Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Crime Page
about and He Doesn't podcast. It got chili as hell here.
We got a cold front in the border lands of
South Texas today, where the billboards for personal injury attorneys
shine and the car dealerships are many, and nobody cares
about the native living skin of the planet in this
particular region. Actually a few people do, but not many.
But yeah, it's got cold as shit here. So this
mocking bird is really I don't know what he's doing,
but he's always. It's always mocking birds and sparrows here.
And once in a while we get a kissity in
the in the in the yard here, in the dense thicket.
But so I was out throwing blankets on stuff, I
brought some stuff inside. This is why I try to
grow just only natives, because I don't I don't like
doing this, but I've had I've got stuff that people
have given me, cool plants that people have given me,
you know, subtropical or desert plants, whatever. It can grow
a lot of stuff that's native. Only a one hundred
or two hundred miles south in Mexico. Got a lot
of rare cactie that will get tip damage. But you know,
the more that the Arctic warms, the more unstable the
jet stream becomes, and it starts wavering like a roller coaster.
And so while it's warm up there, warmer than usual
up here, it gets colder than usual down here. You know,
they're at the trough of the wave. We're at the
or we're at the trough of the wave. They're at
the crest up there. You know. I remember like during
the Texas freeze, it was like, uh, it was warmer
in Alaska than in southern Arizona. This is like in
twenty one when the get dreams all fucked up, you know,
And that's where most of the warming is going to happen.
He's in the Arctic. But you wouldn't know that if
you look at a lot of elements of American popular culture,
where climate denial is still so huge. It's amazing. It
blows my mind that the oil companies have been so
good at their PR. All it takes is PR. You
just put money in the PR and the PR firms
and they just start pumping it out there that you know,
the soliet is wrong or there's money to be made
off the green scam, the green the green news scam.
So it's all part of the dystopic reality we're here
living in the US. You know, people get dumber, the
oligarchs get richer. People vote for you know, uh leaders
and autocrats that are going to screw them in the end,
that are going to fuck them over, like happened with
the recent firing of thousands, tens of thousands of federal employees. Right,
you vote for someone who's going to make America great again,
and they lay off tens of thousands of federal play
They laid off the fucking national people at the National
Institutes of Health. They just because you know, the idea
is cut you cut those jobs, and you could cut
the funding. Right. This is the same thing that the
railroad was doing with precision scheduled railroading before I left.
You know, they stopped they When I first hired out,
we had all these insane safety quote safety rules because
they were worried about worried about they were they they
wanted to get their injuries down because that would save
them money. They were worried so anything that they we
were getting instructions on how to walk and so this
was some policy that all the class when railroads were
doing like you know twenty ten, where they were just
firing you for anything, if you if you know, for
getting on and off moving equipment, for not walking right,
for not looking both ways before you cross a yard track,
like a track in the yard that hasn't been used.
I mean, just stupid shit, insanely stupid shit. You know,
some of it made sense at first, but then it
got to the point where it was ridiculous, and the
managers were testing you, and so they created this completely
uh antagonistic relationship between management and employees. You know, you
get some guy who worked at a fucking Applebee's two
years prior or you know, but he had a business degree.
He was like a managing an applebe's, excuse me, not
a worker. He was managing an Applebee's or one of
you know, these bleak elements of American consumer dystopia. He
was managing an apple These are some shit. Now he's
a manager. He applied for the position. The railroad's never
hired from the ground up. They used to. They don't
do that anymore because they realized those those managers they'd hire,
if they did hire them, would have too much sympathy
for the employees, and they wanted people that were really
just robots, subordinate and had that all that business school,
that entrepreneurial indoctrination and so anyway, so but the railroad
was doing this. They were just started cutting jobs, like
cutting jobs to the point that it didn't make sense.
