Speaker 1: M hmmm, welcome to the crime pace. But body doesn't podcast.
That's some that's some smooth ship. That's nice. I like
to I like to listen to be Humphrey every once
in a while. You know, she's an amazing musician on
the blue Note label. Anyway, all right, we can finish
off with that. What's going on? Welcome back? I just uh,
I just got back from I was an ecuador Alan
and Mandy invited me to come down there and be
the plant person on a little uh like mycology tour
they were doing down there, and it ended up being, uh,
it was a fucking wonderful time. It was. I met
a lot of cool people, spent the last two weeks
hanging out with like nerds of the highest order. But great,
I mean great conversations, mentally stimulating conversations. I learned a
ship ton just from being down in that kind of
habitat and observing the plants. Uh, And I said, wow,
you know, the blue the tropical blueberry diversity is really wild,
as well as members of the orders in Gibrelei's the
Ginger order and all the families in there. You know,
morantasy uh, helicony, ac cost they s et cetera Cyclant.
They see the Panama hat family. They look so much
like palms at first glance. Uh, and then you get
up close and realize this is not a palm, and
the inflorescence is wild and they can be the members
of Cyclant, Theacey. We'll get into this later, but you know,
they were like vining epiphytes. There were you know, small
tree like things. The only kind of hint that they're
not palms comes in the leaf shape. They've got this
this it looks like a palm frond that splits into
a v wild shit. That was down there with herpers
I was down there with I mean, just other biologists.
I guess it was technically an eco tour that they
were offering, but almost everybody on this tour, on this
thing was whatever to fuck you call it. I mean,
it was you know, it was not it was not
like fluffy and h click baity or any of that.
You know. It was like pretty in depth learning and
extremely educational and just fucking fun. But basically everybody on
it was some sort of you know, had some sort
of biological background or not. Everybody. There were some people
that didn't, but you know, and everybody got afforded the
chance to learn. It wasn't like there was you know,
like it was h like to be to go on it.
You didn't need to be extremely well versed in any
of this stuff already, but you certainly would be by
the time you left. And man, it was just it
was so fucking great. You know, it was a little
more plush than I would have you know, been traveling.
And I mean I normally am like when I go somewhere,
I'm living out of a beat up rental rental car
and just fucking you know, just not for changing my clothes,
and I'm just like, you know, wake up, get caffeinated,
eat some food, pack some food, then got in on
the field for ten hours and just bust ass to
take you know, three thousand photos, make notes, collect some
herbarium specimens. Whatever. This was a little more relaxed, and
you know, they fed us and everything. It was kind
of cool, but yeah, it was. It was an expenses
paid trip to just go down there and basically be
the botany person, be the plant the plant person, which
when I you know, when it comes down to it,
I mean, tropical botany is so new to me. I
learned so much in this trip. But there's there's families
that I had no prior experience with, like cost aacy,
you know, these weird monoca families, myriantasy cyclant the see
another great example, uh erythroxylce the coca family, the cocaine family,
which I guess has four genea. Almost all the species
are in Erythroxylum, which is the erythroxylum whatever. However, I
think Erythroxylum so really the way to pronounce it, it's
a lot easier. But those are that's the like the
largest genus in a family. And there's a couple other ones.
I guess there's disjunkt Erythroxylum in Africa, which I did
not I did not know, but these are you know,
these are like montane, very wet, very humid. It was
an I opener for me too in the sense that
I picture the Amazon. We were in Upper Amazon, to
be fair, we were like three thousand feet God, that
wonderful South Texas there. It smells like burning plastic can
garbage fire. It is such a fucking dystopia being back here. Man,
it has been unreal. Was It's just like they go
to fucking Walmart to return this speaker, which I should
you know, I would love to patronize an independent business.
But I'm in fucking South Texas, so there's nothing down here.
Walmart is what we got. I have to go there.
I have to fucking it's I'm that's my own hell.
Like this is punishment for some shit I did, probably
a decade ago. I don't know, but I'm being punished.
I feel like I'm being spiritually punned. I had to
go to Walmart. I bring my kid with me. I say,
you're coming with me, you know, for emotional support, getting
so I put her on my shoulders. We go into
fucking Walmart, and I'm dying the minute I walk in.
I can smell the off gassing plastic, the fluorescent lights,
you know, the consumers being farmed. We're all being farmed
here in the United States. It's part of the dystopia.
I hope you're enjoying it. Uh. And in South Texas especially,
it feels like the Matrix. I feel like I'm living
in the matrix, like a nineteen fifty style. It's so
fucking dark, you know what, I should be taking this
up with my shrink, not you. But this is part
of the fun. In the podcast for me is I
get to fucking dump on you. You don't mind, do you?
What are you doing? You know right? You got time?
So I go in there and I had to return
this speaker that I bought for a fucking electric drum
set that I have so I can make some like
a bleke sel beats. I can make some beats for
background music and shit like that. I played drums, been
playing drums like twenty five years, and so I needed
this little speaker so I could hear the thing because
I don't know where I live. I live in a
small house and I'm just I don't have enough room
for an actual drum set. So I got this thing. Whatever,
I'm returning this. I shouldn't have bought the speaker at
Walfart to begin with, because it was I knew it's bad,
all right, It's just like go I have to go
in there for groceries sometimes and uh, just an awful experience.
So I was I but I did, and of course
it was like cheap garbage that you know, came in
a shipping container, was probably made by you know, nine
year olds on the outskirts of Beijing. So I brought
it back to return the thing, and I'm watching these
two dudes like unpack this fucking TV that was like
had to be nine feet long or something, and I
was just like, that's you know, this is this is it.
It's like the TV is not big enough. It's like
a table. You could flip that on its side and
eat off that thing, you know, with like a fucking
twelve person dinner. And then I just realized, like God, what,
like the fucking who the fuck? What do you need
a TV that But the fuck you're gonna watching a
TV that big? You know what, are you running a
rec center? You got like an orphanage or something. I mean,
I could see if you had an orphanage, you know,
you have like movie night, you need a TV that big.
It was just depressing. But it's at this connection from
the real world, right that this part, it's all part
of it. So anyway, get a TV in a South
so's that a sick car? Uh that's just my judgments anyway,
So uh, anyway, what the fuck? So it was it
was an eye opener for me being in the Amazon.
That's what I came back to. I was like trying
to get out, you know, kind of come to terms
with these wonderful life forms I've been seeing, and and
then the human hell, the dystopic scenery of billboards and
car dealerships and just consumer hell and complete alienation and
isolation from the living world and what's real, and that's
what you know, that's what a great many people live
in in the United States and many other places as
well anyway. So, but being in the Amazon was an
eye opener for me because, you know, I picture I
had never been to the tropical rainforest before, and I
pictured hot, humid, miserable, and indeed, it can be that,
but it wasn't at the elevations we were at. We
were about thirty one hundred feet and it wasn't that bad.
It wasn't as hot as I pictured it. It was
chilly on some mornings. It's certainly not as hot as
South Texas and June or August, you know, throughout the
whole summer. And the mosquitoes weren't that bad, primarily, I
would assume, because you know, i'd well, first off, mosquitoes
are going to be worse and disturbed areas and in
places that humans have basically cleared, you know, except for
like Alaska. I was talking with Matt about this the
other day, you know, and like remote Alaska, the mosquitoes
are really bad because there's so much you know, so
many large mammals for them to feed off of it,
and it's just hell. But if there's not a large
food source around and there's not a lot of human
clearance because human disturbance, clearing the habitat also kills everything
that eats the mosquitoes, which we don't realize because you know,
we're disconnected and alienated from what's real and we live
in this little hell of our own making. And so
you know, in disturbed areas, it's when you get the mosquitoes,
and it's for species like eighties a jipdi, these invasive
mosquito species that you know, didn't they're not from North America.
They were brought over. And not only that, but they
they're like you know, Norway rats and feral cats, et cetera.
They kind of follow humans. They they are organisms that
benefit directly off of human society. You're gonna encounter, you know,
those those show up once the land gets cleared and
the et cetera, and they're you know, they're they've spent
thousands of years co evolving with humans too as their
food source. So well, I shouldn't say co evolving, just
evolving because humans aren't really well. I guess humans are
evolving in response to eighties a gyp D. Right, that's
what sickle cell is. Anyway, the mosquitoes weren't that bad
in the Amazon. There were a few, but you know,
there's so many frog species and other insects that prey
on them that there's the checks and balances, and it's
I mean, it's the same story with ticks, right. The
tics get out of control when you knock out the
editors that keep the deer populations down, or when you
stop burning. And so that's why ticks are so bad.
Part of the reason why ticks are so bad in
Northeast fire suppression, you know, removal of predators and complete
imbalance of the deer populations. Anyway, I didn't know what
to expect when I got down there, and it was
it was really pleasant. It's just humid and it rains
a lot. You've got you know, the intertropical convergent zone,
and so that's you've got these warm air masses you know,
rising and uh of course creating low pressure systems low
pressures of course associated with rainfall, and so you know,
basically the other end of that Hadley Stell, you've got
the high pressure zones, that high pressure cold they were
descending at thirty degrees latitude north and south, creating deserts
in certain areas. And that was air that originally rose
at the tropics. We're part of that air originally rose
at the tropics and then got pushed to thirty degrees.
So because of that rising air, it just rains all
the fucking time. It was like, I think the rainfall
for where we were was between fifteen and twenty five
feet of annual rainfall a year. And you know, many
of the places where we were, it's wild. It's like
you'll be walking and then there's just this little two
foot crevasse that opens up two foot wide by like
three feet deep, and then there's just water running through
it and it's just a drainage and it's clear water.
It's not like nasty brown water. It's clear water. It's
got a little fish in it, and then that's just
part of the drainage. I mean, the ground is just
always wet. There's lots of leaf litter the forests. There
were just fucking incredible. I kept thinking the whole time
I'm there, I'm like, what is it like? What is
it like to do psychedelics in this kind of habitat?
It's got to be incredible because everything around you is alive,
you know, versus like where I live now, everything around
me is dead, you know, including like the people on
the inside. Right, It's just like it's like the modern
American that's where we're all headed. Like I think, you know,
just we're all gonna be walking dead, just farmed this
consumers dead on the inside, alienated from what's real. So uh,
but just to be surrounded by like this, all this
living green, living green fabric everywhere has got to be intoxicating.
And then the fucking frogs at night, the frog diversity
there's insane. Saw a lot of cool herbs who saw
coral sneak. We saw what was it Boutria kophis, some
pit viper species that the Alex, one of the herpetologists,
was with. They milked the venom out of it. So
we got the milk the venom out of it. That
was cool at least see how it's done. Uh. And
then they of course use that to create anti vent
and it was. It was a really great experience, but
the plant life was just fucking nuts. We went up
to the Paramo one day, which is you know, Paramo
habit that for anybody who doesn't know, is high elevation,
low latitudes, basically what twelve one hundred feet looks like
on the equator, and it was just fucking nuts. I've
been wanting to go there for a while. But you
get all these temperate lineages, lineages from you know, points
further north or south, latitudes further north or south, but
they're at the equator, and basically at the equator it's
far too warm for them and just too different of
a climate and habitat type at lower elevations. The only
place they can really get on is at higher elevations.
But they're also kind of on these islands in the sky,
you know, the andes, and so they they speciate you
just but it's just nuts, man, and there's so much
hummer pollination. Serato stemma elatam was a really wild looking
member of Eric Casey, the blueberry family that was there.
It was like this scandent vining epiphyte as well, and
it was just fucking you know, these bright red flowers,
very neck, the rich, the petals recurved back. It looks
like a little bell with these recurved petals. And then
these exerted stamens poking out, and some of these things
would form like these woody tubers. They were epiphytes, but
they would form woody tubers on their branches, which was
nuts to me. It was like they were forming storage
mechanisms for those you know, short periods that they may
dry out. I mean, I don't know what the habitats
like that. We were there in the paramo and it
was it was very wet and cool, you know, chillier
than sand. It was like, it's such a weird habitat.
It was like climate not even climate of San Francisco,
like climate of like coastal Humboldt County, like coastal like
up in the Redwood Belt, like Chili almost and very foggy.
Everything's wet, and we're walking through this short canopy for us,
maybe twenty feet tall. The dominant tree was Escalonia myrtaloides,
one of the escalonias, you know, which is in the
order escaloni alies. That doesn't tell you that much, but
you know, if you look on the angiosperm phylogeny poster,
it's somewhat close to the order astles, the sunflower order,
and the Lobelia order and the trigger plant order. So
but anyway, Escalonia is really diverse in South America. You know,
there's a ton in Chile. There's a couple members of
the family. I'm pretty sure in Australia and New Zealand,
and a lot of things we saw had disjuncts, had
other members of the genus or the family in New
Zealand or in Tasmania. It's that gondwan in connection. There
was like when I when I was in Chile, we
saw Rakua Rakawa. How are you fucking pronounced that? Ra
a u k a u a lead of virans, which
is in arali a c the Ginseng order, order Apa
les a carrot order. Uh not Ginseng order, Jinseng family.
