay. I'm fine. Half

940
01:14:49,279 --> 01:14:53,039
an hour is fine. More than
that, I think I have to water

941
01:14:53,159 --> 01:14:57,079
the plants, okay, okay,
So okay, well I don't want to

942
01:14:57,199 --> 01:14:59,920
I don' want to take your whole
afternoon, but okay, so I want

943
01:15:00,159 --> 01:15:03,159
talk about there's a couple of papers
you wrote that I was pouring over yesterday

944
01:15:03,199 --> 01:15:09,760
that are just just really really interesting
stuff going on. One was called the

945
01:15:09,840 --> 01:15:15,159
DFIC Endemism and the Amazon. I
think you co authored it, and it's

946
01:15:15,199 --> 01:15:20,760
about let's talk about some of this
endemism that goes on in the rainforest on

947
01:15:20,960 --> 01:15:26,079
Iron Bridge, on iron rich soils. Yeah, that's very interesting because that

948
01:15:26,319 --> 01:15:31,000
was it was time when I was
working for the mining company as a botanist.

949
01:15:31,079 --> 01:15:35,840
Of course, all those companies need
need the input of biodiversity people to

950
01:15:35,960 --> 01:15:40,279
tell them what is growing in the
grounds and what they had to watch out

951
01:15:40,359 --> 01:15:46,560
for because it's very important that if
there is any endemics, they must make

952
01:15:46,680 --> 01:15:53,279
all possible efforts not to extinguish species. So it's very important and very sensitive

953
01:15:53,319 --> 01:15:57,279
subjects. But as part of that
study, we went to a place that

954
01:15:57,479 --> 01:16:03,560
is absolutely like like a minor bit
too batter plan but it's like you have

955
01:16:04,079 --> 01:16:11,159
places where the soil is very special
and the substrate very interesting. And this

956
01:16:11,359 --> 01:16:16,760
place is Characters, which it's called
one of the biggest mineral provinces in the

957
01:16:16,840 --> 01:16:21,000
world, and the quality of the
air and oil from that area is so

958
01:16:21,239 --> 01:16:30,199
high that is unbelievable. However,
on top of this very special specific open

959
01:16:30,319 --> 01:16:35,119
vegetation, we have a series of
more or less forty or perhaps more now

960
01:16:36,000 --> 01:16:43,039
plants that only grow in those in
that environment. So we were studying those

961
01:16:43,159 --> 01:16:47,520
plants and identifying in them and describing
all the distribution of those plants in order

962
01:16:47,600 --> 01:16:54,600
to provide data on them, because
it's very important that those things are well

963
01:16:54,720 --> 01:16:59,560
known so that it's not like with
the rest of the things in the vegetation

964
01:16:59,680 --> 01:17:02,399
that get destroyed before we even know
them. So that was the purpose of

965
01:17:02,560 --> 01:17:09,279
that work. And it's very interesting
to see how this endemicity, these endemics,

966
01:17:09,640 --> 01:17:15,880
they belong to very different clades of
the tree of life, and depending

967
01:17:15,920 --> 01:17:18,760
on the area where you are,
you have a predominance of some of those

968
01:17:18,800 --> 01:17:25,399
clades and indetterment of others. That
was very interesting to study in terms of

969
01:17:25,479 --> 01:17:29,960
biogeography of the plants. So what
are those plants that were amazing? Yeah,

970
01:17:30,000 --> 01:17:31,079
yeah, I was going to ask
you what are some examples? And

971
01:17:31,199 --> 01:17:34,880
also how does because I'm used to
serpentine, I mean when I learned aficc

972
01:17:35,000 --> 01:17:40,880
endemism, I was Unserpentine in California. I was very lucky there. What

973
01:17:41,359 --> 01:17:46,760
how does ironstone formation direct the evolutionary
trajectory of some of these lineages? And

974
01:17:46,840 --> 01:17:50,279
what are some good examples of the
cool plants that occur? Well, the

975
01:17:50,720 --> 01:17:57,560
the the properties of the iron stone, which is for the geologies, they

976
01:17:57,560 --> 01:18:03,760
don't like us to call it stone
nation. There are more. Is very

977
01:18:03,920 --> 01:18:11,000
dark. We are talking about two
degrees south of the equator, and the

978
01:18:11,119 --> 01:18:15,119
color of this stone is black.
So imagine when the sun shines on that,

979
01:18:15,279 --> 01:18:19,640
it's like friezling the fries almost everything. So a lot of the plants

980
01:18:19,680 --> 01:18:26,920
have very dark pigments, like Brazil
Brazilians in the melestone family. It's like

981
01:18:27,039 --> 01:18:30,359
the leaves are all red. The
plants is all read Karajazia conga as well.

982
01:18:30,520 --> 01:18:36,680
Carajaza is minute. It's like a
plant about five or six centimeters tall

983
01:18:38,199 --> 01:18:46,239
and totally differentiated from other weedy rubiaci
that I know. You have a nippomele

984
01:18:46,319 --> 01:18:51,800
with a bright red flower pollinated by
hummingbirds. You have sorts of different things

985
01:18:51,840 --> 01:18:57,640
there. It's like you landed in
the alien place because all the plants are

986
01:18:57,720 --> 01:19:01,760
so different, and you are surrounded
by pair humid forests all around you.

987
01:19:02,159 --> 01:19:08,199
Then there's an elevation of five hundred
to seven or eight hundred meters above the

988
01:19:08,279 --> 01:19:14,119
sea level, and on those crusts
of very dark rock you have those plants.

989
01:19:14,439 --> 01:19:19,159
However, is more water yielding than
the granite that we studied next door

990
01:19:19,199 --> 01:19:24,359
to it. We did a study
on the granity outgrop and not many of

991
01:19:24,479 --> 01:19:30,359
the plants from the from the Ganga, we call it the iron lock grow

992
01:19:30,600 --> 01:19:33,399
on top of the granite. You
have another group of plants growing in the

993
01:19:33,439 --> 01:19:36,880
granites. It's quite interesting. You're
like, you know, five kilometers ten

994
01:19:36,960 --> 01:19:42,880
kilometers of the crow fly, but
you have a totally different flora on the

995
01:19:44,000 --> 01:19:47,840
on the two areas. You can
only distinguish those things if you have the

996
01:19:48,000 --> 01:19:55,079
lock to have a large team of
people with their specialties and know their plants

997
01:19:55,119 --> 01:20:00,439
and their traditional taxonomists. So it's
very difficult to get to that level of

998
01:20:00,560 --> 01:20:05,199
diversity and handle it if you don't
have a team of people. Oh got

999
01:20:05,239 --> 01:20:10,119
it. What what is as far
as the color of the leaves and this

1000
01:20:10,359 --> 01:20:14,760
this darker color, what what element
of the environment is selecting for that?