It's like, you, you know, you have to put money
into your fucking infrastructure. You have to put money into
making sure the locomotives run. You can't. I mean, there's
just basic costs you have to do. You guys have
gotten so fucking greedy and obsessed with pleasing shareholders, you're
cutting everything. And so that's what the government's doing. This
is like, this is the right wing American ethos. This
is this. These are elements of the shit that started
with Reagan. This the trickle down theories, the Reaganomics, the
defund the libraries, defund the post office. Everything should be
privatized because it's more efficient. And it's funny because it's
all the shit that these these right wing, these shiny
plastic shit eating grin right wing pundits say is gonna
happen under socialism, but it's happening under capitalism. On steroids,
This deranged deregulated form of capitalism on steroids, and it's
so dystopic to me. It's starting to get fucking hilarious.
In a really macabuay. You got to blend the terrible
with with humor. All right. That might seem absurd to
some of you, but you really do. I mean, just
stop the pearl clutching and stop the oh my god,
stop the outrage, and just just fucking realize this is
I mean, it's I don't make no mistake. I'm filled
with hate and anger. I know a lot of people
that got laid off, but this is just this is
what they want, and they're gonna They're just gonna cause
everything to collapse. I mean, they fund they fired people
at the fucking Nuclear Agency and then they brought them back.
I mean, it's it's insane. I'm watching this shit and
I'm watching these clowns. I just you know, and I
know this too, because this is exactly what the railroad did.
I mean, they were they were slowing things down so much,
they were the trains got longer. They stopped putting as
many engines on them, as many locomotives on them, you know,
so they couldn't they they were going, the trains were
going slower, shit would break down. It was just like
this short term gain, long term loss mentality. It's that's
just infused American uh business ideology, and it's these it's
at the base of it all are these fucking you know,
this is what's really frustrating, is at the base of
it all are these obsolete primate hoarding impulses that disregard
the collective and just focus on the self, just just
on accumulation. It's a fucking mental ill. You know. I
had hope with Luigi. We need some more of that.
We need more, we need more of these fucking I mean,
you know, just start just start laying them out. I
don't know, it's the only thing that the left and
right can agree on. But I'm sure with enough propaganda
you could probably get the right to probably i mean,
you know, vote for them again. Whatever it's but it's insane.
I mean, this is a these federal firings, these federal
employee firings going on in the United States right now.
It's estimated they could eventually affect more than two hundred
thousand people. Two hundred thousand people could lose their jobs,
you know, and many of those people voted for this
fucking orange dipshit in office, right, I mean, I fucking
held my nose and voted for Kamala Whatever. I don't
like I don't like her. But if I've got a
choice between getting beaten with a club or getting stabbed
nineteen times, I'm going to take the beating with the club.
You know, it's kind of what it was. But really,
I mean, after this experience, I don't think I'm ever
going to vote again. I don't think. I just think
I want to not live here anymore. At some point,
there's a whole world out there that's not like the US,
where people aren't getting fucked, where healthcare is affordable. You know,
this is all. This is all the result of these
ein randy and economic principles. This is again, this is
just Reagan two point zero, the mass firings. I don't
think any of the people that voted for this guy
saw this coming. It's you know, but with enough pr
you can convince anybody anything, and especially you know, the
right has captured the working class because the left has
just fumbled so bad in the last ten or fifteen years.
The identity politics thing. It really didn't work. It was
a real bad idea. You know, you let these college
kids who've got no fucking, you know, experience with real
life or with working, these social theorists, these humanities that
you case, people with no fucking very little understanding of
science too, very little schooling in natural sciences or in
biology or natural selection evolution, an understanding of the real world,
not this make believe human bullshit that we've created over
the last few hundred to you know, a couple thousand
years whatever. You let them take over and infuse the
whole ideology with all the identity politics shit, how you
want to be perceived, how you wanted the people to
perceive you, all this it just becomes, you know, and
then just the elitism and talking down to people and
the fucking I mean, the cancel culture part was part
of it. You know, you guys didn't want to listen
to this, but I'm gonna make you anyway, we'll get
it out of the way. Like the cancel culture started
with attack and genuine monsters, and then it just went
for everybody and that it was just people fighting against
each other and just left this attacking each other. Oh
it was amazing. Oh it was it was a comedy,
you know, and even if it was some sort of
you know, uh cia app if you if you want
to go that conspiracy theorist or out of plenty of
people took it up. Anyway. There were so many disaffected,
you know, traumatized people that had shipped there that probably
weren't seeking therapy for and they just that was what
the left was, just perpetually online, the American left, perpetually online,
talking shit, elitist, fucking mean uh, not not reaching out
the people, not getting people the benefit of the doubt,
not trying to convince people of a better way to
be without shitting on them. And this is what the
other one hundred percent helped this happen. They really did
so uh anyway, but at least you got to, you know,
perform online and uh play holier than now and morally
talk down to people anyway. You don't need to agree
with me, and I don't care. I'm just I got
ten minutes to just puke this stuff out because it's
it's bothered me and I'm gonna do it so you could,
you know, just fast. But anyway, let's talk about O
Vicula by Radiata, which is the new species of composite
that was discovered not even a year ago by Deb
Manley in Big Bend National Park. Deb I had hit
her up before, a contact her before, because she documents
all these cool plants. She's always hiking all over the park.