Excuse me. Arali acy, which is a rarely ac is
like the sister family to the carrot family. Ginseng family
is sister family to the Carat family. So h but
order Apa Le's we saw Rakawa lad of virans and
then I looked up and uh, you know the ce
my my I naturalist profile where else I've seen that
fucking genus before, and I had seen it in New Zealand,
so I you know, that happened a lot. And there
was another a couple other genera two that I looked
at and realized, oh, I've seen this or a related
genus in New Zealand. So you know, these plant lineages
in South America, especially in Chile, you know, go back
a very long time, you know, to when the continents
were a little bit close together, fifty sixty million years
in some cases, the same with Gunnera. Some of those
might be long distance dispersal, but I'm sure a good
many of them are the result of Gondwana and affiliations. Anyway. Yeah,
the Paramo was just just filled with wild shit Pinguicula calyptrata,
a carnivorous plant. I think the thing for me that
was that was wild to see was the habitat up
there is. You know, a lot of stuff was fuzzy,
a lot of stuff was covered in hairs. But it's
not a dry habitat. I normally associate plants with hairs
with with you know, dry or seasonally dry habitats. I
don't think it's ever really dry for long periods in
the Paramo. Certainly nothing compared to deserts or tropical dry
forest or tropical thorn forest, et cetera. These hairs were
mostly there as a result of adaptation to ultraviolet light
and to frosts, because you're so high up that it
can get very cold, especially at night. So just just
the too a totally novel habitat for me and filled
with diversity. There's a supposedly there's a disjunct Epiletia stand
or Espilletia stand or Espalicia if you want to pronounce
like that E S P E L E. T I A,
which is a huge genus that's almost I think it's
all endemic to the Paramo, but they're mostly in Colombia.
It's astracy, so it's the sunflower family. But they can
form these uh sometimes two or three meter tall colescent
wooly just really bizarre look in doctor use plants. And
there's a disjunk stand of Espialetia I forget what species.
I think it begins with an L in Yanga nat
National Park in this you know, like in which is
like mid Ecuador. Most of the Espalicias are in the
Espilletias are in the north, but there's this one disjunk
population down down where we were. But it's it's like
a two day hike in over some rough drink cat
that would be fucking amazing to do. Yeah, the diversity
in the Parmo was just fucking it was so cool.
It was so cool. We didn't get enough time, but
I could have spent I could have spent the you know,
a few days. There. Two gunnera species, those weird ass
you know, elephant ear looking plants. If you're not familiar
with them, they're just they look like, you know, there,
we saw Gunnera tinctoria in Chile, but up here it
was Gunnera mage I guess it was gunna A magellanica.
It didn't look anything like the gunner of Magellanica I
saw in southern Gile. It's probably a different species. I
don't think that's the DNA has been sequenced. Probably, uh,
they just you know, just based on morphology alone, it's
been lumped in with Magellanica. At least that's what I assume,
because it's it's certainly a different ecotype. It's it's phenotypically different.
I'm sure it would be genetically different. If you look
at it, it's probably a different species or should be
should be split up. And then I think there was
gunner a mannicotta down there as well, anyway, unrelated. It's
nuts to see. I mean, it's such it's such a
it's such a shit storm here back in the US,
and I knew it was gonna be. I mean, I
try not to. I'm just trying to close my eyes
and take more of a Carlin esque approach to the
fucking dystopic idiocracy nightmare that is the United States. It's
just it's this. It just feels bad. It feels bad
to see, to be here, It feels bad to think
about this place. It feels bad to hear. It feels
bad to read the comments, just of shit that's going
on here, just reading about what's going on, Like the
people are still in such denial, you know, the I mean,
I knew this was going to be Reagan two point zero.
I knew it was going to be defunding everything. I
knew the country is gonna get dumber. I know people
are going to be even more farmed than they are now.
I know the middle class is going to continue to eroad,
But it's just such a dystopias. Seeing the support still
among I mean, it's whatever. It shouldn't surprise me. People
are fucking morons, people are retards. At least we could
say retard again, you know, without being lectured by some fucking,
you know, elitist nerd. That's the that's like the high point, right,
the one like the whole the whole country is going
to ship. But at least you could say read again.
She would never say to someone who's actually mentally disabled.
But but it's this is the poisonous concoction. That's the
result of the last fucking i don't know, ten years.
I mean social media too, the effects this all has.
But you know, having numerous friends that have lost their jobs,
the defunding of science, like it's just gonna get worse.
This is what the right has been wanting to do
for forty five fifty years now. Reagan started it, and
this is finishing it off. It's just it's fucking unbelievable. Man.
It's just it's so dystopic. It's such a death cult.
It's talking about being alienated and estrange from the living world.
And I think just the stupidity too, like the just
realizing there's not a lot going on upstairs. It's just
like these lowest common denig dominator, bottom of the brain
stem primate instincts to like acquire money and hoard and
anything that stands in a way of that. But uh, gutting, education, gutting.
You know, I've got so many friends that that have
federal jobs. They're scientists, They've got federal jobs, uh to
you know, for surveying, for collecting data, for monitoring important shit,
you know, for keeping the living skin of the earth alive,
for keeping this living machine functioning. And he's fucking retards
on the right. These people that just are so disconnected
from anything real. They live in this make believe land
of of that humans have just created of of a
of the economy and the fucking investment portfolios and the
shareholders and whatever the fuck that diseased, boring ass world
is focused on, but disconnected from anything alive and real,
and the decisions that they're making is just god man,
it's just what the what a fucking the properate existence
they must lead. But yeah, a lot of people have
just lost their jobs who are more than qualified. Because
we're cottag or cottag we gotta cot. We gotta buy cots.
And what are you gonna do with that money? You're
gonna You're gonna you're gonna get basically award contracts to
your friends, your crow. I mean, the oligarchy is just
gonna be fully cemented in now. I you know, I
don't want to talk about because I know this is
this should be an escape, right, a little bit of
an escape, but it's, uh, the dystopia is just it's
so ripe now. So I think the answer is just
more of this, just the you know, complete irreverence for
that world and complete reverence and respect for the living
world in front of you. By studying something, by learning
about something, by obsessing and fixating on something, it's a
way of respecting it and also spreading it, you know,
spread it like a contagion. Make other people excited about
this stuff as well. And grow the shit out of everything,
to grow the shit out of all the plants you
can make, you know, spread this. You know, there's so
much you could do, you know, just don't just focus
on that world. Don't pull out of that world and
get immersed in this dark, make believe dystopic reality that
the humans have created in the United States. You know,
it's the country that doesn't want to believe, the country
that's in denial. Right, it's going to be morning in
America again. All over all you have to do is
say it, say it three times and click your heels
and it'll happen. While the price of eggs never went
up anyway, God fucking okay. So yeah, so the Paramo,
we'll talk more about that later. That was some pretty
fucking wild habitat and just just the diversity. And then
I mean, I've got so many videos to edit to
and put clips to put together, and I'm still working
on Chile stuff. I'm really busier than I ever have been.
And then I'm going to be in Chicago at the
end of this month, at the end of February to
do a presentation, to give a presentation at the Wild
Things Conference. Then I got to come back here. I've
got shit signed up for June, which is like, you know,
I've got like four presentations I'm giving in the next
few months. So anyway, but back to the Amazon, you know,
the most diversity in the lower regions that we were in,
not the Paramo. We've moved on to talking back about
the elevations between thirty two hundred feet four thousand feet.
Below three thousand feet, I think it probably gets a
lot more miserable, just like humid as hell, and you know,
probably a lot more buggy. But but where we were
at like thirty six hundred and thirty seven hundred feet,
the most common families that we sawcaus nariac for sure,
which is in the order lamy alas. So you got
bilatteroidsymmetrical flowers, generally opposite leaves, lots of adaptation and hummingbird pollination.
Some really wild forms too, like they just the tropical
plants are so crazy to me. I mean, huge leaves,
you know, hairs in some parts, but overall pretty glabrous
to shed water, especially on the top. There's a ton
of aeroid diversity and thoriums and philodendrons everywhere, which that
philodendrion that all the uh, you know, the aeroid nerds were,
like the covid era aeroid nerds were paying like six
thousand dollars for phill Dendron varicosum or some of those lookalikes.
There was this giant ass Bogonia that it got to
like fifteen feet tall, was parvifolia, with which were the
plants were diecius to. I went and looked at the flowers.
A lot of bogonias will have male and female flowers.
You could tell them apart because the female flower they
look alike, but the female flowers will have an ovary
subtending the flower. It looks like a little winged fruit,
immature fruit. But they've both got that yellow, you know,
basically yellow sexual parts. Like the female flowers on begonias
try to make it look like they're producing pollen because
the bees that hit them are pollen collecting bees and
so anyway, but normally you'll find both sexes on the
same plant. With this one, it was like fucking fifteen
feet tall, huge leaves, you know, foot and a half
two feet across, well maybe foot and a half eighteen
inches across, and it will it's uh, it was just
they were dioecious, you know, it's monsters. There was a
really cool tree called Brownia, which was in its own
subfamily of the legume family, a subfamily that I don't
normally encounter very much. I've only seen a few members
of it. It was a detereoid e D. E. T. A. R. I, O, I, D,
E A E. What else is in the terrioid. It's
a weird family. Uh uh oh shaddy, yeah, I think
I've seen some. Actually it's got h yeah, well let's
see genus Anea A, Gourdia, gabonius i, Curia labor vilias, Sindoropsis.
I don't know anyway, it's a fucking weird Uh. It's
a weird subfamily of Fabase that was only created a
few years ago once, uh, you know, due to due
to some new ship, due to some incoming molecular evidence.
But you look at the flowers and they look remarkably
different from most p flowers. They look more like say,
sell pinioid, almost like a centa or a camacrista. But
the flowers are axillary. They're these big red flowers that
come or not accilary, excuse me, calliffloris. So they come
right out of the you know, the plant is coalesce
and it's got a main stomach, gets upwards of like
thirty feet tall maybe in some cases really unique philotaxi
to cool leaves, and the flowers just come right out
of the main trunk. And what's cool is that before
the flowers open. I've noticed there are ants that just
guard the opening flower buds. I'm not sure if they're
collecting some sort of material or wax off of it
or what I've seen that. I remember seeing that with
like pae andies. My mom when I was growing up,
you used toll grow peonies and the when the as
the flowers would open, before they would open the air
would always be ants crawling around the flower buds. Tons
of antiversity too. I got to see the Atta species
down there, Atta, the leaf cutters, because we get at
in Texas too. We get leafcutter ants in Texas. It's
out of Texana up here, but down there it was
a different species. You know, all these connections to which
was cool. I mean, you know, similarities. When you see
a plant that's similar enough to one you already know
that occurs, you know, one thousand miles north of it,
you can you get a window into how that might
have evolved or speciated. And the distribution of these plants,
of these plants, well, my voice keeps fucking cracking. I
don't know what. I don't know why. So that was yeah,
Brownia was wild. There was the aeroid diversity was nuts.
We saw an anthorium up in the paramol too at twelve
thousand feet. Uh. The neotropical palms was fucking crazy. God,
there's so many cool ones. This Ethnobodany video that I
got coming out next week, I mean, it really shows
the importance of some of these palm species, both for
fiber and for fruit. The what was it that was
Bactris is the genus of palm, and the fruit that
it produces is like a little golf ball sized fruit.
You gotta peel it, and then the fruit tastes like squash.
It's delicious. It tastes like kabocha squash, and then you
just you know, the spit out, the spit out the seed.
You kind of have to eat around it. Seeds kind
of big. The fucking market there was wild. And then
the last day, crews made us go to this market
with didn't make us. He suggested it sounded cool. I
went there. It was fucking great, and it was just
loaded with with all kinds of cool shit. It was fun.
Mostly native fruits there. I mean they had stuff that
wasn't native that like, you know, bananas obviously aren't native
to to the Americas. Same with rambutans. They're not native
to the Americas. They're in the you know, they're related
the light cheese. They're in the maple family. Step in Dacy.