1001
01:20:14,960 --> 01:20:17,800
Is it like blending in to avoid
you know, herbivores or is it a

1002
01:20:17,880 --> 01:20:23,159
stress response to the heat and the
I think it's a stress response to the

1003
01:20:23,479 --> 01:20:28,000
light, to the high luminosity that
that you have when when the sun is

1004
01:20:28,079 --> 01:20:31,439
running on top of this blackstone,
everything will becomes corch unless your pigments are

1005
01:20:32,159 --> 01:20:38,840
very condensed and concentrated. I'm assuming
realizes that grow there. They are purple,

1006
01:20:38,920 --> 01:20:42,359
The lives are purple. That's crazy, God, that sounds amazing.

1007
01:20:42,479 --> 01:20:46,359
I'm assuming things don't get very tall
here and these ironstone habitats. No,

1008
01:20:46,920 --> 01:20:51,279
you can have. You can.
If you have water bodies, information of

1009
01:20:51,439 --> 01:20:57,039
soil, things start changing. The
soil starts changing and you start having like

1010
01:20:57,199 --> 01:21:00,560
copses and groves of plants. But
in general, no, you have this

1011
01:21:00,720 --> 01:21:05,199
bare, bare rock. And one
of the things we had to prove was

1012
01:21:05,279 --> 01:21:10,399
that this bare rock in the Amazon
was different from the bare rock in the

1013
01:21:10,479 --> 01:21:15,520
state where you visit the minergeries near
the city of belloy Zoune, because for

1014
01:21:15,760 --> 01:21:19,600
people who are lay and are very
interested in the substrate, be much nicer

1015
01:21:19,680 --> 01:21:21,880
to say, oh, these are
all the same plants, it's all the

1016
01:21:21,960 --> 01:21:29,319
same thing. But we found in
our research that the flora bears no resemblance

1017
01:21:29,359 --> 01:21:32,520
to the one from so far away. Is our toc to news is locally

1018
01:21:33,079 --> 01:21:39,479
evolved. We don't know how long, for how many millions of years it

1019
01:21:39,560 --> 01:21:43,920
took, but it's very precious and
it has to be preserved so isolated.

1020
01:21:44,079 --> 01:21:45,560
God, I bet man, how
many endemics. I mean, there's got

1021
01:21:45,640 --> 01:21:50,960
to be hundreds of it. We
only because of the because of the trade,

1022
01:21:51,119 --> 01:21:56,199
of the mining trade. We called
it endemic affic because there are also

1023
01:21:56,319 --> 01:22:00,000
species that grow both in the conga
and in the granny or in the sand

1024
01:22:01,079 --> 01:22:05,359
Sundy area below. So we had
to discount a those So oh, you

1025
01:22:05,399 --> 01:22:11,199
know, we made forty forty two
species that a pandemic to the to the

1026
01:22:11,760 --> 01:22:14,680
iron ore in that region. So
you guys, you guys, that are

1027
01:22:14,960 --> 01:22:17,600
it's quite a high number. Yeah, that's well. It was the floristic

1028
01:22:18,039 --> 01:22:25,199
floristic work. We had floristic accounts, which are like accounts with the descriptions

1029
01:22:25,239 --> 01:22:29,920
of the families general and species for
all the families we found, because we

1030
01:22:30,000 --> 01:22:33,000
also wanted to see what the biodiversity
was, so we got to more than

1031
01:22:33,720 --> 01:22:40,239
I think seven hundred species growing in
those in those outcrops. We discounted the

1032
01:22:40,319 --> 01:22:45,039
forest because you need another another five
lives to do the forest. But to

1033
01:22:45,159 --> 01:22:54,039
be clear, the Congo is ironstone, iron habitat surrounded surrounded by Amazonian rainforest

1034
01:22:54,800 --> 01:22:59,720
by perubid Yeah on Brophilus forests.
Yeah, God, that sounds so cool?

1035
01:23:00,239 --> 01:23:01,640
Is there? Do you know?
Is there like a good book even

1036
01:23:01,680 --> 01:23:05,920
if it's in Portuguese, of that
you could recommend the listeners. I wrote

1037
01:23:05,960 --> 01:23:10,159
a book. I don't know whether
you can't get get the book. I

1038
01:23:10,239 --> 01:23:14,319
wrote a book for the company when
I was there. It's called Landscape and

1039
01:23:14,479 --> 01:23:18,520
Plant Landscapes and Plants from Karajans.
And it's bilingual, so it's called bull

1040
01:23:18,640 --> 01:23:26,239
languages and is interesting. Maybe it
existed the Amazon c A R A j

1041
01:23:26,760 --> 01:23:30,600
A j A s Is there is
there a good Is there a good like

1042
01:23:30,800 --> 01:23:35,239
textbook on and all the different this
sounds kind of like a tall order too,

1043
01:23:36,239 --> 01:23:42,359
and all the different biomes and and
ecosystems of Brazil or even like or

1044
01:23:42,439 --> 01:23:45,560
even just one on campus pro Pesstorates, one on Saharo, one on Kachinga.

1045
01:23:46,479 --> 01:23:49,960
You know where people can read where
these relationships where it's not just about

1046
01:23:49,960 --> 01:23:54,199
one plant species, but it's about
the biome itself and the plants that grow

1047
01:23:54,239 --> 01:23:56,960
there in the plant community. Is
there anything like that? You know?