She basically, I don't know. I forget she told me
what she did. I forget what it was. But she's
in the park all the time, just waltzing around, hiking around,
and it seems like a really pleasant life. And she's
always seen cool plants. And so she found this tiny
little member of astracy, this tiny little composite. And you
can actually look it up on I Naturalist, which I
suggest you do. I think there's only three observations. What
is it? Yeah, oh vicula by rate cat. It's amazing.
That's sold on. Let me go to this what is
it all? I got filters on here. That's what the
problem is. I'm so fucking grateful for I'm naturalist. It
is just it's such, it's so invaluable. I figured out
this way to create plant lists and uh, you know,
species lists to put him into like a spreadsheet. Download
a CSV file using the filters tab on a n
Ashris and put him into a spreadsheet and you know
you can have family and genus and species and common
name all that shit. Anyway, Yeah, three observations mine, Uh
who is this? Debs? And then some other guy got
a really nice photo up close macro photo of h
who's this James Bailey silversea star song anyway? Uh yeah,
so I think he's but deb found it. And then
you know, this was on the newswire among all the
plant nerds and botanists talking about it for a while,
and so yeah, this guy went out and saw it,
and uh and then uh I went out and saw it,
and uh it's fucking wild that grows with Aerocarpus phizzerrats.
It grows and these low these limestone kind of gentle,
you know, undulating limestone hills, and uh, yeah, this is
a great photo. This person got white little white corollas.
But then the leg you the rays on these thing.
These things have these like candy cane stripes on them,
these red striations, and the whole thing is just covered
in here. It's covered in wool, which is I mean,
it's it's dense wool. You can barely see any green
in there. It looks like a cotton swab. When I
was out there, they were just finishing up. They were
kind of dry already, and it looked like, uh, you know,
I would have you could have. Initially, you could have
been forgiven for thinking at first that what you were
looking at was like, you know, someone's toilet papered. It
got stuck on like a vicilia branch, and then the
wind whipped it up and now you just had these
little rolled up white cotton pieces of paper all over
the ground. You could have been forgiven for thinking that,
because that's what it looked like. But they were readily
abundant in you know, standing two inches tall if that
in the rocky talis there the rocky limestone talents. It
grows in limestone. Obviously, it's Aerocarbus visserrais is out there,
and plenty of those Innoceramus fossils that Texas bivalve, and
this thing was it's just nuts that. Yeah. I think
it's the first plant that's been discovered in a national
park in fifty years. But still in twenty twenty four
when this thing was discovered, I mean just that there's
still new species. I mean, there's of course there's new
species out there. There's a bunch Matt Berger's found like five.
You know, my friend Julie has found like six, six
or seven in California, So there's plenty of stuff out
there still. But this thing was this thing was really special.
This was exciting and just totally nuts. So Avicula bi
radiata they wanted to call it Biligula anomala, but the synanthrologists,
the people that study astracy, had an issue with it
because legules. They're trying to they're trying to basically encourage
people to use the word lgual to refer solely to
sechorioid e, the chicory subfamily of Astracy, not use the
word legules to refer to rays like the rays you
would see on a sunflower or a daisy, et cetera.