But they had these big ass beetle grubs too, which
was the genus was rinko forests. They're like two or
three inch long beetles. They live in the palms. And
then and you can eat them and grill them whatever,
fry and whatever. They're supposed to be fucking delicious. I
didn't actually end up trying any. And then the beetle
that it makes is cool too. It's not like one
of those rhinoceros beetles. It's one of those circoulianids which
has like a long snout, like a weavil like snout.
You got to get down with eating bugs. Don't be
fucking weany about it, Okay. It's but also like seeing
the ecology too. I mean, these things are connected to
the palms. They're using the palms. They eat the palm.
It's not wood, because palms are not you know, they're
not woody, they're fibrous. Monocots don't produce wood. They don't
produce you know, lateral marris, theems. They don't produce secondary
growth except for a few of the few of them,
like you know, a few monocuts do, like the fucking
some drosinas I guess, and other I should actually do it. Well,
we'll mention that later. We'll get into like secondary growth
and monocuts. If you don't know what I'm talking about,
you really should, because this is a key point of
angiosperm anatomy. Dicots and udikots and conifers, which are obviously
not angiosperms, produce vascular cambium. They can grow laterally, not
just up and down. Palms and monoca, which are monocot
can only grow up and down. They don't ever get wider.
That's why when you look at a palm tree, it's
a spindly rod. It's been the same with its entire life.
It doesn't get bigger. But some palms have found a
way around that, including some that I encountered down in
the Amazon, like what was it Eriardia del toida, the
dick palm. It produces, you know, these lateral roots that
come out at a forty five degree angle to form
this kind of flanged base, which is primarily you know,
it forms like an hour glass base basically so that
it can't be tipped over in this squishy soil or
get blown over. But when these things germinate there like
pencil thin a couple maybe that were I think a
little bit bigger, but but they can basically get a
little bit wider as they grow, you know, up to
a certain point by forming these lateral roots, which I'm
really curious about the physiology of that too, Like you
send out this lateral root, but where is the bud
for the lateral root, and it's it's further they look
like they end up looking like a mangrove because they're
not the original stem kind of rots away as the
tree matures, and then they've just got this series of
thirty or forty roots coming out at forty five degree
angles and with their you know, they come out like
three feet above the ground and then eventually root into
the soil. They come out, you know, at a forty
five degree angle outwards and then eventually root into the soil.
And that's how the palm stabilizes itself. Because these palms
get like thirty, forty, fifty, sixty fucking feet tall, and
they've got fishtail leaves too. Really weird, not like any
washing tony is that you see in North America. Complete
different file a taxi or like the Phoenix canary ancess.
It gets planted all throughout California, including it. The old
Southern Pacific Railroad stations like Southern Pacific Road used to
plant Phoenix Canary ancest everywhere wherever they would put up
a depot, you know, Canary island palm or Phoenix deck,
the liffra the date palm complete different fileottaxi complete different
leaf shit, not phileo taxi, but leaf shape. I guess
it is a pilotaxi because it looks like these little
fishtail palm leaves that come off the racus just so much.
You know, I would see shit and just be like,
what the fuck is that? I have no idea. I
need to know what that is. I need to learn
about that. So I head up Scott Zona. You know
you got any references on neotropical palms, And he referenced
the book that I ordered. I found it on the
internet for like ten bucks, which was cool. I didn't
check lib jin. It's probably on there, but hold on,
I get your name, I'll get you to name it.
A book in a second. Yeah, Field Guide to the
Palm of the Americas by Henderson looks like it came
out in the nineties, but god damn man. Yeah, just
just you know, I'm fair stated by this shit. But
I also know that in learning about it, I'll probably
learn about other things, because everything's connected, you know this. Uh,
you learn about one thing that might seem inconsequential and unimportant,
and then you end up realizing, oh, it's not. It's
like through learning about that thing, you learn a new
example of how something is biologically accomplished, or how something evolves,
or or just something as simple as what other species
this plant. You're not initially concerned with what it might
be connected to. So learning that kind of shit, because
I've seen that happen so many times. Something I'm not
interested in initially because I find it boring, and then
later on I learn, oh, it's actually connected to this thing.
Fuck that's cool. Now I'm interested in it. And also
just you know, I'm not gonna lie. A lot of
this just comes from like complete revulsion at the human
world in front of me, you know, especially like what's
going on in the United States right now. Like I
just watched the country I have to live in getting
dumber and greedier and just more disgusting culturally speaking. And
so I just you know, Bondi's not just an escape,
it's also the answer. It's not just an escape. I
feel like it's also there's some good instructions for living
and for morality by studying the living world. So don't
be a dumb dick. That's basically what I'm saying. Okay, Anyway,
what other diversity the gasnierriads the well. First off, hummingbirds
are of course big pollinators, so we saw tons of
red tubular flowers. Bats are big pollinators to Bremysterra is
another genus that was really interesting to me. And I
was just showing my kid something about because we were
looking at bat nation. I was trying to show our
pictures of bats pollinating things because I showed her some
pictures of these bats that we saw in a cave
that we went into. Nobody got COVID, as much as
I would have loved to bring back COVID two point
oh to the United States, nobody got it. And the
people have been going in this cave for a while anyway,
So uh, but I was trying to show where you know,
bats can pollinate things. Then they went there. There's like
videos and sguaros and shit whatever. But there was a
nice video on Bermeestra, which is a lobilioid. It's related
to Lobilia, and it's got that same flower structure with
the fused anther tube and a little pollen presenter that
pops out of it, and you know, is male on
the first day and it becomes female on the second or
third day whatever, and so uh anyway, but Bremeistra, you know,
you see this thing and you can tell it's a
Lobilia or it's a Lobilia relative because of that fused
anther tube and the pomp presenter. But then you look
at the flower. It's got a really distinct morphology to it.
CenTra Pogon was down there to it. Another cool genus
in Lobilioidy of companilacy, the bellflower family. Anyway, but these
little these bermeyestras were out everywhere, and they're not red,
they're not tubular, and they're you know, they're they're obviously
possessing the traits that have been selected for by bats.
The bats have like actively bred these things over millions
of years. Whatever. You know, the bats, the ones that
are most appealing to the The flowers that are most
appealing to the bats are the ones that end up
getting pollinated and then producing more of themselves. The ones
that aren't, you know, appealing, appease appealing to them for
whatever reason, don't you know. It's typical natural selection how
it works. But the fruits, I'm curious about what disperses
these fruits because the fruits were like these inflated hollow
bags and then on the center like the burmeister are
fruit I saw, at least I don't know what species
it was. Very few of my e naturalists observations have
been you know, put to species level. They're just genera
or family whatever, And it's good enough for me. And
that's the most you can hope to get in such
a dense, diverse, species rich area that's also probably understudy.
There's so much shit in many of these places that's
understudied because there's just so much out there and there's
not enough botanist to work on it whatever. And there's
actually a lot of good bodany that's been done on Ecuador.
I mean, you just go to like Google scholar, you'll
see a shift ton of papers. But this fruit was
like a bagfruit. And then in the center of it
was like a little nodule. And then on that nodule
where all the you know, hundreds of tiny seeds because
lobilioid seeds are tiny. That's probably part of the reason
they're all over the fucking globes, because the seeds are
so tiny. But but fuck man, was it was. You know,
anytime you're encountering a new genus, it's it's pretty exciting,
especially with such a like distinct and unique flower morphology,
because all these flowers are a little puzzles, right, they're
little clues at what this thing evolved with, or what
pollinates it, or what its ecology is, et cetera. So
Bremstra was a genus we frequently encountered. I also saw
some cool micoheterotropse, of which there's many. Most of the
fungi in the Amazon, the micorrhizal fungi is arbuscular mico hisea.
These are fungi that don't that disreproduce a sexually. For
the most part, they don't. They don't produce mushrooms. They're
not basidio my seats. They're glomero mi seeds, and so
they're mostly just you know, infused everywhere in the soil,
but they're also associating with probably most of the plants
eighty percent of the plants there, if not more. But
there's a number of plants that have found a way
to exploit this, Plants from unrelated families like Burmanniac or
Gentian Ac Gentians. Voi Rihea was one that I saw,
jim No Siphon Andy saw, which is in uh that's Burmaniac.
I believe what else was there, Teco phile Ace, there
was quite a few. Field Museum of Chicago has a
bunch of good PDFs and they've been a huge, huge
source of help seeing those PDFs online. They were when
I was in Brazil too, and I think that's what
I was referencing. There's a PDF on mico heterotrophs of
Brazil and it's just thumbnail photos. It's a single thumbnail
photo for each species. But you know, when you see that,
then then that can at least point you to what
genus you're looking at. It's been immensely helpful. Let me
find this thing because there's that it'd be cool to
throw some names out there. At least tell you where
you can look it up. God, okay, yeah, voiriea. Of
course we mentioned that already Gentienac. It was triur not
tecophile ac was excuse me sorry, triurid ce t r
I U R I D A C E A E.
The PDF is called Micoheterotrophic Plants of Reserva particular de
patrimonial natrural do Crystallino. It's Portuguese, uh, which is in
Matto Grosso, Brazil. But yeah, burmanniac triurid a C. That
is a fucking femine. It's not even on my radar yet.
Triurid s thismyac. Of course, some really cool thismia is
down there, which I did not No, I did not
think of it. Thimia milanomitra looks fucking insane. Uh ooh
what is this? So they got corloid root morphology. A
lot of these micoheterotrophs, when you look at their roots,
they've got these things that look like these papillomas. Aenal
peppoaloma Rein's previous anal peppaloma. Just had to get that
out there, Marco Rubio anal peppa paloma. Uh hopefully you're
getting some terrible imagery. Oh god, I hate it. Here triurid.
They see Sia philip propriria, these papaloma like roots, like
wardy roots. They look like cauliflower, like col knobs of califlower,
which attached I assume are just infused with this arbuscular
micro rise. And you know, I'm trying to think of
how these relationships go, because it's not just we anthropomorphise, right,
we say the plant is just stealing from fungi. That's
an easy way to introduce the idea to people. But
of course it's it's a simple, it's an oversimplified way, right.
It lacks the complexity that's going on in this relationship,
which obviously started as a two way relationship and might
still in some way be a two way relationship. The
fungus might be benefiting somehow, but to us on the surface,
it just appears like this plant is a pit. In
any case, it's fucking fascinating. Triua deacy. I gotta look
at it. I'm gonna have to consult the angiosperm phylogeny poster,
which is down by the way plant Gateway, dot com
or dot org, whatever it is. Is down, they're updating it.
I can't get a hold like guy James being a
friend of a friend in I guess he's moving to
a new botanical institution in Europe. I don't know. I
don't know what these guys. I don't know what they're doing.
You know, nice guy though, he said I could use
that angiosperm phylogeny poster from my book, which will be
out in fucking nine years. Thanks Abrams Press. Uh. I
can't wait to do unpaid labor for you when I'm
designing it on in design. You know, if only I
wasn't a dumb ass and had had my lawyer look
at the contract before fuck me? You know, why? Why
have an angry Irish attorney, you know, who's just a
fucking bottle of piss and vinegar. I love him, He's
a perfect attorney for me. Why have one of those
if you're not going to use him. I didn't use him.
I thought that the lady who reached out to me
from the book company he doesn't even work there anymore.
From the publisher, I thought she's so nice, she's such
a nice lady. Why she wouldn't fuck me over? You know,
she wouldn't screw me over. There's not even got nothing
to worry about. I'll just sign this contract. I'm sure
it's fine, And I ended up signing. This was a
while ago. This book has been under for a while. Then.
I'm working on another book, which I'm actually pretty excited about,
which is should be done here soon. But I'm just
I'm up to my knees and shit and good shit,
but it's just shit, and I'm so fucking busy, and
I've just stopped responding to text and emails and every
I just don't give a fucking rudt of time. Sorry, Okay, anyway,
the andrew spronphilogic, but I don't have to look this
up because I've not try her a daisy. What the fuck?
It's a monoc family. Let me let me go look
at this. Okay, but this anyway, the point I was
getting to about the andrew Sprimfilogny poster. It's down for now,
but it's gonna be back up again. I guess they're
working on it. They're gonna there's some new revisions that
need to be made, and it'll be up again at
some point in the meantime. If you need a copy
of it. Email me. Make it short. I'm not gonna
do anything but just send you a link. Uh and
uh that's it. Yeah, okay, hold on all right, my
mind is blown. I'm so happy I got one of
those posters on my wall. I can just go right
to the wall and look at it. You know, I
have to go online. I threw a fit today and
was about to throw this fucking cannon print through out
the window. God, I just think about it and I
feel bouts of rage. I just want to strangle the
fucking thing. I want to like. Oh God, I just anyway, sorry,
I couldn't get the printer to hook up today. I
had a nervous breakdown. I've had this problem for eight months,
and of course the company doesn't give a fuck you.