1048
01:23:59,119 --> 01:24:02,720
I think there are some in the
Atlantic forest that I can remember. And

1049
01:24:02,840 --> 01:24:10,680
there'll be books on the Sehado for
the protected areas on the Sejado so for

1050
01:24:10,800 --> 01:24:15,439
the Chapados viad something comes to mind. I don't know the titles by heart,

1051
01:24:15,560 --> 01:24:23,279
but they will be mostly relating to
the to the protected areas like national

1052
01:24:23,399 --> 01:24:28,520
park somethings like that. And I
think there is a wonderful book on webeil

1053
01:24:28,600 --> 01:24:32,800
money that deals much more with the
shoots and ma shadow, that deals much

1054
01:24:32,880 --> 01:24:38,039
more with the with the habitat and
the interesting things of webil money than with

1055
01:24:38,159 --> 01:24:42,159
the species. Is excellent book and
very well illustrated. What is the name

1056
01:24:42,239 --> 01:24:45,680
of it, you know? I
think it's the genus web build money.

1057
01:24:46,119 --> 01:24:50,520
Let me see it's on the shelf. Get to the shelf. Oh my

1058
01:24:50,640 --> 01:24:56,199
god. Your library, your personal
library has got to be amazing. It's

1059
01:24:56,199 --> 01:25:00,399
a bit problematic because half of our
life was in the UK and the house

1060
01:25:00,520 --> 01:25:03,800
is his, so the library is
likewise divided. So you have the book.

1061
01:25:03,840 --> 01:25:12,199
It's called webbel Monia. The authors
are Shoots and Shad Shoots U L.

1062
01:25:12,359 --> 01:25:18,359
T C S C H U L
z shoots without the t Okay,

1063
01:25:19,399 --> 01:25:23,600
there is there is a book on
the cartings that's good. Is the Floor

1064
01:25:23,680 --> 01:25:27,359
of the Cartingers of the San Francisco
River. That's also by Ling Books.

1065
01:25:27,359 --> 01:25:31,119
I mean there's there is an English
and a Brazilian edition and the author is

1066
01:25:31,279 --> 01:25:42,000
Cicada Florida Floor of the Cartinga Flora
of the Cartingas of the San Francisco River.

1067
01:25:42,359 --> 01:25:46,760
It's very nice because it includes natural
history and conservation. And that's with

1068
01:25:47,000 --> 01:25:53,159
three a's right, yeah, yeah, to to start and want to finish.

1069
01:25:55,439 --> 01:25:59,840
Okay, So with this with this
ironstone, how do you pronounce the

1070
01:25:59,840 --> 01:26:05,359
heir? But that type the conga
and g yeah, conga. So I

1071
01:26:05,720 --> 01:26:10,159
presume this iron is there. You
know, it's very old rock, great

1072
01:26:10,239 --> 01:26:14,720
oxidation event, that's very old.
Is that is that generally speaking correct?

1073
01:26:14,760 --> 01:26:16,399
I mean because normally when you find
iron ores, you know, dated to

1074
01:26:16,479 --> 01:26:20,239
the Great Oxidation event, it's very
old rock, you know, two billion

1075
01:26:20,359 --> 01:26:25,880
years old. It's yeah, it's
old, but at the same time it's

1076
01:26:26,000 --> 01:26:30,680
dynamic. You know, the diversification
we talk about in terms of the species

1077
01:26:30,000 --> 01:26:35,159
here in Brazil, even in the
super diverse habitats like campest Is Plaily your

1078
01:26:35,239 --> 01:26:41,159
place to see it doesn't go back
further than there was all this. Who

1079
01:26:41,239 --> 01:26:45,000
have about the theory of the museums
and cradles? Remember that one what was

1080
01:26:45,079 --> 01:26:48,640
that everybody was talking about that?
Well, that the origin of some groups

1081
01:26:48,680 --> 01:26:51,960
of plants? Was it an old
origin? Like you're looking at the Camp

1082
01:26:53,079 --> 01:26:57,039
Hopest and is it a museum or
you're looking at the Camp Hopest and is

1083
01:26:57,079 --> 01:27:01,600
it a cradle of new new species
lineages? Yeah? I think so far.

1084
01:27:02,079 --> 01:27:06,039
Yeah, yeah. The the only
the only thing that was proven is

1085
01:27:06,119 --> 01:27:12,079
that is the species that we see
now theres are very recent, right right

1086
01:27:12,199 --> 01:27:15,039
right, Well, I'm talking of
the geology itself. Thought so when when

1087
01:27:15,119 --> 01:27:18,239
I look at the yeah, the
geology is old, but the dynamics of

1088
01:27:18,399 --> 01:27:24,479
what is on top of the geology
is quite fast, you know, because

1089
01:27:24,520 --> 01:27:29,039
we have climatic changes that occur every
so many, you know, hundreds of

1090
01:27:30,000 --> 01:27:33,439
thousands of years, so you don't
have a stable environment everywhere, and things

1091
01:27:33,560 --> 01:27:40,680
move a lot, and there are
major moments like the moment when when the

1092
01:27:40,800 --> 01:27:48,079
grasses evolve the mechanisms to cope with
the with the sad and then they expand

1093
01:27:48,600 --> 01:27:55,720
greatly, so they do the Sea
four mechanism or the cam mechanism. In

1094
01:27:55,760 --> 01:28:00,359
the case of the cacti, those
are key moments when plants migrate from one

1095
01:28:00,439 --> 01:28:03,800
habitat to the other. On the
other hand, you have this this dry

1096
01:28:04,399 --> 01:28:10,399
and dry and hot periods alternated with
wet and humid periods, so you have

1097
01:28:10,600 --> 01:28:16,159
an expansion of those forests that in
in Brazil there there are two major areas,

1098
01:28:16,199 --> 01:28:18,840
one forest in the coast, one
in the Amazon, and those things

1099
01:28:18,880 --> 01:28:24,079
seem to have united at some stage. Imagine it leaves very little habitats for

1100
01:28:24,199 --> 01:28:28,239
the cacta. Yeah, that's you
know, that was when that happened.

1101
01:28:28,479 --> 01:28:31,880
I didn't see many grasses even though
I was or maybe I just wasn't.