So because people usually just call those legules, that's what
I would call them. But anyway, uh well, wow, yeah,
the styles the pistolate flowers, because most of the most
members of Astracy the ray floor, it's the floor. The
flowers that are to the rays are just pistolate, and
so this has very small you can see these little
styles on there and then the pollen. The staminate flowers
are in the center with you know, five white corolla lobes.
But this thing is cool. I mean, it's a fucking
wild thing, especially how harry and wooly is it came
out closest to the genus silas strophe or cilostrophe, however
you want to pronounce it, which is uh, I think
you get what is cilostrophe? It's in the it's this
is in the tetra Neurus clay. But cilostrophe. You get
quite a few in Texas, and you get are there
any in californ I think there's quite a few in
California too. How many have I seen? Yeah, tagatina, naphelodes
and coopry Where do I see coopry? Oh? That was
in Baja. That was that was on the Viscano Peninsula. Cilostrophe, cooprice.
So anyway, but there's there's quite a few of them there,
and they're all wooly and when once you see Selah,
you know you could see, okay, it's wooly as hell,
but cilostrophe is normally you know, some of them can
be eighteen inches tall. I think, is what is this
a coop ryo? What do you want. I don't think so,
I can't remember. But but either way, Oh and yeah,
like I got a I got a nice photo of
tagatina where it's the whole uh, the whole compound head
flower head is wooly as ship. It looks like a precursor,
like a precursor step to two. What was that tagatina
to this thing towards to a viculous so you could
see how they kind of diverged, how they diverged from
a common ancestor. But yeah, man, it's a it's really exciting,
really exciting news. New species of composite discovered in a
in a national park. Let me see, yeah, Isaac Isaac
Mark wrote the uh, where the fuck did this? Think on?
I just lost the hold on. Let me find this
there we go, okay, Oh, Vicula by radiata, a new
genus of composity from Big Ben National Park in Transpicos, Texas.
Deb Manly, Isaac Lichtor Mark, kiglie Peraltar, Tuo Castro Castro,
Kelsey Wogan, my friend Kelsey, Carolyn Whiting, and A. Michael Powell,
the Wizard of the Seuel ross Er Barium, one of
the best baria in Texas. So but yeah, came out,
came out close to silostrophe, and I wonder what the
extent of this thing is too, Like, where else does
it occur? Because the known population, I think there's only
one uh this one population, maybe too, but it's got
to be in other places as well. I mean, there's
some really remote areas of Big Bend, and part of
the reason they're remote, it's because they're just if you
don't go there in the right time of year, they're
just so fucking hot and dry and uh, you know,
miserable to being dangerous, dangerous to being But right now
is a good time to go. Okay, all right, let
me let's see, we're gonna do something different. I stepped
away for a minute, you know, I got other ship
to do besides just talking to you know, on this
on this podcast, talking to you guys. Anyway, I'm back
and I feel like kind of masochistic today. So I'm
gonna go ahead, and I'm gonna play something terrible for you,
uh that you know, hopefully you will get stuck. You
will get it stuck in your head and you'll feel
as bad about it as I do. It really is,
it's it's horrible it's it should be this, this song
should be illegal. We're gonna go ahead, change of pace here,
We're gonna we're gonna check this out.
Speaker 2: And loves your country.
Speaker 1: Check this. This is this is this is an audible
form of genital herpes. If genital herpes, if genital herpes
could be could be uh manifested into his song, it
would sound like this. Let's turn it up a little bit.
Just maybe you maybe you, maybe you get this stuck
in your head. You get a little earworm. And notice
that in the video, this man is not playing the guitar,
He's just holding it. Let's go back to the because
it was you're a bad asshole working American that loves
your country. Check this. See that? Did you hear what
he said? If you're a badass, hard work and American,
America deserves this. This is punishment. This is divine intervention. Now,
I've never been very religious. I've been more of a
spiritual type, but this makes me believe in some sort
of uh, some sort of you know, divine vengeance. You know,
America has not been behaving well, you know ever since
World War Two, all those all those foreign interventions, those coups,
all this all the things the CIA, this is punishment
for it, and now for what America has done lately.