I just I bought a paper weight. Now I'm fucked.
That's the thing, you know, just these little bits, you know,
where the system is getting one over on you, right,
Just it's just one example of the many ways. It's
not like equivalent to having to call the health insurance company.
I tried to get health insurance too. Uh, and then
I realized I can't do it. It Just I feel
like it's a scam. I'm being robbed. I'm not going
to pay four hundred dollars. This is insane and so
but now they just have been billing me anyway, even
though I'm any coverage and I had to get the
tax credit, and so the government's probably going to the
irs is probably gonna still charge me the tax credit.
The whole thing is fucked. I don't know more CEOs,
you know more Luigi's free Luigi. Okay. Anyway, Trieridas is
related to veloziac in the order pandinals family and order.
Should always be asking what family and order is this
fucking plant that I'm interested in? Ge get a little
bit more context for uh, for life, and then if
you don't know that family or order, well what the
fuck is in and ask about go to in neet,
hit the explore feature type in the family name uh,
look at pictures of that plant, learn about it, and
then click on the map and see where it's distribution occurs.
Very interesting, it'll help you know, zoom out in larger world,
et cetera. But triarid Ace is, yeah, it's in. It's
another weird fucking family in the order Pandinales, the screw
Pine order if you don't know what a screw pint is,
it's fine, it's you know, you can you can be forgiven.
Because they're not really in in North America anywhere. They're weird.
They're all weird. But the Lows, the Ac and uh,
the the Panama hat family cyclant the see is also in.
It's just the weird order of monocots. But apparently triarid Ac.
I wonder, I suppose all of triarid A s is micoheterotrophic. God,
that's cool. God, these fucking weird, weird things, these strange
and beautiful things. So ethysmyac triarid A s. In gent
On an unrelated note, and I know I'm all over
the place. Just bear with me, okay, all right. Was
drew from Carnivoro, the carnivorous plant nursery was over earlier
this morning. Stopped by my house to shoot the shit,
and because he was down here anyway for family stuff,
and he was telling me about a front of his
that that has discovered a bunch of new carnivorous plant species,
including one in the Amazon that's underwater for a few months.
I think it's got a dormancy strategy, but most plants
with a dormancy strategy. It's a response to cold or
to dry they grow in like cold temperate latitudes, or
they've got they're grow in seasonally dry places or deserts.
But this is a plant that's got a dormancy strategy
in relation to being inundated with water and you know,
blocked off from sunlight because it's growing. You know, it's
under six feet twelve feet of water whatever, and and
uh and then once the you know, the water's subside,
then it comes back, it springs back to life and
you know, that's it's never died, you know what I mean,
figure of speech and starts doing its thing. But that's
that was totally novel to me too. A fucking dormancy
strategy in response to being flooded. All this shit is
so foreign to me. The whole Amazon. I mean, I
was looking at maps with my friend Zane, who's a
herpetologist down there, and and we were looking at you know,
I was like, I, for some reason, I don't know why,
I thought you could just like drive east from Ecuador
and you're just driving to Brazil. There's I know, it's
all the Amazon, but there's surely a highway that goes
through it. Yeah, I was so fucking ignorant. And then
I looked and I'm like, oh, there's nothing like It's
really like people use boats to get around. There's no roads,
there's you can't it's so thick and just water log
there's no Uh. It's like a such a huge portion
of Earth's service. It's amazing. I'm so curious about it now.
I want to go there and get deng gay and
you know some other horrible tropical diseases. Zaying, by the way,
had leish maniasis, which is a protist that you get
from uh and causes the horrific rash that you get
from something called sand fleas or sand flies. I don't know,
these little diptera, these little flies that just can spread this.
That sounds fucking awful. And he's got a friend who
got out in his nose and ate half his face.
Now he's fine. His nose came back, he grew it back.
I don't know if you got to get a skin
graft from his ass or something or whatever, but it
sounds fucking bad. And it pops up like six months
after the originally infected with it. What fun. One of
many tropical diseases you can get. It's just like, it's
so fucking humid down there. Shit just thrives. Not where
I was, it was fine. I might still have denga.
I don't know, but uh, Alex got denga. You know,
he was out for you can't do anything. It's he
was out for a few weeks. But he's fine now.
But anyway, this, uh yeah, check out that Mike Mico
heterotrophy pdf. I just saw a little voi rhea. I
don't know what species it was, but some of these things,
it's fascinating. They're fucking fun to draw it through. They're
really cool. Excuse me, I just burped. Somebody wrote me saying,
I listened to this guy's podcast, but it's disgusting. I
can hear you drinking water, And then I had to
remind her, well, it's a good thing you can't hear
me pissing in bottles because I do that too. You know,
if I'm like right now, I could just pause and
go to the bathroom. But if I'm talking with someone, hey, buddy,
I don't have time to I'm not gonna take away
from the conversation. You know, that would affect you the listener,
you'd hear the pausing or whatever. I'm just gonna piss
in a bottle. They don't know. I just mute the
thing a pissing a bottle. I had to inform where
that happens too, and she was repulsed. It was she
understood though. It was all good fun. So uh so, yeah,
the fucking micae heterotrophy thing was cool. Well, and then
I think I probably have a I'm getting a little
bit of a more of an interest in ethno botany.
I've always been interested in etho botany. I've always been
interested in human relations to plants. That's one of the
few times I feel hopeful about humanity or just about
people as individuals, is seeing them get excited about plants,
especially kids. When people are dead on the inside and
they no longer have that appreciation for the living world,
nor do they have the capacity to get excited about it.
That's when I'm I just don't you know, like really, like,
what do you do? What's going on up there? Really?
You don't like see any greater context. You just video
games and fucking sport, Like what do you deal with
your time? Like sports cars are fucking collecting shit to pray.
You know what, I don't understand the I don't understand it.
But you know, no judgment is they say bless their hearts.
Ah So anyway, but the ethno botanical aspect of all
this is, especially if some of these plants, you know
it's fucking wild, islex y Usa, which is in the
genus islex same genus as yerba mate, same genus as yopon,
which you know we get up here. It's a caffeine
source native North American caffeine source Islex vamitatoria. Unfortunate species name.
A friend of mine makes a makes macha out of
that species and sells it. He's got like a little company.
It's it's sold for a lot of money and whole foods.
But you could probably pocket it from the store though
you know it's gonna he's gonna make money either way.
So anyway, but yeah, Ilex Yusa is like a thirty
to forty foot tall tree. In some cases it's larger.
I don't think it's one of those plants. It's like
Salvia divi norm where, which is supposed to not occur
in the wild. It's a cultagen. It's been in human
cultivation for so long that or is probably a product
of human cultivation. Maybe who knows that the species itself
or that genome, whatever it is, doesn't exist in the wild.
It's just predominant in cultivation. But it's it's man, they
drink this shit like it's just water down there. It's
great and it's you know, they'll make it really light,
so it's not overpowering. But it's got caffeine and it
feels like a much softer, more pleasant to the taste
yerba mate because yerba mate will give me a headaches
sometimes and it's got kind of a weird flavor to it.
This stuff is pleasant, this pie, and it feels good.
Of course I fuck it up and make it too strong.
But it's what's enabled me to quit coffee for the
last month. Except for a few times, I've mostly been
off the coffee, which is great. I needed to be
off of it because I just overdid it. I've been
addicted to coffee since I was like fourteen or fifteen.
Uh yeah, so it's been nice. I feel less. I
feel slightly less ince anyway. On the uh the subject
of ethnobotany, a plant that was I found really fascinating
and that I had never been exposed to before was
Crescentia couhetae, which is in Big Noniac, the Catalpa family,
the trumpet vine family, some North American relatives, the desert
willow family, Big Noniac order. Lamy a leis uh so
you know bilatterally symmetrical flowers opposite leaves generally speaking. But
the name for this is calabash tree. And it produces
these fruits that look like many basketballs, you know, like
the little ones. So you might see it like a
game at the you know when you you go to
like fucking daven Busters or chuck E Cheese, you know,
one of those like basket the little mini the mini
basketballs like that size, not the big ones. And uh
my cult trill references, they really place me. I used
to I used to go to Chunkie Cheese. You know,
you take take your take the kid there and she's
run all over the place. You gotta go there on
the weekdays, you know, because it's a fucking Petrie dish.
Otherwise now it's a ripoff, but you could always find it. Wait,
there's scams. You could pull a chuck E Cheese, you
know with the ski ball machine or something. The whole
place is a scam. Really, when it comes down to it,
they're just milking you anyway. Uh. The calabash tree family
Bignonia ac order lamy alies produces this fruit that's the
size of one of those mini basketballs. You cut it
open and it's got this uh woody exocarp. It's like
a woody it's part of the fruit. It's beneath the rind,
but it's it's woody tissue and it creates a perfect bowl.
So these imagine like one of those mini basketballs cut
in half. It creates a perfect bowl. They're fucking everywhere. Uh,
and I think, let me stick at the range map.
It is the distribution. I mean it's planted throughout Southeast
Asia now too. This is obviously see an immensely useful
plant because you basically have a bowl from it. Right.
It's like it's not the hardest wood it's got. I
mean you could definitely step on it and break it,
but you've basically got it. What. Yeah, it sin Dominican,
it's throughout the Caribbean, it's throughout southern Mexico, and it's
I think it's is it colifflorous, two flowers popping right
out of the trunk. Yeah, it parts, yeah, but it's
a fucking cool It's a really cool plant. Odd pinnate leaves,
big noniac, just like the sausage tree, which is also
big noniac, which I've I grew a few of those.
I've got seeds, actually stuff. I got sausage tree seeds.
Who wants a sausage tree? Anybody out there work for
a conservatory that could use Kegelia africana, would you like
a sausage tree. I'll send you these seeds. It's a
great plant for a fucking conservatory, especially, but you know,
obviously you need a glasshouse. You need to be in
Florida or southern Califia or in my case, deep South Texas.
But it still dies back. Mine just died back in
a freeze. Once they get big enough, they don't fully
die back. The leaves will die. It's like a thirty
foot tall one. We got it froze. It got down
to like twenty eight here for a few hours, and
I was freaking. I had to bring all that. Hovier
brought all my shit inside for me because I was
in Chile. Thank god, you know, uh, and then then
it was supposed to get fucking cold again because most
of the native cac died down here. Are fine, you know,
all the mammalarias and all the native any native cactus
in South Texas can take a freeze. But I've got
other stuff that I you know, like someone gave me
one of those. Uh. I think Andy Andy from Andy's
Orchids gave me one of those ant house orchids. It's
like the stems are you know, it's a mermecophile and uh, anyway,
some of those are just I've got shit that's that's sensitive.
You know. Some of them are tillococtus you might use
for grafting or something, and well are sensitive to this stuff.
And I've got like columnars like my pack of series
wherebe I the tip died, so this will be less
of an issue. As they get bigger, they can take
these early morning freezes for a few hours, you know,
dipp into like twenty eight without dying back. But while
they're small still it can so anyway, it's just anyone.
It's the pain in the ass. But yeah, if you
want those Kagelia affri kind of seeds, email me and
I'll send you some. A friend of mine who has
a seed company in Rwanda gave them to me and
I've already grown a few and it'd be great. It's
definitely a cool plant to show people because the fruit
does look like a fucking sausage. And then the flowers
are incredible to It's got these pendent influorescences that are
pollinated by birds and bats, you know, the huge flowers.
So anyway, but yeah, this Criscientia cool heade was was
really cool to see and I had no prior knowledge
of it. You see, when you see the fruit, you
think it would be either some sort of large palm
fruit or it would be in Kukerbatasi it would be
a cucumber fruit. It's neither. It's from big noniac. I
wonder what this thing evolved with. What you know, the
inside of the fruit is filled this white meae substance
that it was probably megafun I guess, of course, but
this white meae substance with you know, many seeds inside.
And now I want to grow this thing because it
seems like it's got a drought tolerance too. But you know,
again all this shit and the climate's so fucked up
and the jet stream. You know, the Arctic's warming so
much that the jet stream isn't stable. So now we
get these polar vortexas. Remember whenever that cold air is
dipping far down south on the other side of it,
just like a wave and a trough, you've got warm
air going way up to the Arctic too. The Arctic
warms like one of the during the deep freeze that
happened here in Texas and was it twenty one? I
think Alaska that day was like warmer than fucking somewhere
in Arizona. And I forget anyway. Uh, you know, it's
all it's all part of the the general trend of
warming climates. I can't believe that fucking people like Joe
Rogan are full on climate deniers now. It's fucking insane. God,
it's so it's so fucking crazy. I shared a clip
on a YouTube channel yesterday by climate Town, which is Uh,
that guy Roley, I forget his fucking name. He's out
in New York. He's got a climate science policy degree,
but he says it with like a it's kind of
tongue in cheek. But he runs climate Town the YouTube channel,
which is great. It's fucking hilarious, hilarious, and it's good info.