1102
01:28:32,079 --> 01:28:38,600
I saw lots of leganocorpuses that that
diamond diamin and genus are said, yeah,

1103
01:28:38,640 --> 01:28:43,760
yeah, but I didn't see I
don't remember seeing many grasses. But

1104
01:28:43,880 --> 01:28:48,359
Saharo is a grassland, right,
Yes, it's a grassland. But we

1105
01:28:48,439 --> 01:28:53,760
could says the grassland of in general, because you have the sedge, just

1106
01:28:53,800 --> 01:28:59,439
the separation, the recal relation.
However you do have you do have for

1107
01:28:59,520 --> 01:29:04,680
example, the Conga work we did. Our leader was Pedro Viana is grass

1108
01:29:04,760 --> 01:29:11,760
expert and the biggest family of plants
in those outcrops was the grasses. The

1109
01:29:11,880 --> 01:29:15,359
thing is that people don't have a
good eye for grasses, so they all

1110
01:29:15,479 --> 01:29:18,760
step on the grasses and the grass
is just like the next one. But

1111
01:29:18,920 --> 01:29:23,520
it's not so, it's not so. It's a very diverse group needs another

1112
01:29:23,600 --> 01:29:28,600
lifetime, and luckily we have our
friends that are dedicating their lifetime to them.

1113
01:29:29,239 --> 01:29:31,399
But the grasses are very diverse.
The other thing you went in July

1114
01:29:31,600 --> 01:29:36,840
when the grasses would be all over, and only when the rains start they're

1115
01:29:36,880 --> 01:29:42,840
going to develop. And there's some
beautiful grasses in the Cat's amazing, is

1116
01:29:42,920 --> 01:29:45,079
there the congo stuff though? I
mean, how threatened is that? I

1117
01:29:45,199 --> 01:29:48,079
imagine if it's sitting on a bunch
of iron ore, it's you know,

1118
01:29:48,119 --> 01:29:51,920
there's a demand to tear up.
There is a machine looking at it.

1119
01:29:55,880 --> 01:30:00,439
Man, that's that's crazy. So
so much endemism and so much richness and

1120
01:30:00,800 --> 01:30:04,680
an endangered plant a very narrow distribution. Yeah, yeah, exactly, so

1121
01:30:05,800 --> 01:30:11,359
the or the There are lots of
studies of the dynamics of the populations and

1122
01:30:11,439 --> 01:30:16,279
so on, trying to trying to
work out how to how to allow those

1123
01:30:16,319 --> 01:30:21,680
plans to remain because the grid over
this aren ois is just two immense m

1124
01:30:21,840 --> 01:30:26,920
hm. And you never know when
when one company would hand over to the

1125
01:30:26,960 --> 01:30:30,520
other because there is a thing called
exhausting the mind, and then the other

1126
01:30:30,640 --> 01:30:34,359
companies come and finish, finish exhausting
and so dynamics of that trade is very

1127
01:30:34,560 --> 01:30:40,720
very very tough. Yeah, yeah, very seriously. There wasn't there There

1128
01:30:40,800 --> 01:30:44,640
was a species of Erosia doa was
that on iron that was just discovered and

1129
01:30:44,680 --> 01:30:46,800
then it was like immediately endangered and
they had to move a bunch of plants.

1130
01:30:48,319 --> 01:30:53,840
Was that. There's a species of
disco cactus called disco cactus species bibles

1131
01:30:53,880 --> 01:30:59,000
that is being found on top of
of conga recently that we described. Also,

1132
01:30:59,039 --> 01:31:01,880
it doesn't sent it grows on on
iron or does it like iron sand

1133
01:31:02,000 --> 01:31:05,159
or what? It grows on iron
pebbles? Yeah, like iron pebbles.

1134
01:31:05,760 --> 01:31:10,960
You can see that. Sometimes you
have iron gravel and when that forms is

1135
01:31:11,760 --> 01:31:15,359
good enough for the disco catters.
Some disco catters growing kind of tough limestone

1136
01:31:15,800 --> 01:31:18,840
habitats as well. Not all of
them grow on sand. What is the

1137
01:31:18,960 --> 01:31:24,920
disco cact Is it the one on
iron? What's the species name? It's

1138
01:31:25,000 --> 01:31:30,119
named after the river called Page Bravo, which is. It means the brave

1139
01:31:30,279 --> 01:31:38,359
Fish river. So we name the
piece barbarous in Latinised to make an allusion

1140
01:31:38,399 --> 01:31:41,960
to this river. It's in northern
Meanness, it's not far from Gromgo,

1141
01:31:43,640 --> 01:31:46,920
but the land is already owned by
the by the mining companies. So this

1142
01:31:47,119 --> 01:31:54,399
is a very prospected, very narrow
distribution the species, Yes, very narrow.

1143
01:31:54,560 --> 01:31:58,439
Yeah, now that's a cute plant. Yeah, but it's the I

1144
01:31:58,479 --> 01:32:02,920
mean, this genus is seemingly it's
colonized every rough environment where I can outcompete

1145
01:32:03,439 --> 01:32:09,399
things that get bigger and yeah,
but always always it became it always made

1146
01:32:09,560 --> 01:32:15,800
small populations and distribution not very wide. I mean, I think the most

1147
01:32:15,840 --> 01:32:20,359
widely distributed is Hepta con Paraguay,
I believe in Brazil, but the rest

1148
01:32:20,439 --> 01:32:24,880
of them, especially on some eastern
Brazil, don't have very big distributions.

1149
01:32:25,520 --> 01:32:28,920
How many species in the genus that
that are known, because there's new plants

1150
01:32:29,000 --> 01:32:30,920
being described in Brazil. I mean
when I was there, I saw like

1151
01:32:31,039 --> 01:32:35,199
five species that have been described in
the last two years. How many species

1152
01:32:35,239 --> 01:32:38,920
if disco characters are known? Yeah, some of them are allow, some

1153
01:32:39,079 --> 01:32:44,880
of them are disallowed. Are some
of them are what? I don't allow.

1154
01:32:45,319 --> 01:32:48,560
Oh, yeah, that it's they're
they're the same. You're saying,

1155
01:32:48,600 --> 01:32:57,000
there's there's the differences. Yeah.
I contribute to the Brazilian list and Flora

1156
01:32:57,039 --> 01:33:04,640
of plants. That is, that
is our web based real time system.

1157
01:33:04,720 --> 01:33:09,720
That's maybe we'll talk another time about
that one because it takes too long.

1158
01:33:10,239 --> 01:33:16,399
But in this one I have in
Brazil today, it's slowly in the stuff.