This is I mean, and the guy's whole page. If
you want to check this out for yourself. I almost
feel bad. You know, this this man is either this
is either the most brilliant satire. Uh. This is either
the most brilliant satire or this is this man is
mentally ill. And I would say, just judging from how
prevalent mental illness is in American society today. And I
fully understand why I'm not being ablest, I'm or Sainist,
which is I think that's the new word they invented,
Sainist if you're if you discriminate against those who are
mentally ill. I'm not being Satanist. I think that this
is there's a genuine mental health crisis in this country,
you know, part of part of which stems from the
fact that we live in ugly shitholes that are dominated
by car dealerships, billboards, and parking lots, and we're trapped
in cars we have, you know, we have no connection
to the living world around us. Mental illness is to
be prevalent, and you're gonna get shipped like this I mean,
this guy's whole page. It's like it's thirty reels, thirty
Instagram reels of just this same song, you know, with
there's some stock footage. He puts some stock footage of
people of color in there, you know, because he's this
man is Caucasian. I don't know if you could tell.
You know, it's very obvious just listening to this song
that this man is Caucasian, but he puts some stock
footage of black and brown people in there too, to
show America's diversity. And you know he's, uh, it's he's
wearing a sleeveless T shirt. He's got his hair slicked bad.
I mean, he looks like Emilio Estevez straight out of
like the late eighties. I heard this and it was
it was horrible, horrible. I was in so much pain.
I had to share it with with everyone I knew
so that they could get it too. It's like it's
it's it's like sharing chicken pox with people, which I
didn't know. I had to xc for it. Now post
ninety fight, they got a vaccine. It's everywhere, Yeah, the
things you find on the internet. So that's what I've
been doing, procrastinating when I'm supposed to be writing my
book is I've been listening to shit like this. But
you should really go to this man's Instagram page see
Wilder w y L d e R Music and read
the comments. Let's see what some of the comments here are,
because they are they are. It's amazing. If General Herpes
was a song, that's me. Uh this is the song
that plays at the end of a work safety training video.
Uh uh? Legitimate question? Is this satire? Because I can't
tell now. I know that the harping on this song
too long is a distraction from you know, from from botany,
which is the subject of this podcast. But again, this
is this is you know, we do a little we
dabble in anthropology too, and I think this is a
good reflection of where America is at right now, you know,
empire and decline right before the collapse. Anyway, gas station
boner pill vibes. That was another comment. The comments are hilarious.
So if you know, if you're pulling tubes someday and
you're you know, you're you're stone out of your mind,
come here with a friend to this Instagram page read
the comments together. Hey man, I know there are a
lot of negative comments in this thread, but that's all
I wanted to say. I watched this masterpiece four times
and this can't be real. Who is the fuck encouraged
this dude to put this out? Wait? Am I going crazy?
Is this the exact same video as this other one
but with the background just under a bridge? Now I
feel like I'm going crazy. Here's a good one. They
should play this at Guantanamo Bay. It that it? Really
they should. I'm gonna that's It's a fucking This would torture.
Can you imagine being waterboarded with you know and uh,
you know, prodded h and being forced to listen to
this song for days, for fucking days. It's not turned off.
You're strapped, you're cold, you're wet, it's damp, it's dark,
there's mold on the concrete walls, and you're forced to
listen to this. This would be torture. Instagram recommended that
I edit my Wait what Instagram recommended that I edit
my comments? I don't catch a band. Just know I
roasted the hell out of you. That's not that good.
This song made me want to take up communism if
Acid Reflux were a song, get this man? A passport.
This song made me root for Canada in the Four
Nations tournament. I don't get that off. You know, this
is I mean, this is bad. It's really it's it hurts.
This is hurting me. I hope it's hurting you too,
because you know, we all got to share in this
paint together. Here's a good one. I was in the Marines.
I'd like to think that I fought for everyone in
the country except this guy. The mix on the vocals
could use a little work, But other than that, this
song sucks. This song makes me wish I had joined
the military and got killed in action so I didn't
have to hear it. This is the musical equivalent of
a pizza party from man. That's a good one. A
pizza party from management. I remember when the railroad, this
must have been twenty fourteen or something. They threw us, ay,
they announced it like a month before, and they were
so proud of themselves. They were throwing us like a
party at workday. And they were gonna have a track
in the yard with this the Officer Special train in it,
and they were gonna give us barbecue and all this shit.