But I posted it because I kept seeing people sharing
that land Man show. I don't know if you know
about that. You're you know, suburban dads, boomers, climate deniers.
They love this show because it's the main clip from
it is this billy Bob Thornton, who really went out
on the deep end. I said, wow, you know, he's
got like a he's doing like a Captain Jack Sparrow
impression in his daily life. He's dressed like a fucking pirate.
You know, he's dressed like a drag queen pirate. No shade,
I'm just saying it's, you know, anyway. So, but he's
doing this. He plays this West Texas land man who
works for the oil companies. It helps get land. And
there's this scene where he's it's so fucking tongue in
chee man, it's not tongue and she it's so cliche,
like it's so like, this is what I would imagine,
you know, a Joe Rogan bro or like a West
Texas bro who's never left West Texas would think of
like the California liberal. You know, the roles are very
cliche it's very cartoon, it's very predictable. But you've got
this landman played by Billy Bob Thorton, and then the
the liberal out there who's all for renewable energy, and
he's telling her how none of this is renewable. It's
those windmills are bullshiting, you know, blah blah, and oil's
all we got. Yeah, everything's out here is made of oil.
And you know, like the typical thing, the typical argument
you hear against electric cars. And I'm not for any
of this shit. I'm not four cars, I'm not four windmills.
Any of this. It all feeds the tumor. It's all
part of the same disease, just a different source. I
will say, I don't like oil, though I don't like cancer.
I don't like the fucking smell of exhaust. That was
something that was running through my mind the whole anytime
I go to Latin America, because the fucking air pollution
is so bad. There's no catalytic converters on most of
the cars. Mexico City smells like a fucking parking garage.
I love Mexico City, I just it smells like a
parking garage. The fucking auto pollution is terrible. It's all
car pollution. It gives me a fucking headache. I want
to puke. I literally get a nauseous when I smell that,
And I'm just like, man, you know, cars fucking suck.
But like if shit was electric, like infrastructure had slowly
been moved to electric. Of course it couldn't have been
because the technology didn't exist yet, and electric cars have
their own downsides, especially when it comes to temperature and
then the minerals required whatever. But either way, you're gonna
be you know, fucking robbing. You're gonna be looting the
habitat to get the materials you need for any of this.
But the answer is just less cars and better better
urban planning. But regardless, the whole time, I'm just thinking,
like God, man, like electric cars, like internal combustion engines
are just so inefficient, you lose so much energy to heat,
et cetera. Electric cars are fewer moving parts, better pick up,
they don't and most importantly, they don't fucking stink. They
don't like spew poisoned into the air. All right, I'm
not a booster for any but anyway, so I shared
this Climate Town clip because I just got so tired
of seeing that landmank that from this TV show. You know,
I'm like, this is just I've been hearing these parroted
arguments when people parrot arguments, and you know, people on
the left do this too, of course, like the American left.
They part these stupid talking points and then like try
to pass them off like they thought on them themselves,
like they're they're educated, though you've never heard this before
or you know, and everybody's doing it right, especially of course,
and that's what they're always you always reading the comments
like those electric cars, the minerals and blah blah blah,
and you know, climate's always changing. The climate deniers have
their own round of this shit. But people basically they're
repeating shit that you've heard nine thousand times already, and
it was stupid as fuck the first time you heard it.
And then they're they're telling you to telling it to
you like you've never heard it before, like you're supposed
to be blown away by this. This is some new new
information they're going to blow your mind with. And then
they're like passing it off as their own and it's like, man,
I know, you just heard that somewhere else. You didn't
even fucking think about this or look at look into it.
You're just using it to back up your dumbass opinion.
It just it's it irritates the fuck out of me.
You know, it's like, man, I wasn't born. Yesterday I
met a fucking idiot. And also you're not an original
thinker regardless. I shared this clip on the YouTube channel
yesterday and the amount of like climate deniers I was
seeing in the comments was blowing my mind. I'm like,
how the fuck did you get Why do you follow
this channel? Do you know what I do? Like? You
just think the fucking you think like the fact I
curse or I have like a problem. I have a
problem with cursing, right, I curse far too much some time?
You just what is it that? How did you get here? Like?
What are you doing here? You know it's like seeing
a crackhead in an AA meeting? Well, actually that makes sense. Sometimes,
you know, people relapse and they just stand up back
in the meetings. You know, the door's always open, come
on in here. You know you could come into this
meeting still spun out of your mind. It's fine, you
know we're gonna give you the recovery you need, even
though we know it's not gonna work. Nobody's denied. But
you know what I mean, this the climate denial shit again,
this is just more I just can't fucking I need
to get out of this country at some point. You know,
every place has its own flavor of poison. Every place
is filled with idiots in human toxicity. And there's nice
things in every place too, of course, don't forget that.
Live laugh left, But I just need to I can't
sit still. So this is just the home base. I'm
just here from my daughter. And then, you know, I
don't know where. I don't know where to. Wind will
blow me later on, you know, hopefully not off a cliff.
But uh yeah, the US is rough, Texas is rougher,
culturally speaking. Wonderful plants and animals here, Okay anyway, So
Krishanthia Kueta, I'm gonna try to grow that. It's it's
drought tolerant. It's it's gotta grows in areas with a
seasonally dry climate. I really like those seasonally dry areas,
not quite deserts, you know, men as your eyes. Brazil,
parts of the Dominican Republic love to be there in
the wet season, so I could really you know, I'm
not misled into thinking it's more dry than it is
or that it's just whatever it's season. Like if you
go to Wahaka cloud Forest during the rainy season, you're like, oh,
this is just a cloud forest, you know, rainy whatever,
and it never dries out here. And then you go
there in the winter and during the dry season you're like,
oh shit, this is like the roads are dusty. It's
completely different. It's complete and you want to get that
full picture. Anyway, what are we talking about here? Where
are we going with this? Let's keep moving on. So
on another note, there was a really cool orchid that
we encountered, fragment Pedium, which I think is one of
five genera in subfamily and orchid subfamily siper pedioid E,
which has two anthers instead of only one anther like
orchid doity. The subfamily like the terrestrial orchids in North
America or Australia, or epidendroid E, a lot of which
are the most epidendroids I think are Epiphytes siper pedioid
the lady slipper orchids. What a stupid names. Lady slip,
what is that that's not culturally relevant to me? It's
a little bag. They're a bag orchids just what I'm
gonna call them, the Jewel bag orchids, like a bag
you get from the Jewel Osco, which is a Chicago
supermarket chain. Do they still do it? They still have
plastic bags? That did jewe Losco? Or do the woke
Bob type of away well, all plastics just like the
plastic straws. The woke Bob took away the plastuck straws
at a plastic bag. Anything's a woke mob. Anything you
don't like that tries to like do a little bit
of environmental good in a world as a woke mob.
Just reminder for all the Americans here, what a what
an idiotic dystopi? Okay? Anyway, the Jewel bag orchids, the
Jewel Losco bag orchids, the siper pedioid E two anthers,
the staminos really cool flower morphology orchids of course always
have such a fascinating flower morphology. The flowers are like
little puzzles where you look at this thing and you say,
what is it doing there? How is it doing it
what pollinates it lots of specialists pollinators, lots of deceptive pollination.
Many times no nectar or pollen being offered. It's you know,
pheromones that are alluring in uh, pollinators to dupe them all, right, epipac,
this gigantea which we get here in Texas, all the
way west to California, is pollinated much the same way
that this fragment pedium is. It's it. It lures in
flies hoverflies that are are that mostly uh, I believe
they all are meant most of them lay eggs in
aphid colonies and then the eggs hatch, the larvae eat
the the aphids, and so to lure them in, yeah,
you need some sort of bait to fool them into
thinking that there's an aphid colony there, whether it's pheromones
or in the case that is fragment pedium. It's thought
that the lure is these splotches that look like aphids
on this bag flower. So uh, I believe all of
these not ladies, slipper orchids, but the jewel bag orchid
because that labellum is a little pouch. It's a big
inflated bag. The insects crawl in there, and then it's
got this trap and least pollination system, just like aeroids do,
and just like aristolochia do. Really fascinating It temporarily traps
the insect, makes it hang out in there for a
day or two Aristolochia does. I don't know how long
it is with the jewel bag orchids, the siper pedioids,
and then lets them out. But when they go out
in the case of fragment pedium, in the case of
like Aristolochia, the pipevines like Aristolochia erecta that we get
in Texas, which is a fucking wonderful species that I'm
trying to propagate a lot more of we need if
you live in Texas, propagate the shit out of Aristolochia erecta.
It's not grown enough. They're easy to grow from tuber
I think like to just take cuttings of and you
should just set aside a little area of your yard
to grow this plant. And they're also the host plant
for really dope caterpillar and butterfly, the swallow tails orange
black caterpillars. They turn into these fucking really cool butterflies.
And we saw some wild aristolochia down at this little
butterfly sanctuary this lady had set up in her yard
down there in Mara, Ecuador, and I've got to do
the video on it. God, it was fucking wild. It
was like a six inch eight inch tall bag of aristolochia.
And there were caterpillars there, of course, And there's caterpillars
on coca plants Erythroxylum coca as well, which makes sense
all those fucking alkaloids in the leaves. You know that's
you got a plant with strong toxic fhito chemistry, you're
gonna get a caterpillar that evolves to bioaccumulate that stuff
and hold it in its tissue, so that if a
bird comes neaeds the caterpillar of pukes, it's a great defense, right,
gain a tolerance to these compounds, then bioaccumulate them so
if anything tries to eat you with pukes and doesn't
try to eat any more of your species, selective advantage
in that. So God, the erythroxyland was so cool. What
a cool genus, not even just for like the stupid
drug aspect, because I think cocaine's fucking awful. It makes
people so intolerable to be around, almost as much as
alcohol does. But it's a really cool, curious genus. I
chewed on Erythroxylum grisillipes leaves that had been planted a
century or two before at this research station and at
forty eight hundred feet in the upper Amazon of Ecuador,
and it like made my mouth nomin and gave me
a little bit of a boost. I didn't like it
because I don't like blow. I haven't done blowing like
fifteen years. But the feeling of it is gross, Like
it's mostly the comdown too, Like I got like a
little peppa. It was like a coffee It felt like
a more unpleasant coffee crash. But the fact that it
numbed my mouth, I was like, Jesus Christ, this is potent.
The whole thing was covered in moss and lichens and
algae growing on the leaves too, really wet. Environment wasn't
that hot, Like it was chilly at night. God, that
was such a lovely morning, waking up after it fucking
pissed all night, and the sounds of the birds and
the forest, and you know, we were up on top
of this mountain where they built this research station. They
didn't haul anything up there. They built it with trees
from the surrounding area. Really dope, set up to drinking
Guayusa tea at night, solar panels, they had the fucking
starlink so they had good internet there, microscopes, a library.
It was like a dream. That's like what I want
to have at Thorn Scrubs Sanctuary sometime, like a research
station like this, and they host visiting groups. It was
so pleasant, you know, and it had it not been rainy,
you could look across and see these volcanoes. Like Alex
was showing me pictures, like nobody could see this giant volcano.
And he showed me pictures of like the volcano with
like lava spewing out of it too, like this is
a small eruption. Anyway, what was I talking about? So
the uh this trap and release mechanism, which aeroids do it?
Aeroids will temporarily trap their pollenate ARISTOLOCHI will temporarily trap
its pollinators. And this fragmentpedium did it as well. And
I looked up this paper called pollination of slipper Orchids
siper pedioid e review by Pemberton, Florida Museum of natural
history and it's fucking fascinating. And it turns out see this.
I was never into orchids before Peter Bernhardt got me
into them because he studies them and he studies their
unique pollination systems, and that's what is so cool about them.