1159
01:33:17,199 --> 01:33:26,319
It's about twelve species, ten of
them endemics. And yeah, so

1160
01:33:26,920 --> 01:33:30,279
that's that's that's the size of it. And the and the stated most of

1161
01:33:30,359 --> 01:33:34,479
them it's Minasueta is followed by bay
mm hmm. Yeah those but here,

1162
01:33:34,560 --> 01:33:36,520
Yeah, we didn't make it,
but here I want to go there.

1163
01:33:36,560 --> 01:33:40,199
At some point, it just looks
it looks nuicte you. I was very

1164
01:33:40,239 --> 01:33:44,039
impressed. Getting off topic here for
a minute. With the food there,

1165
01:33:44,119 --> 01:33:45,119
I got to say, it's you
know, you go to like a truck

1166
01:33:45,159 --> 01:33:50,600
stop in America, your your your
options are like greasy chips and sugary drinks.

1167
01:33:50,920 --> 01:33:54,960
But I went to a truck stop
in Minas and they had like a

1168
01:33:55,039 --> 01:33:58,359
buffet of very healthy food. I
was very impressed. You know, the

1169
01:33:58,439 --> 01:34:00,960
truckers there have good tastes. It
was one of my highlights. So the

1170
01:34:01,039 --> 01:34:05,560
truckers were king. You know,
it's quite sudden when I think of how

1171
01:34:05,640 --> 01:34:11,439
the evolution was when I when I
first started botany so many years ago.

1172
01:34:11,880 --> 01:34:15,000
You go to the place to the
shoe has carreers by the road, and

1173
01:34:15,319 --> 01:34:18,760
when you saw enough trucks parked there, so that must be a good one.

1174
01:34:18,880 --> 01:34:26,119
So stopped there and had the truck
drivers was sitting by this, sitting

1175
01:34:26,479 --> 01:34:30,640
and not facing each other in diagonal
with another very large truck driver and having

1176
01:34:30,720 --> 01:34:38,279
a magnificent meal because they were the
owners of the roads. And all that

1177
01:34:38,479 --> 01:34:44,600
has has has come to an end
in the last ten or fifteen years with

1178
01:34:44,760 --> 01:34:49,479
the over provision of well the credit
became easier, so everybody could buy a

1179
01:34:49,600 --> 01:34:57,920
truck. So there is an excessive
offer of freight in the country. So

1180
01:34:58,119 --> 01:35:01,399
they have to lower their price,
or they do that or they become they

1181
01:35:01,479 --> 01:35:05,960
belong to big companies that just paid
them a small salary. They were independent

1182
01:35:06,079 --> 01:35:12,079
guys, you know, and now
they are totally cool. Yeah, the

1183
01:35:12,199 --> 01:35:15,880
market totally flooded and they are no
longer the kings of the road anymore.

1184
01:35:16,600 --> 01:35:19,840
Such because they were quite you know, there were some characters. You know,

1185
01:35:20,279 --> 01:35:24,520
nowadays they have two resorts to all
sorts of things like drugs and things

1186
01:35:24,560 --> 01:35:29,119
to keep driving for longer and longer
hours. And oh it's so fun.

1187
01:35:29,800 --> 01:35:32,640
They became ubers of trucks. Yeah, yeah, that's yeah. I used

1188
01:35:32,640 --> 01:35:36,439
to work for I worked for the
freight railroad here in the United States a

1189
01:35:36,479 --> 01:35:41,199
while ago. And uh, you
always hear that among the old heads,

1190
01:35:41,239 --> 01:35:43,520
the people that have been there for
a long time. This job used to

1191
01:35:43,600 --> 01:35:47,119
be great, and then the company
just started screwing their employees and just you

1192
01:35:47,199 --> 01:35:51,920
know, fighting them over stuff,
and things became you know, the wages

1193
01:35:53,000 --> 01:35:57,479
became less, et cetera. But
okay, well usual, I've just got

1194
01:35:57,560 --> 01:36:01,119
such pleasant memories of going into a
truck stop expecting to find like unhealthy trash

1195
01:36:01,199 --> 01:36:06,159
food and finding like someone's mom had
just made a wonderful buffet, like healthy.

1196
01:36:06,640 --> 01:36:13,119
I was blown away with some salad, some beans and that. Yeah,

1197
01:36:13,279 --> 01:36:15,000
it was like some sort of None
of the truckers here have diabetes,

1198
01:36:15,439 --> 01:36:17,760
you know, or they're like four
hundred. But that was the solution.

1199
01:36:18,000 --> 01:36:23,079
That was the solution for the former
mules were like served at the table.

1200
01:36:23,159 --> 01:36:25,880
They will bring all those little dishes
of things to the table. Be like

1201
01:36:26,039 --> 01:36:30,680
Mexico but they invented this Skilo system, which is much better in terms of

1202
01:36:31,079 --> 01:36:34,359
use of resource because not a lot
of food gets thrown away. You put

1203
01:36:34,439 --> 01:36:38,720
on your plate only what you're going
to eat, and you wait, and

1204
01:36:39,359 --> 01:36:45,119
you know, I have my son
in law has a knack of managing to

1205
01:36:45,199 --> 01:36:47,600
fit a whole kilogram on one of
those plates. But it's quite difficult to

1206
01:36:47,680 --> 01:36:50,439
do a stack it. You know, it's an art. Stacking it as

1207
01:36:50,479 --> 01:36:55,880
an art. You make a nice
little pile exactly. He's he's got circus

1208
01:36:57,119 --> 01:37:00,359
talents. So he manages to do
that. Must be something to do with

1209
01:37:00,479 --> 01:37:01,960
balanced. Yeah, it's amazing.
Well, okay, so I'll let you

1210
01:37:02,039 --> 01:37:06,359
go here in ten minutes. I
want to talk about one more paper beyond

1211
01:37:06,439 --> 01:37:14,319
okay, maquisy Okay, yeah,
Beyond forst and Amazon biogeography in floristic relationships

1212
01:37:14,359 --> 01:37:16,439
with the Amazonian savannahs. We've kind
of already talked about this, but what

1213
01:37:16,760 --> 01:37:19,560
was this? What was this?
How would you sum up this paper?

1214
01:37:19,960 --> 01:37:26,399
And what is what's what is it
about? Biogology? Again? Again,

1215
01:37:26,640 --> 01:37:30,720
it was an investigation that we were
able to do because we are a big

1216
01:37:30,840 --> 01:37:39,079
team and collaborations are very important for
doing largely floristic analysis that makes sense.