And then as the weeks progressed. It's slowly the incentives
and what they were offering slowly diminished, Like we're gonna
give you hot dogs turned into like microwave hot dogs
to we're just gonna give you like a bag lunch.
It's like, you know, you're better off just not showing
appreciation for employees at all. You know, just give us
like a swift, you know, booted kick to the groin.
Let's see youth group pastor who definitely tries to groom
teenage girls personified. That could be That could be a
decent one. Oh, here's another one. There are a lot
of haters in here, but I genuinely hope you get
a bola. That was a good one. You go there
and read the comments. I mean, this is really brutal.
We're gonna go to another We're gonna go to another
Instagram reel here that I really like this one. Okay,
this one. This is an ad for something called the
brush bullet. The brush bullet, the brush bullet, and it's
a gun that you shoot at trees. It's like a
little paintball sized capsule of herbicide. You shoot it at
the tree, it drops, and then the next time it rains,
which doesn't happen too much in Texas these days. The
rain washes the erbside into the roots and it kills
the tree. Now, what we're seeing here is a man
which is given very Time of Finland vibes. He's in
a cowboy hat. He's in a gray polo shirt with
a collar tucked in to uh to, some some beige
jeans with a little a big buckle on it, and
some tactical style military boots. His package is accentuated. This
is why I'm not imagining the Time of Finland thing here.
This is real. Okay, this is real. He looks like
a good Christian man. He's holding this what looks like
a paintball gun filled with the brush bullet, with many
brash bullets. And he's referring to you know, native species
like juniper and mesquite as invisives. And you know, to
be honest, this man doesn't seem that bad. I would
talk to him, you know, I uh, you know, I
I've been living in Texas for four years. Takes all kinds.
I've I've seen people that I never had seen before,
you know, like this guy. And I said, you know,
he's not that bad, just don't get it talking about religion, politics,
A number of subjects here are offully. You don't want
to talk about him with this guy, because you're gonna
hear it. It's the same thing if you start, you know, yeah,
the same reason I wouldn't talk to like, I wouldn't
bring those subjects up with someone who's like twenty two
and goes to fucking Evergreen or something, you know, and
as a septum piercing the size of a fucking uh
shower curtain ring, you know, no offense to anybody would
have accept the piercing out there. I just I had
a sept up piercing when I was nine, no, nineteen,
Excuse me. My parents weren't that loose. My mom wasn't
that loose. Uh. I had a you know, I stuck one.
I stuck a fucking staple through my nose. I had
one of those for a while. But back then it
wasn't It didn't have the connotations it has now. You
know what I mean, where you're about to get lectured
on your moral Okay, anyway, let's just listen to this
thing on the brush bullet. All right, this is America today.
I like holding a mirror up to the cultural zeitgeist
to the country, and especially for any Canadians or you know,
people in South America and ey Chileans, Brazilians, Australians who
might be listening. I just want you to know how
far we've fallen. So this is part of all that.
This is why I'm doing this little crime Pays anthropology section.
Here we go. I had been in the.
Speaker 2: Brush bullet for myself, but I think it might be
something you might like if you've got invasive species like me.
So what it looks like. It looks like a musket ball.
When you shoot the trees, the tree catches it, drops
it on the ground, and then it rains, and then
the rain dissolves the bullet and it's pulled up by
the tree and kills the tree. So say, if you've
got junipers or mesquites or yuka or choria, this might
be something y'all look out of my cell because it's
easy to do, easy carry pickup.
Speaker 1: You don't even get out of the trees in the morning,
eve you gotta get out of your picket. You can
just rub yourself in the pileup while you're shooting stuff
with your brush book. You get your shoot, You get
your shoot them with your You don't even got to
get out your picket. You can just sit there and
your vinyl lembies, touching yourself, rubbing your thigh, admiring you're
on package while you're shooting the brush bullet. Now, some
people don't like the brush bullet, and I would say
they must. They just must be homosexuals. It's a homosexual thing.