It's like every fucking orchid is a puzzle. You know,
when you stop seeing these things, is this is the
pretty flower? Who gives a fuck about that? I don't
care about aesthetics, that's nice, whatever. I'm interested in this
like ornate morphology that's evolved in so many orchids, just
having like intricate ornate morphology to their flowers. It's like
a puzzle everything is. In this case, this Fragmentpedium pierci,
which we saw growing on these limestone rocks that are
on this river. That and the river is they're surely
submerged at some point because there's so much rain that
you get torrents. I mean, there was a giant boulder
in the middle of this river that I'm sure you know,
it was the size of a fridge, probably weighed, you know,
two thousand pounds. I'm sure it didn't be pushed there
in an epic flood however, long ago, right, and a
series of those epic floods, these epic torrents where the
river is just swollen and it ends up moving at
another one hundred feet, and then it sits there for
a century, and then another flood comes by. It sits
there for twenty years, then another flood comes by and
moves it a little bit further down the river. Just wild, wild,
fucking god, it was so cool. I mean, this habitat
is just so rich. I'm gonna fucking I'm gonna do
to Ayahuashka thing. I don't care, you know, I don't care.
It's a cliche. You know, the hanky's going down here,
the gringoes, whoever, you know, the techies to do psychedelics
in a place like that, because psychedelics and nature just
go hand in hand. That's what's psychedelics are. They're probably
a way, they're probably away for the plant to fucking
get us to chill out with whatever stupid shit we're doing.
You know, this race to nowhere where we're completely shitting
all over the place, right, behaving like a teenager that
just found a liquor cabinet. Now we're just puking and
shitting all over the place, you know, bottles, we're just
trashing the house, right This maybe what the plants are doing.
Maybe if I, you know, blow these people's minds, maybe
they'll they'll have a moment of clarity and settle down.
I don't know. I get a little woo wu. But
it's a nice theory. But to do ayahuasca, I mean,
when you do ayahuasca, you're not even there anymore. You're
off somewhere else. It's like a prolonged DMPT trip. But
to do any kind of psychedelic and we did encounter
quite a few silosophy species zop at the korum young
gensis or is it young ee I forget uh, and
a couple of a couple other like the more or
higher altitude Mexican species. Uh. We encountered there too. But yeah,
Zapata korn was there. We saw Zapata oh who chiganyi too.
The psilosophy with the sharpest nipple saw that as well.
Mushroom trip in it that kind of habit. That would
be amazing too, because that's what, you know, that's what peyote.
Any of these things therefore talking to the plants, therefore
being surrounded with nature, and also, you know, facing the
shit you don't want to face so you can become
a better person, a little bit of introspection. Anyway, this
fragment pedium was growing on these boulders of limestone that
had fossils in them. On this river. It had been
pissing all day, it had been raining. I was trying
to keep my camera dry. I still got it wet.
But if you ever get a camera wet, the way
around that is buy some fucking silica packets online and
put it in a bag with a shit ton of
silica packets and they will absorb the humidity. And then
of course you could just dry the silica packets out
in the oven. Great method for you know, especially for
phones too. Fuck rice, get the silica. Get the silica packets.
You know, the stuff, you know, the ones that say
do not eat when you get a bag of that,
the seaweed stuff, you know. But this fragmentpedium, the floral
structure was insane. And there's I'd later found out from
this paper it's pollinated. It's dependent supposedly on a single species.
Three of the four I'm quoting the paper now three
to four insect pollinated. Fragment pedium species are narrow specialists,
being pollinated by a single insect species. Fragment Pedium perci
and fragment pedium called datum are each pollinated by female
hoverflies of a single species Pemberton twenty eleven. Fragment Pedium
longe of folium is pollinated by both a female hoverfly
and a halictid bee. See. I don't even know what
a helictid bee is. Now, I gotta look it up. Now,
I gotta look this up. What's what the fuck is
a helicted bee? Sounds fascinating? What is it? Now? Are
sweat bees? All right? Helictid bees belonging to the family
Helictity are known as sweat bees. They are at a
verse group of bees found worldwide, with over forty five
hundred species described. Here are some key characteristics and facts
about helicted bees, size and appearance. Helicted bees are generally
small to medium size, ranging from three to ten millimeters.
Where did I encounter one of these that wouldn't leave
me alone? I encountered a sweat bee. They literally go
for sweat. It wouldn't It was a mean all the time.
It was kind of cute. It never stung me. I
don't even know if this thing could sting, but it
was really interested that I was sweating like a pig,
sweating like a whore in church, and I just, you know,
I forget where that was. I remember it was in
a video. Interesting. You know, the sweat bees are called
sweat bees because they're attracted the human sweat. You know,
this is because they need salts and minerals. So where
would they get that if there weren't people around now?
And if there's an OrCAD that's pollinated by halictied bees,
by sweat bees, what does it do to get him
in there? How do you get those guys in there?
I don't know. Now, I gotta look up this species
fragment Pedium, lounge of folium, this stuff. I am endlessly
fascinated by this kind of shit, these relationships, How does
this stuff evolve? The floral morphology and the things are
just fucking beautiful too. But this this uh orchid had
had two anthers, which was unique. Again, most orchids only
have one, a single anther, with each anthro theica uh
per ethiki producing a a polinia, a pollinium. Excuse me,
you know, because orchid pollen is arrogated into these little
knobs called the polinea, just like milkweeds. And then so
it had two anths. And then this stamino with these
little eyelash looked like a mustache kind of. And then
the whole column is fascinating. And then of course that
big bag pouch with the splotches on it. But you know,
you see these things and you're like, I know something's
going on there. That's an incredibly ornate flower. It's incredibly complex.
What the fuck? And you look into it and sure enough,
I would love to sit there and do pollination studies.
They don't quite have the patience for it. Maybe you
could put a little camera or something that might be hard.
But I fucking hate sitting still. That's the big problem
with me for for like getting work like this done,
you know, like for like writing or whatever. It's like,
I just I gotta get some fucking activity. Can't sit down,
you know, you stand up and do squats. That was why,
you know, when I got my locomotive license, I knew
it was wasn't gonna last. I couldn't do that. I'd
be fucking miserable being trapped sitting down anyway, before I forget,
I want to play the sound of an oropendula, and
I'll probably play this again. These are these birds that
make these hanging nests. They're related, They're in the same
family is the birds that make the hanging nests here
in South Texas, the ultimira orioles. And this is what
I woke up to every morning. Just listen to this.
I had to. I should have recorded these guys earlier.
Those are two separate verds. One does the little water
drop puts down in the other response the fuck? What
did I saying to each other? I don't know? Oh god?
So uh anyway, shout out to Cora. The genus Cora
a basidio liking. Most liking is asco my seats. This
is a basidio my seat, and it associates with cyanobacteria too.
I put an Instagram post up about that, if you
want to see photos a fucking gorgeous organism. It looks
like a basidium my seat. It looks like a shelf fungus,
but it's got the habit of a lichen and it's
growing epiphytically with a bunch of moss. Where I encountered
It was growing epiphetically with a bunch of moss and
a little blueberry member called spherrospermum bucks of folium with
bright purple fruits, an epiphytic one of the epiphytic bloomberries.
What are the many many species? And I think the
first time I saw where else? I saw it in
Brazil And maybe I saw it that. Where else did
I see? Let me look this up? Got inga edgeless
the ice cream bean with a bean pod three feet long,
tried growing at once that hated South Texas. Where did
I encounter this? I think it was just maybe it
was just Brazil. I feel like I've seen it in
other places too. Yeah, it was near Nova Friebergo, Brazil.
Different species of cora, there's probably I think there's like
hundreds of species of Cora, each growing in different habitats.
But uh god, it's just a fucking beautiful, beautiful organism.
This one was like this bright turquoise teal color with
you know, striations in it. A fucking yeah, man, And
I don't think you get them in any of the
northern latitudes. Actually, let me see, like you know what,
let's see that. Let's see you get Cora's in uh
anywhere in North America. I should have checked this earlier.
I gotta eat something I didn't fucking eat today. Just
had some way USA. Let's see taxonomy, Cora. Now, I
don't think none of the United States. No observations in
the US. Some in Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Chile. Oh yeah,
did I not see? Did I not? You know? I
think I saw some in Chile. Maybe I didn't get
any photos. What a jackass? What a jig? None in
the Amazon. None in Central South America, like this center
of the con that. I'm not sure if that's just
not been observed or what. I'm so curious, you know,
get your shots. Go to the state of Amazonas in Brazil.
I just want to see what it's like. Just take
a little just go down a river there. God man,
so much, so much cool stuff out there, you know,
so much cool stuff to observe. Well, you want to
spend your time thinking about depressing things and this this
flailing ending empire. Okay, anyway, let's uh, let's go back
and keep talking here another yes, anyway, inga edgelist. I
talked about that briefly, but that was another plan from
the Ethnobotany market. Three foot long bean, delicious fruit, white
mealy pulp around the the relatively large inch and a
half long seeds. And they're fucking delicious too. Yeah, but
they you know, I think they grow in Veracruz, Mexico,
it's probably the closest. But they need warmth, they don't
tolerate freezing, and they also need a lot of water.
So this is gonna, you know, during those long dry
spells we get in South Texas, it's going to be miserable.
You could probably grow them in part portions of Florida
before it's you know, submerged beneath the Atlantic Ocean. But yeah,
fucking delicious. But that's I mean. The cool thing too
is they were volunteering in disturbed areas like roadsides and
shit all over, you know, this little area near Marra
and Puyo, Ecuador, which makes sense. I mean, you buy
this thing at a market for fifty cents. You lit
me fifty cents for this three foot long bean, and
then it's got like forty thirty seeds in it. You're
eating all of them, eating this stuff around them. You
spit them out land, you know, the seed lands and
and doff. The climate here barely ever dries out, so
it's moist all the time. The duff is going to
be moist all the time. And you could see how
these things just they spread like cow. I mean that is,
it's a plant that's taken very well to producing the
sweet material that's you know, enjoyed by humans, and then
the humans basically distribute the seeds everywhere. God, there was
so much cool shit in that fruit market. You know,
tons of back rist species. Two up in a paramo,
we saw back risk and this the Looides, which is
one of those winged leafless stembackris stem coyote bush. Saw
some cool flug marrieurs up there, to those really weirdlycopods
that look like you know, inch diameter worms that can
be two feet long in some cases. Jamisonia, which is
one of the Chylanthoid fern genera, some really fucking weird
ones in that that genus. But I want to I
want before I go back to talking about the parmo,
I do want to focus on the lower elevations because
this is where a lot of the weird stuff was.
How have I not even mentioned the genus Socropia yet? Right?
These are most. I think all Cycropia are New world
they're all neotropical, but they're they're a pioneer. They're all
pioneer species for the most part. You know, they're the
first to re colonize disturbed land, the first to start
to reclaim the land after humans have fucked it or
ruined it. You know, they they get around easily, and
they have huge peltate leaves. There's quite a few species.
I remember seeing what species did I see in Brazil
with the silver undersides? The family is ertic Casey and uh,
let's see what species was it? I think they were
in their own family for a while, or they've been
in more ac as well. It was yeah, Socropia hollow Luca,
Socropia hollo luca. And uh, where do I see shriber
shri bariana? Where was that? Oh that was in the
d Aren't the Meinican Republic. But really cool leaves umbrella
like leaves, peltate leaves, a really cool pilotaxi. When the
leaves are emerging, they look all wrinkled and just have
this beautiful form as they emerge from the bud. And
then the fruits of course are you know, eaten by
a number of animals. These are immensely ecologically important trees,
especially since they're they're i mean, being a pioneer species.
They're one of the first plants to show up and
then get the land ready for the next succession of
species that are not pioneer species, for next you know,
the next line of plant species that wind up growing there,
that need a little bit more forest cover, that need
that living skin on the earth. They can't just you know,
before they can get established, you know, they can't do
the species that are secondary or third in succession to
you know, to recolonize an area after it's been cleared
or destroyed for agriculture or pasture or whatever. You know,
those pioneer species are important. That's basically what you're doing
when you kill your lawn, You're you're you're helping the
land reclaim. You're helping the life, the living skin reclaim
what was taken and destroyed. You know. So those pioneer
species are important, and then you plant those first so
that the secondary, secession secessional species can get established. The
stuff that might need a little bit of shade or
might not be able to thrive, you know, on barren soil.
That's getting beaten to death by sun might need a
little bit of cover. Maybe can't compete with weedy stuff
too well. You plant, you know, it's a process, and
then after a decade or so, you've got the hopefully,
you know, maybe you could create not a climax community,
but close enough to it. That's basically what I did
here in South Texas. That's what I do when I
kill lawns. I'm not like, I'm not so much. I'm
not a fucking designer. I'm trying to just recreate the
living skin. You plant the stuff that's gonna cover. Especially
where I am the sun is so hot. You plant
those pioneer species first with the full intent of maybe
later removing them or having them only be temporary, just
as a way to increase the immediate humidity, which they
do to act as a living shade cover, et cetera.
Because there's a feedback loop at some point. Anytime you
kill a lawn, you know, the plants start thriving. When
it reaches a certain density, stuff starts growing a hell
of a lot faster because the immediate humidity's been upped.