1217
01:37:39,640 --> 01:37:46,560
So we went to some some campeinn
aanas or savannahs in the Amazon and did

1218
01:37:46,640 --> 01:37:51,000
collections there and got very curious to
know whether this was seja do or not.

1219
01:37:51,600 --> 01:37:56,600
And Saha Do is a biome self
contained in the center of Brazil,

1220
01:37:56,960 --> 01:38:00,479
and it doesn't really enter the Amazon, where you have doe vegetations that are

1221
01:38:00,520 --> 01:38:05,399
savanas, but they actually don't have
floristic elements enough floristic elements in common with

1222
01:38:05,560 --> 01:38:12,800
the shadu to be called sea do. And the work calls because formerly all

1223
01:38:12,880 --> 01:38:17,319
the studies just took into consideration the
tree flora, the floras of trees,

1224
01:38:18,079 --> 01:38:24,319
but we did a complete work looking
at every little herb we could collect and

1225
01:38:24,479 --> 01:38:30,479
identify herbs lianas, shrubs, trees
as well. So if you do that

1226
01:38:30,920 --> 01:38:34,640
you may get a different picture from
what people were saying before. So that

1227
01:38:34,880 --> 01:38:42,159
was the point of that work was
to enhance some floristic list, that is

1228
01:38:42,279 --> 01:38:45,880
my fourth thing I do all the
time, by selling it a bit up

1229
01:38:46,439 --> 01:38:49,520
in the market rather than just this
is a floristic list, goes into a

1230
01:38:49,600 --> 01:38:56,039
little journal, local journal and doesn't
get any impact. We are forced to

1231
01:38:56,119 --> 01:39:00,239
make impacts of as scientists, so
that that's the way you can and do

1232
01:39:00,640 --> 01:39:04,239
a very good job that you trust
and also that hits other right notes.

1233
01:39:04,720 --> 01:39:10,760
I just love the idea of composing
a list of species, of not talking

1234
01:39:10,800 --> 01:39:14,560
about just one or two species,
but the whole plant community is studying the

1235
01:39:14,680 --> 01:39:16,520
dynamics that exists within that can.
I want to do something like that for

1236
01:39:16,640 --> 01:39:24,760
South Texas, because there's not really
well there's like a book on South and

1237
01:39:24,880 --> 01:39:28,000
I want to do school books.
I want to do books for the local

1238
01:39:28,119 --> 01:39:30,520
kids here to know that they are
not in the Atlantic Forest, because we

1239
01:39:30,640 --> 01:39:34,720
live in in the inner part of
that year, and there is such an

1240
01:39:34,920 --> 01:39:41,880
overvaluation of the Atlantic Forest that when
it comes to the Day of the Environment,

1241
01:39:41,960 --> 01:39:44,880
which is in June, they come
and ring me and say, oh,

1242
01:39:44,960 --> 01:39:46,920
can you talk about the Atlantic voice? As I know, I'm going

1243
01:39:46,960 --> 01:39:51,760
to talk about the catinga no no
athletic forests for you or the couple opestive.

1244
01:39:51,840 --> 01:39:58,920
But there's this over emphasis on some
vegetations and that place with the psyche

1245
01:39:59,039 --> 01:40:03,039
of people pasted. It was even
worse because it was more like an European

1246
01:40:03,520 --> 01:40:08,840
eeropization of the culture. So you
went to school and you learned a both

1247
01:40:09,520 --> 01:40:15,359
days is and strawberries and roses and
elephants and animals don't care here, so

1248
01:40:15,479 --> 01:40:19,319
you don't know anything about the local
flora or phone. So I think what

1249
01:40:19,439 --> 01:40:24,600
we need to do is is more
books that can be e books or hard

1250
01:40:24,720 --> 01:40:27,640
copies, but is what I want
to do. You know that I was

1251
01:40:27,720 --> 01:40:30,119
in near future, I will say, that's something that kind of blew my

1252
01:40:30,199 --> 01:40:32,720
mind. Being there was I was
so I mean from the minute I got

1253
01:40:32,800 --> 01:40:36,079
there and started looking at things,
I was blown away and just enamored with

1254
01:40:36,199 --> 01:40:41,319
the flora there and just so curious
and just just you know, everything was

1255
01:40:41,399 --> 01:40:45,600
a great mystery and so cool.
And when I went to like a bookstore

1256
01:40:45,239 --> 01:40:47,960
and looked up you know, I
was looking for like books or like a

1257
01:40:48,199 --> 01:40:51,640
guide to like basic plants, there
was nothing, Like, there was nothing.

1258
01:40:51,640 --> 01:40:55,199
It just seemed like, you know, in popular culture, there was

1259
01:40:55,319 --> 01:40:58,640
very little awareness of the native flora
of Brazil. And I thought, this

1260
01:40:58,760 --> 01:41:00,520
is one of the most biodiverse plays
in the in the world. How could

1261
01:41:00,560 --> 01:41:04,520
that be? Yeah, Well,
it's the same with all sorts of things.

1262
01:41:05,439 --> 01:41:08,760
If you got the bookshop, you're
not going to find a lot on

1263
01:41:08,840 --> 01:41:14,640
the on the local authors, or
you find a lot of self help books

1264
01:41:14,920 --> 01:41:19,439
translated from American sources or things like
that. Women are for from venus and

1265
01:41:19,479 --> 01:41:26,119
stuff. So it's it's very if
you, if you look at the overall

1266
01:41:26,640 --> 01:41:31,039
reader pattern of Brazilian population is very
low. People don't have books at home.