The plants are creating humidity for themselves. You know, holding
helping hold humidity in and that layer of air beneath
the little canopy they've created, even if it's just a
shrub layer or a you know, you've got like a
scrubby setting, if it's only four feet tall, they're preventing
the sun from hitting the ground, baking the ground, you know,
causing the ground to lose less moisture than it otherwise
would be. You know, they're acting like a living mulch
in a way, well, performing the same the same service
that mulch does, you know, just more cover and then
you just you know, go in there, let it get
out of control, and then just go in there and
just give it a haircut so you can walk through it,
keep it trimmed, keep the city off your back. Whatever. Anyway,
I digress. Socropio is everywhere beautiful plant, immensely important and
especially important ecologically, you know, for the services in food
it provides to the things that eat the fruit as
well as the things that palm it. You know, cecropia
are wind pollinated, but you know some insects can assist.
There is I'm sure even with a lot of wind
pollinated plants, I'm sure there's still insects going in there
and eating pollen. But but yeah, the main the main
benefit is in the fruits. But yeah, they're fucking everywhere.
They get huge and multiple species. I mean, it's they
could be hard to identify because often the leaves are
so high above the canopy unless you're in a disturbed
area where they just grew. But you know, you see
a lot of them in the forest too. Especially they're
especially easy to make out, like when you're on the
other side of a river on a narrow, sketchy road
in a canyon and you can see just these giant
peltate leaves, especially if some of the more silvery species,
you know, like Howlo Luca for instance, I mean, they
stand out, like the leaves look so unique and different
from anything else. Another common plant that that I encountered
there was triplerois comingiana, which is in the family Polygones.
It's in the buckwheed family. But it's like an eighty
foot tall tree, if not taller, and you could see
them from far away because they've got these the flowers
have these bright red bracts. No idea what pollinates. It's
probably a hummingbird or something like you know what I
should look that up while I'm here. Oh wow, wind. Okay,
I guess that makes sense. And so it's wind just
like cecropia, it's dioecious. So the individual plants, either male
or female, just like cecropia. And those red bracs, of course,
are only on those red bracts are they're like wings
for dispersal, They're only on the females. That red color.
I'm curious about that. I wonder why why so bright red?
I suppose it's Oh, you know what, this actually makes
sense because there was an article that just came out
recently about the red color on stigmas or on other
tissues of wind pollinated plants. Why the red color if
it's wind pollinated, the flowers don't need to be showy,
there's no why would they be creating this this pigment.
Turns out that, of course that red color is created
by anthocyanins. In the case of polygonace, this would be
you know, since there are carriophilales, this would be it this,
it would be beta aine pigments. But still beta aine
pigments are of course analogous to to anthoscionance. Just for
the order Carriophilales, the cactus and beat order. Anyway, it's
it's it's protective, it's it's basically like a like a
plant sunscreen. There was this article that came out I
think it was from Washington University where the research was done,
but it was about windo. I forget what what plant
genus they were looking at, but it was a wind
pollinated plant. And this researcher was curious because the stigmas
were red. What's the point of that? And I'll see
that in a lot of carric species sometimes or even grasses,
the stigma will be red. Well, it's that tissue on
the stigma is extra thin. We meaning it's also you know,
much more susceptible too. And it's thin because it has
to be so pollen grains can land in Germany out
germanate on it and when it since it's so thin,
it's also that makes it more susceptible to UV damage
or cold damage, et cetera. Which, of course, these red pigments,
whether it's anthocyanins or betolanes, whatever, stress pigment provides some
protection against. So that that makes sense, I guess, because
there's there's no attractive benefit in the fruits of a
well maybe I guess for dispersal. But these wings on
this triplearis, this tree, the polygones look they certainly look
like maple samaras. They've got that like helic helicopter thing
going on. Surely wind dispersed anyway, I I guess I
should look home on. Let me look into this too. Yeah,
it is, it is pollen. It's it's or wind dispersed,
wind pollinated, wind dispersed. Another study said insect pollinated. But
that's not fucking right, there's no I no. I didn't
see any males though, but again the males wouldn't be
showy because they don't know those red bracks, so they
wouldn't be as not showy, but as conspicuous the either way.
Triplais kaminguiana is another pioneer species. Like Ciba, it very common,
it's fast growing again families polygonac, the buckweed family, and
it's got mutualisms with ants, which with the which Cycropia
also does. Like Cycropia, it's wind pollinated and uh and
got a mutualism with ant with ant species. This was yeah,
I mean, this was a really conspicuous tree that I
just was completely unfamiliar with until Now another another plant
that fucking blew my mind down there with Guadua and Gustafolio,
which is a bamboo, some of the shoots of which
can reach ninety feet tall. I mean, this is a
monstrous bamboo species. It's a native New World bamboo, a
native neotropical bamboo that forms these massive colonies and the
forest there, and I'm curious how to get established and
how big the seeds are. But you'll see new shoots
that are six feet tall and just look like these
these sharp asparagus buds six foot tall asparagus buds sticking
out of the forest floor there. And then you know,
forming these massive colonies. I mean that the diameter of
these things is like ten inches in some kind. I mean,
they're fucking massive. And then they form these lateral branches
that are covered in spikes that nobody likes. They make
it very unpleasant to touch these things, you know, like
an inch long spike. Maybe they can be bigger. The
ones I saw were an inch. And then the deligules
of these bamboos, well, I guess it would be the lamina,
like the little leafy part, but it's like a bract
that in many cases of the guad the guadua. Probably
pronounced it wrong, guad dua it was. You know, it's
like a foot to eighteen inches tall, the fucking little
protective bract is, and it's covered in these like rusty
maroon hairs, these little that feel like a shark tongue.
Just fucking crazy. Such a cool that's such a plant.
I would have loved. I would have loved to spend
more time with it, observing it. You know, I'm curious
what the flowers look like. How often it flowers, probably
not very often. What are the inflorescences look like? A
wild species? The ant? I mean, this is a nothing
I need to look into, Like I've got notes of
all this shit I need to look into and research.
But like the the the abundance of ant symbiosis down there,
like tripleeris uses ants as defenders. It's got this mutualism
with the ants. These these scale insects are they eat
the tripleris, But apparently there's a payoff because the ants
then farm the scale insects and also provide protection to
the tree, like ant bouncers, you know, from things that
might eat it. Socropia of course has ant bouncers. In it.
There's someone sent me a paper of these ants that
hang out on socropia leaves, kind of looking like they're
questing like ticks to you know, like hanging on to
it with their legs and then another set of legs
and a pair of legs reaching out and they'll catch
things like moths and shit, just and you know, like
essentially trapping other insects and then eating it. It's fucking
it's crazy down there. There's so much to study ecologically,
but the ant relations were especially cool. It was a
really just mysterious thing to see. I mean, you go
there and if you're paying attention, you just end up
walking away with so many questions. So ant the ant
symbiosis was abundant there. I have a new appreciation for
ants after spending ten days in the Upper Amazon, I
will tell you that. And again I also saw that
native Ada species. What's the leaf cutter? I mean, I
gotta consult that naturalist again. What is the species of Ada?
The leaf cutter? Genus any Amazon? Right? Not like the
ones that we get in Texas. You know, the little
bastards I let hang out my front yard. I appreciate them.
I was happy to see them. It's cold as hell
right now. It's thirty four degrees on a Texas Mexican
border right now. But just yesterday they were out and
they were mad at me too because accidentally stepped on them.
They'll let you know, they'll fucking bite you. And then
Ada Cephalodes that's the one in the Amazon. That's the
leaf cutters in the Amazon, at acephalodes, and boy, they
were you know, they were busy. They were getting to
work feeding their little fungus underground. Which was exciting too
because unrelated to this was with termites. But there were
these termite mounds we would see at the lower elevations
at like three thousand and thirty one hundred feet what
is that meters nine hundred meters and we would see him.
They'd be at the base of a tree. These are
not the termites that are gonna do well. Maybe they
would destroy your house, I don't know. I think they're
mostly just recycling nutrients. They're performing a very essential ecological function,
you know, akin to fire in terms of recycling dead
plant matter and nutrients. They're they're raking and cleaning the forest.
Circa what fucking year was it that moron said at
twenty seventeen. Why did he say raking and cleaning the forest?
There was twenty seventeen. That's what the termites are doing.
They're raking and cleaning the Amazon. But they build these
little wood, these little nests, these little mounds like the
size of a yoga ball, like the sigh of an
erotic yoga ball. You know, I knew this guy. I'm
really all over the place today with the ad D.
I knew this guy who had a fucking what are
the super neurotic dogs, the border collie, And he got
at a yoga ball that he would take it to
the park and let it heard the thing, because it
wasn't enough just to taste the fuck just to take
a fucking tennis ball. He take the yoga ball out
there and throw it his thing with chase the yoga ball.
He lived in Sacramento. There was a long time. It
was like ten years ago. Maybe I don't know anyway anyway, Okay,
but so back as we saw this termite mound and
it had a mushroom growing out of it, and that
was because and the mushroom species was luco A garrighis.
Let me see what what was this? Uh? I think,
let me see what this was, basidio my coda, because
I don't know my mushroom family is that. Well, what
the fuck was this? I got a photo of it. Yeah, oh,
it was a garricus. It was just an Agaricus species
probably undescribed, had a really ahead of really distinct wardy look,
barnacle look kind of on the top of its cap.
But it was fruiting out of a termite mound. And
that's because it was the fungus. It was the mushroom
to the fungus that the termites were farming, and I
guess they would eat this fungus this hole. And you
could see my selam all over this giant yoga ball
sized termite nest. Fucking fascinating, but it was cool to
see the fungus fruiting. And these these leaf cutter ants,
whether it's the ones the added Texana that are in
my front yard here in South Texas or or the
ad of Cephalodes down are on the Amazon, have a
fungus too. That's what they're bringing the leaves for to
feed the fungus, and it would fruit too, presumably when
the when the nest dies. If the nest does die here,
I don't know one of the leaf cutter fungus. How
do you get them to fruit? I think it's a
what is the what is the fungus? Let me let
me ask the oracle here? What is the fungus that
leaf cutter ants farm? Luko Agaricus gongola gongolo for us,
Luco gericas, gongal gonglaers gong You ever have a bad
case of gongalapherus? Uh? You know it's so hard to
get antibiotics these days. That's what you gotta have your
friend in Mexico purchase them for you, because you can't
really just cross the border and go to the pharmacy
and get the antibiotics because those are probably fake. They're
probably knockoffs, you know, knowing if you know the border
towns like I do, you know they're sleazy, slimy and
full of uh miscreant entrepreneurs of all shapes and sizes.
And a lot of the drugs you're probably getting are
probably fake too, So be careful with those inhalers, and
certainly be careful with an if you're going there for
ozempic or something, which, uh, what is the connection with
between no zembic and helo monsters. Isn't there one there?
There certainly is. I'm not gonna we're not gonna talk
about that now though, because it's not related to the Amazon,
but just should you should just know, you know, the
helo monsters are helping the American fatties live their cardependent
lifestyles by reducing the appetite. So thank a helo monster
near you. Right, America. What a wonderful land. It's made
walking obsolete. Okay, So anyway, but these aunt symbiosis are
there were ants everywhere and let me see. Did I
get bit by any of them? I think so, I
can't remember. I don't know, but but yeah, I mean
the ants are a bun in the Amazon, and there's
tons of mermeco fights. There's tons of ant symbiosis. And
one of my favorites was from the family Melostomatasi. Well,
first off, like triplayis we talk about that Triplaris That
Trio was just telling me about polygon Ac. The buckwheed
family gets up to eighty feet tall when pollinated, probably
insect pollinated to I believe bees have been observed going
in the flowers. The only way to really tell is
to get up there and go observe the flowers firsthand,
but you would have trouble getting up there climbing the
tree because the stems are hollow and they're inhabited by ants.
It's another more mecophyte obviously. But there was a tree.
It was I thought it was called Demia in obcepta,
not a tree. It was a small herb two or
three feet tall, and it was it's Melastoma tases. So
it's got those really cool flowers with the really fucking
weird anthers, those inflated porcidal anthers, and the distinct leaf pattern.
Remember all melastomes, they're like se and note this, they're
like the genus c and note this is completely unrelated,
but they're like it in the sense that the leaves
have that distinct venation to them. Most notably, I think
in most cases it's it's three main primary veins well
on one mid vein, and then two lateral veins, one
on each side of the mid vein. But it's I mean,
you can see it's one of the few plant families
where you could see leaf and be like, yeah, it's
a it's a melostom. Even if it's not in flower,
there's a few exceptions, of course, but for the most part.
But anyway, Clydemi and abcept. It was a plant I encountered.
It was everywhere, and only a few places that I
see at flowering with these pink flowers, with these really
cool flower morphology. Fun is fuck to draw like that
kind of you know, that kind of fun, like the
flowers that the anthers are inflated, their portcyl their hollow tubes.
It's got the five pedals, it's got a fuzzy klyx,
fuzzies hell, got the hairs all over it, on the stem,
on the leaves, on the ounder side of the leaves,
and the and the on the sepals and the klyx
of course, and uh, the veins are red, the leaf
is green. And then it's got these swollen petioles. Put
I did a video on us on the integram if
you want to go find it, if you give a shit,
If not, that's fine too. But those swollen petioles and
there they look like little knobs. They're very conspicuously swollen,
you know, and you cut them open and there's ants inside.
There's these little orange aants that don't bite, and they're
they're raising their young in there. They enter on the
underside of the leaf, at the distal end of the knob,
so kind of where this lead the swollen petiole actually
meets the leaf. They crawl in there, there's a little
hole and you can eat them. They taste like lemon.
I didn't eat them because I felt bad. I already
fucked up their day by cutting their home open to
film it and take some photographs. This turned out to
not be Clydemia and Abcepta. It was uh, Miconia, it
was I thought it was a Clydemia got changed to
Maconia and Abcepta. And then one of these aspy you know,
one of the aspy uh I naturalist people, you know,
God bless them, bless their hearts. The people that are
on I naturals all the time but rarely doing much fieldwork.
We need those people. I'm not knocking them. Someone in
Europe who was certainly aspy, very very aspy, just being
like so ablest right now. Uh you know, I'm on
a fucking spectrum to so take it easy with your
with your stupid buzzwords, right, I'm not not being ablest,
I'm just you know, whatever you got to be on
the spectrum a little bit to fucking be on. I
n astress all the time, getting people's identifications to this
this degree. I don't identify shit on aign astress. I
don't care. He was strictly for myself, Okay. I have
a love hate relationship with people like this. I love
the work they do. They can also be extremely fucking annoying.
But uh, and I don't know how to hell this
dude knew this because he was in Denmark. Again, bless
his heart or her, whoever it is. But he said,
certainly not mconya in obsepta, because genus mcconia. It's just
Jenus mconya because genus because mcconyan upsepta has strongly initial
filess leaf pairs and axillary inflorescences. I mean the inflorescence
has just come out of the stems, out of the
leaf axles. This one belongs to the old genus of tococa. Now,
how to fuck would this guy notice if he's not
an expert in melastomes, I don't think power to him.
He's just a little ass by, which is fine. That's
fine too, I could certainly relate. And plus people just
go nuts about melastomes. Watch this is like, I don't
know who this is too, but if this is like
a famous melastome researcher, and I'm just like, I'm not slandering.
I'm just teasing. Loosen up, okay, unpucker, all right, unclench.
But it would probably key to Mconia to coca. But
that species has a very wide circumscription, meaning it's it's
probably very broad and needs to be split up. It
encompasses many different ecotypes and species probably species in there
in Meconia tocca. So you just put it in Maconia.
So I need someone who who's a mellostone expert to
go in there and figure out a Nissophilus leaf pairs.
A niophiley is one of a leaf as when a
plant has leaves of different sizes of not a uniform size,
and a lot of tropical plant families do. This especially
gives ni a ace the African violet family. What a
silly common name, huh gives nari As is those hairy bastards.
You know, flowers are hairy. John Clark Studies and we
had John Clark here in a podcast a year or
two ago. Wonderful conversation I wish I remembered more of
it in my extremely overpacked and fucking neurotic brain, but
I don't. But that podcast is out there. Gais nari As.
It's one of those plant families where you'll you know,
it's in lamey a least, so it's got biletteral symmetrical flowers,
it's got opposite leaves, it's got the very hairy you know,
the abundant in the tropics, both New World and Old
World tropics, and very hairy. Everything's harry and a lot
of hummer pollination, and it's very distinct. There was a
ton of Gazneria diversity. I could do a whole other
podcast and the gasnieri Ac diversity in the Upper Amazon,
but obviously won't go into it too much. But yeah, anyway,
a Nissophilus and nissophile isophiley is when all leaves are uniform,
which is what most people are used to, uniform size,
uniform shape, and nisophiley is when they're not uniform. And
it's a very common thing, especially in Melostoma tase this family,
and in Gasneriac and a few others in the tropics.
It's a way to basically maximize light exposure or light
catchment in the understory of what are generally dark forests.
So anyway, speaking of the leaf cutters, and it's so
fucking cold right now in South Texas. It's thirty four
and it's gonna be here for the next three days
at these lower and then hopefully that's it and then
it'll be It was just like we were setting up
fencing at Thorn Scrub two days ago, no, yesterday too,
Jesus Christ. We got so much stuff going on. I'm
so busy. It's it's stressing me out. It's kind of
making me miserable. Videos, to edit, presentations, to give it,
a book to finish. I'm just fucking done. I'm done.
But we were at Thorn Scrub yesterday or two days ago,
and it was like eighty five and now it's getting
down to thirty fourth. The you know, the get dream
is all fucked up. It's wavering. So being that we're
in a trough, some the longitude just to the west
of us at higher latitudes is in a crest, and
so it's abnormally warm up there and abnormally cold down here.
But anyway, I guess the Texas leaf cutters are limited
from spreading further not by their tolerance to the cold,
but by their fungal food sources tolerance to the cold.
And I guess the genus of that fungus used to
be adam mice's uh ata, after the genus of ant,
but I guess now it's just it's all. And then
it was Luco coprinus for a while, and now it's
Luco Agericus gongailapherus, and it creates this was kind of interesting.
I didn't know this, but it produces uh, it's well.
First off, it's completely dependent on ants for survival, with
the workers feeding it cut plant material, and it produces
gonga lydia that's the name. Gonkilophorus and gonga lydia are
nutrient rich hifel swellings, so like these little knobs along
the heifelstrands upon which the ants feed. And so this
seems to be a specific adaptation for its co evolutionary partner,
which is amazing. It's so fucking amazing. But anyway, the
I guess the fungus uh, you know, at higher latitudes,
is much more cold tolerant than ecotypes of the funk
or populations of the fungus or phenotypes of the fungus
at the lower latitudes, and so the ants. But still
even during cold because you get Texas leaf cutters in
Louisiana too, but the ants during cold periods will actually
move these fucking I mean, and I know this because
you know my yard, my house is tiny, My yard
is like a quarter acre almost, but they'll be there's
ant holes all over it. I get harvest the ants,
which I appreciate to and then the leaf cutters as well,
and they don't really do get out too much. But
I think that's why I probably get so many because
I've got those ants. That's why I get like four
different species of lizards, including the Texas spiny lizard, which
a fucking one. I feel like one that was the
size of a hamburger ran by me yesterday, no three
days ago. But anyway, these caverns, these underground their underground layer,
I just want to say the word. Their underground layer
will be like one hundred you know, they'll be enormous
in some cases, you know, one hundred feet deep supposedly,
and so that seems a little excessive though, really, like
who did did some entomologists dig one hundred feet into
the ground. The point is they're fucking massive and they
can probably span for a few a few city blocks.
But the ants will you basically cultivate these gardens of
fungus and keep keep basically, you know, manicure these gardens,
make sure that humidity is right, and then also move
the fungus up and down. You know, obviously move it
deeper if temperature extremes are coming, like if it's getting
too hot or it's it's it's gonna freeze, et cetera.
Which is fascinating all this stuff. I used to never
give a shit about ants, but you start seeing how
everything's connected. It's like anything. I start seeing how everything's connected,
and you're like, oh shit, it's kind of cool. There's
a whole system here. There's a whole pyramid of interrelatedness
that's evolved over millions of years. So anyway, I appreciate
the Texas leaf cutter ants, and I mean, fuck, I
appreciate all of them now. But yeah, ants, ambrosia, beetles,
and termites are the only groups of insects to use
fungus based agriculture. To have this kind of co evolution
with a fungus but just fucking insane when you think
about it. That's basically what humans are doing with different
plant species, right, like weed especially. I imagine the amount of
weed lords. I mean, I don't get it. Don't get
I mean, I enjoy I've grown pop before I grew
up my backyard when I lived in Oakland, and I
would just give it away, generally to the dudes that
hung out on a corner. You know, these old guys.
They would hang out on a corner and they they'd
be drinking, and I realized, you know, you give them
some weed, maybe they'll lay off the booze a little bit.
I don't know, but uh but it's it smells good
and it was a fun plant to grow, and it's
easy too. But I guess you know, that's what humans
do with so many plant species. That's what humans do
in the Upper Amazon with ice cream bean, which again,
those pods, those three foot long bean pods were everywhere
fucking delicious, What a delicious plant. I would have loved
to spend so much more time in that fruit market
or in markets like that. God is it was so cool.
It's such a it's such a like unique just I
don't know, man, you know they're really it really sowed
the seeds of ethnobotany. I mean, plenty of things do.
I'm paying attention to that shit all the time, but
especially being there, you know where it's mostly native fruits
and native native plants being used, you know, for rope,
for bowls, for whatever. I wonder if I could grow
Christynthia the Calabash tree, big non eac down here in
South Texas. Anyway, It's been two hours and I could
keep going, but I'll say it for another episode. So
with that being said, i'lbe at the Wild Things Conference
in Chicago on the twenty eighth, twenty ninth, and thirtyth No,
there's no fucking twenty you know what I mean, February
twenty eighth and March first and second. I forgot, there's
no it's not a leap year, and February's only got
twenty eight days. But I'm going to Chicago for the
weekend in beautiful Roseman at the Rosemont. We're gonna bring
back the Rosemont Horizon. Did you ever go to see
the WWF SmackDown? What do they call it? This? What
is it? Those guys in a rubber underwear slapping each
other around, hitting each other with chairs and shit in
the That was That was a remember scene. I remember
when I was a kid. I always see the commercials
for the Rosemont Horizon. They'd be wwf in it everywhere.
I don't think the Rosemont Horizon exists anymore. What is it?
The All State Arena. Some fucking corporation owns it now,
those fucking crooks. God, ah, it's just the pollution. They
got to put their name on everything. The mental pollution.
It's like a bad fart in an elevator of life
that you can't escape. It's just the corporate branding. God,
it's awful. But I'll be there, uh speaking, and then
I'm gonna what else do I don't know. I like,
I said yes to all these things and then forget
what they are, and all I have to protect me
and remind me that they're occurring is the little Google
calendar app. So uh, I don't know. I need to stop.
I need to start saying no, but I probably won't
because I enjoy this stuff. I just you know, my
time is so fucking limited and my brain is going
nine different directions. So uh, anyway, I just want to
go out and look at it again. I had trips.
I was going to try to go to Mexico in
Mars too, but I probably can't. I've got a lot
of shit work to do and anyway, Yeah, but I'll
be doing another podcast episode soon about more interesting stuff.
I want to talk about the work we've been doing
at Thorn Scrub two setting up fencing, which has been
a pain in the ass, but I'm hopeful trying to
shoot the feral pigs there, and yeah, and just good
old habitat preservation. I'm really hoping that we get rained
soon so the biocrust out there can come back to life,
because what is life if it's not filled with little
bits of bio crust here and there, you know, those
little bits of the living, the literal living skin of
the earth that nobody pays attention to. Anyway, that's all
I got. Have a good rest of your day. Try
not to puke. Okay. It's so hard for me coming
back into the United States and looking at the billboards
with the shit eating grins on them everywhere, and people
trying to sell me shit I don't want or need,
and just this money worshiping culture that is so predominant,
not everywhere, but in many places, as if there's nothing
else to live for except just the accumulation of dumb shit,
of dumb bullshit, of shiny shit. No creativity, no art,
no imagination, no adventure, no fun, just fucking buying shit
and status. And it's so hard for me to be
around all that and a culture that just worships that
and not puke. So I think I will puke every
once in a while. You got a puke, just let
it out, right, If not literally, then figuratively, just just
go puke everywhere, Just let it out, Just barf all
over the place, figuratively speaking literally if you have to. Okay,
don't make yourself bulliem it, don'n't be doing it too much.
Just every once in a while. It's a great it's
a great act, all right. Just a little bit of
vomit here in there. It really does you good. If
you're not vomiting in today's dominant society and something's wrong
with you, you're not healthy, you know, you've got to
purge every once in a while. Better out that and
then the other, you know what I mean? All right,
that's all. I gotta have a grocery day. Go fuck
you somebody,