1267
01:41:31,920 --> 01:41:39,199
It's very very there's very little interest
in those things, and people are

1268
01:41:39,319 --> 01:41:42,880
very much in crisis because books are
going to disappear. Maybe they never existed

1269
01:41:43,359 --> 01:41:45,159
after all, do you think,
I mean, do you because so few

1270
01:41:45,239 --> 01:41:50,039
people consumed? Yeah? Yeah,
I mean everything is short form content and

1271
01:41:50,239 --> 01:41:55,760
you know, the shorter, shorter
attention span with every passing generation. But

1272
01:41:56,319 --> 01:42:00,359
but I just the awareness of native
plants and the popular mind in Brazil,

1273
01:42:00,439 --> 01:42:02,520
like do you think that's never going
to be a reality Because you go to

1274
01:42:02,600 --> 01:42:06,319
New Zealand, they're all about their
native plants. They've got native plants printed

1275
01:42:06,359 --> 01:42:11,039
on the currency, the native mushrooms
there. I mean, I love the

1276
01:42:11,039 --> 01:42:16,640
same. We do have some animals
in our currency plants though some animals judge

1277
01:42:18,840 --> 01:42:26,359
in perception is a real, real
problem in Brazil and the efforts I've been

1278
01:42:26,479 --> 01:42:30,760
making with I have a student who's
a master's just finished. She's a teacher,

1279
01:42:30,840 --> 01:42:33,720
school teacher, and she came said, I want to explain this a

1280
01:42:33,800 --> 01:42:38,800
handle to my kids at school,
and we did a lot of initiatives with

1281
01:42:38,920 --> 01:42:45,199
her. The interesting thing is that
it is possible, but the diversity hinders

1282
01:42:45,279 --> 01:42:48,399
you. It's much easier for school
kids in the UK, where my daughters

1283
01:42:48,439 --> 01:42:53,479
went to school, to know,
you know, the butter cup and the

1284
01:42:54,560 --> 01:43:00,000
bulbs, the bluebells and all those
things, and the winter leaves, the

1285
01:43:00,079 --> 01:43:05,800
plantain and the platinus and the beaches. It's much easier if you have six

1286
01:43:05,960 --> 01:43:11,520
or eight species of three and some
twenty herbs. So if you get to

1287
01:43:11,600 --> 01:43:15,079
the comple who passed, like I
do with the students from the school,

1288
01:43:15,119 --> 01:43:18,199
here, where do I start.
Yeah, it's too much, it's too

1289
01:43:18,279 --> 01:43:24,840
cool, you know for you you're
a season botanist, but for you it's

1290
01:43:25,000 --> 01:43:29,640
already mind boggling. Imagine for a
child that's never you know, nobody introduced

1291
01:43:29,680 --> 01:43:32,079
them to any plants apart from you
know, perhaps the papaya tree in the

1292
01:43:32,279 --> 01:43:35,960
in the back garden or something like
that, but not a great variety,

1293
01:43:36,039 --> 01:43:41,720
and then suddenly through them then you
want them to absorb exactly what So we

1294
01:43:41,840 --> 01:43:46,520
are basing our working and noticeable plants
because just all of them is too much

1295
01:43:47,840 --> 01:43:53,199
and trying it this way. Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. If you

1296
01:43:53,359 --> 01:43:58,279
move it's a continental size country from
from the north to the south. You

1297
01:43:58,359 --> 01:44:00,119
know you're going to teach us I
from my guy from You're going to do

1298
01:44:00,239 --> 01:44:06,000
south, or you're going to teach
Marti herb To to a person from from

1299
01:44:06,199 --> 01:44:11,239
northeastern Brazil, never going to see
that plant in their lives. So there

1300
01:44:11,319 --> 01:44:15,960
has to be catering for regions.
So you need to regionalize the knowledge of

1301
01:44:16,079 --> 01:44:18,720
all those things. How do we
get how do we It's very difficult to

1302
01:44:18,760 --> 01:44:21,680
get them in the curriculum. You
have a national curriculum, and how are

1303
01:44:21,720 --> 01:44:25,920
you going to do that? I
bet we got to get Wonder Wonder,

1304
01:44:26,000 --> 01:44:30,479
Licky and Mirabolis on the state flag
of miniatures. Could we do? We

1305
01:44:30,560 --> 01:44:33,640
gotta voted at some point, we
gotta I nominated. We have We have

1306
01:44:34,199 --> 01:44:44,319
a municipality in in Bahias and Zida
which has three big looking Bahiguda trees in

1307
01:44:44,560 --> 01:44:48,279
in its flag. So some some
have have seen that have done that.

1308
01:44:49,880 --> 01:45:00,600
They are those they're like be bubs
no cavan Lesis cavany Lesia trees and they

1309
01:45:00,640 --> 01:45:03,359
have a symbol in the in the
flag with three of them. Very How

1310
01:45:03,399 --> 01:45:05,359
do you how do you spell that? And I'm going to look it up.

1311
01:45:06,880 --> 01:45:14,920
The cavan Cavanades Cavanilis was a Spanish
botanist. Cavanilis c A V A

1312
01:45:15,920 --> 01:45:24,760
I L L E s cal Cavanilesia. Let me see what family is it

1313
01:45:24,840 --> 01:45:30,359
in this used to be you know, oh right, okay, yeah,

1314
01:45:30,399 --> 01:45:32,960
so it is the Bao bab claid
yeah, cavan Alicia, Yeah, yes,

1315
01:45:33,399 --> 01:45:38,119
Oh my god, what is this? I didn't even know about this.

1316
01:45:39,119 --> 01:45:45,960
This is the next time you come
to That's amazing. It's literally a

1317
01:45:45,039 --> 01:45:48,920
Bao bab. It's like it's somewhat
skinnier, which isn't saying much. Bao

1318
01:45:49,039 --> 01:45:53,960
bab? God, where is a
very nice plant? Where is this?

1319
01:45:55,479 --> 01:46:02,479
Oh? God? And they's associated
with limestone grounds. There's limes, yeah,

1320
01:46:02,600 --> 01:46:09,760
amazing, limestone associated with the river
some Francis. Okay, one last

1321
01:46:09,800 --> 01:46:12,640
thing, but this paper we were
talking about, there's we're talking about.

1322
01:46:13,000 --> 01:46:17,760
I noticed in the paper that we
were just mentioning there was a biogeographically we

1323
01:46:17,920 --> 01:46:23,640
talked that. It mentioned the Guiana
shield and there's kind of are there similar

1324
01:46:23,760 --> 01:46:28,439
plants that kind of get into this
other habitat For a lot of people want

1325
01:46:28,479 --> 01:46:32,680
to want to talk about similar plants
between the camp and the Guyana Shield.

1326
01:46:33,199 --> 01:46:42,000
But the the the points of Venezuela
and northern Brazil and in the Guyanas,

1327
01:46:42,359 --> 01:46:46,920
they are very specific vegetation, so
you have lots of general datonio there.

1328
01:46:48,119 --> 01:46:51,119
In physiognomy, they may look a
bit like a campo who pasted, but

1329
01:46:51,359 --> 01:46:56,960
it's higher and it's wet all the
year around. The people who go in

1330
01:46:57,039 --> 01:47:01,239
expeditions there, they can't dry up. Yeah, they went from the moment

1331
01:47:01,319 --> 01:47:05,840
the helicopter lands until the moment they
are taken away. So it is a

1332
01:47:05,920 --> 01:47:15,319
different it's a different climatic requirement.
That's the It's got a lot of endemics.

1333
01:47:15,119 --> 01:47:19,479
It doesn't have such a big flora
overall like each outcrop is, but

1334
01:47:19,880 --> 01:47:27,520
between eighty and one hundred species,
so it's but all those species are just

1335
01:47:27,640 --> 01:47:30,279
amazing. And there are some families
that make the bridge, like it's one

1336
01:47:30,319 --> 01:47:34,760
of the Rappa, which is close
to the groundses that makes the bridge between

1337
01:47:34,840 --> 01:47:40,960
them. There's some crazy Bromli that's
the dark carnivorous there. That must be

1338
01:47:41,039 --> 01:47:44,560
a wonderful place to be. It's
a bit pricey though, to pay for

1339
01:47:44,640 --> 01:47:48,479
the helicopter. Yeah, I think
there's only one or two you can you

1340
01:47:48,560 --> 01:47:51,680
can hike up. The rest are
just Yeah, they're literally islands in the

1341
01:47:51,760 --> 01:47:56,239
sky. I mean it's you talk
about. Yeah, they're amazing places.

1342
01:47:56,319 --> 01:48:00,159
Yeah, okay, yeah, I'm
great for you coming on. I could

1343
01:48:00,199 --> 01:48:03,000
talk to you for another three hours, but I'll let you go. Thank

1344
01:48:03,039 --> 01:48:06,399
you so much. And I guess
is there anything else you want to end

1345
01:48:06,439 --> 01:48:12,800
with or anything else you want to
say? Wow. I think it's very

1346
01:48:12,800 --> 01:48:17,880
important the value of collaboration when you're
doing your research, and the spirit of,

1347
01:48:18,119 --> 01:48:23,079
of course, you know, the
spirit of fun of going there having

1348
01:48:23,119 --> 01:48:28,520
grabbed the plant, getting dirty,
and for the plant not to be a

1349
01:48:28,640 --> 01:48:34,479
number in your matrix, to be
a thing, that is, a being

1350
01:48:34,560 --> 01:48:41,239
that's associated to a species concept and
it's much more to bottomists than just making

1351
01:48:41,720 --> 01:48:48,439
crazy number number crunching papers. They're
important, of course, but I think

1352
01:48:49,079 --> 01:48:54,920
the the life, the life of
being behind us those bits of fieldworks is

1353
01:48:54,960 --> 01:48:59,279
what really matters, and those experiences, and also the experience of being in

1354
01:48:59,359 --> 01:49:02,720
contact with people in those locals and
getting to meet them and see how they

1355
01:49:02,800 --> 01:49:06,840
live, how they live differently.
To sober up a bit from this crazy

1356
01:49:09,039 --> 01:49:14,239
scheme of fast food fast life,
fast everything, and no life at all.

1357
01:49:14,560 --> 01:49:17,039
So I think that's that's very important
as a biologist. I was very

1358
01:49:17,159 --> 01:49:20,880
fortunate to be able to have a
glimpse of a life that's nothing to do

1359
01:49:20,960 --> 01:49:26,920
with that. Yeah, very spoiled. That's beautiful. Yeah, no,

1360
01:49:27,079 --> 01:49:29,680
seriously, I mean, that's why
I'm into this so I can get away

1361
01:49:29,720 --> 01:49:32,720
from all that. This stuff is
the antidote to that, and that stuff

1362
01:49:32,960 --> 01:49:36,079
slowly kills me when I'm in It
puts me in a bad mood. It's

1363
01:49:36,159 --> 01:49:41,199
very unpleasant this stuff, this living
world, Studying this living world, having

1364
01:49:41,279 --> 01:49:45,840
reverence for it, that's what keeps
me going. So thank you so much.

1365
01:49:45,880 --> 01:49:47,720
I mean, I lastly, I
guess you would assume, I mean

1366
01:49:48,079 --> 01:49:50,600
the people that you're with out there. I mean, it sounds like you

1367
01:49:50,680 --> 01:49:56,439
guys all have that reverence, that
respect and love for the work you do

1368
01:49:56,560 --> 01:50:00,399
and for the organisms that you work
with. That's pretty fair to say.

1369
01:50:00,520 --> 01:50:05,000
Now, yes, we're all very
lucky like that. It's very important.

1370
01:50:05,079 --> 01:50:11,760
Part of the commitments to have this
respect and admiration for the subjects that we

1371
01:50:11,880 --> 01:50:15,479
study, very important. It's substitutes
religion. The other day, I had

1372
01:50:15,520 --> 01:50:18,560
to explain to a person that I
didn't really believe in a god. And

1373
01:50:18,640 --> 01:50:21,680
the person said to me, and
how do you do I said, well,

1374
01:50:23,119 --> 01:50:27,760
I believe in nature. Started with
that story that you know how those

1375
01:50:27,800 --> 01:50:31,359
things are all working in this unisone. And for me that made as much

1376
01:50:31,439 --> 01:50:38,880
sense as her God made for her. Yeah. Absolutely absolutely. Man,

1377
01:50:38,960 --> 01:50:41,199
that's a wonderful ending to that.
So thank you. Okay, I'll let

1378
01:50:41,279 --> 01:50:43,720
you go. Thank you so much
for your time, and hopefully we can

1379
01:50:43,760 --> 01:50:46,079
do this again. Thank you and
yeah, okay, thank you for the

1380
01:50:46,159 --> 01:50:49,359
opportunity. It was very pleasant talking
to you. Thank you, Danielle A

1381
01:50:49,439 --> 01:50:51,920
Zappi. Okay, thank you,
all right, everybody else, take care.

1382
01:50:53,119 --> 01:50:55,760
Talk to you guys there. Bye
bye bye. Take care.