I don't know why you wouldn't enjoy it, this brush bullet.
Some sort of you know, lib tard, homosexual libtard. You know,
we do things a little different down here. All right.
I'm wearing vinyl underwear. They're sloppy as hell. I'm sweating
like a horror in church, all sweating like a pig,
rubbing myself my truck, shooting a brush bullet out by
wearing these vinyl panties. Don't hate oh God? So uh okay, anyway,
where were we? Now that's enough for that. This, you know,
it's ten minutes of the anthropological mirror of the current
American mind state. So anyway, in other news, we were
out at Thorn Scrub again. We're going out there every weekend.
We got pig problems. They dig up Mammalarius sphericau. They
you know, they mess with the payoti a little bit too,
but they dig up Mammalaria spherica. It's a really cute
little cactus. It can form these massive clumps, you know,
the size of a basketball, maybe a little bit bigger
in some cases. Yellow spines, prominent nipple like tubercles, and
big succulent roots. And so the pigs go out there
and they uproot this stuff and then eat the roots.
And because it doesn't have any alkaloids in it, it's
just got spines, and I like peyote as alkaloids, but
they've even been going for peyote. But you know, you'll
see the peyote where they bite it and then leave
it because it probably tastes terrible, but it still kills
the plant, or at least it's it's left to slowly die.
But the Mammalaria has really been taken hit because they
go and they eat the roots and then they just
leave it. They just leave the tops of the plant
and there's still enough succulent tissue in there for it
to form new roots. But you know, they normally leave
them unburied and upside down, and you know, So we
go out there with a five gallon bucket because we
got like one hundred and fifty acres and we go
and we we picked these things up, and some guy
is gonna come out there with a thermal drone, thank god.
Uh and uh and hopefully we'll find out where the
pigs are and where they lurk and uh and we're
gonna shoot all of them. So it's you know there,
it's it's really bad. I mean, the best answer would
be defence the entire property, not just barbed wire, but
you know, fence it to like four feet, so deer
and coyotes can still get in and out, but pigs can't.
And if they do, if they're somehow able to push
the fence open, because normally you bury the hog panel
a few inches right, and so they they could still
get through if they really want to. But then you know,
you'll be able to find out where they are, patch
it up and uh. And then we got a pig
trap too. But this is a this is a problem
I did not foresee. We got we need to raise
money to get a well, and we need to raise
money for we were getting a shade structure out there.
We need to raise money for fencing. So but it was,
you know, it was a lovely day. It's really nice
in South Texas now, I mean highs in the upper seventies,
low eighties. The sand hill cranes came by. We were
out there. I didn't expect that, you know, in the
sand hill cranes, above the Payota Gardens, above the tam
of leap in thorns grub of South Texas. That call
is unmistakable. Giant giant birds, beautiful birds. They get some
attitude too, And so I guess they were going to
a punter. Some I saw really cool? Was it? Oh?
It was it Chihuahuan night snake, not the Texas night snake.
What is this? Oh maybe that's just oh, it's the
same thing. Never mind, I guess are the same thing?
Is that the same thing? Yeah, Chihuahuan night snake. Hipsiglina Jenni,
Jenny Jenny. But we were moving some logs for fencing.
It was too cold for this thing to be out.
Not cold, but you know, it wasn't warm enough. And
I found this little coiled up almost looked like a millipede, first,
one of those giant millipedes, but it was this beautiful
little knight snake that could fit calmly, you know, easily
in the palm of your hand, with room, with room
to spare. Really cool eyes on this thing. Too harmless
and totally harmless. And it was just lurking there under
a log. But out there we were mainly stretching fence
around like a four hundred and ten foot section containing
some of the densest densest cactus population that we want
to protect from pigs. And that's where, you know, we'll
put some of the Mammillaria spherica that we collected in
the five gallon bucket. I'm gonna, you know, take them,
root them and then plant them back in the ground. Uh.
And for you know, for watering, I guess we'll just
be taking five gallon five gallon jugs or something out there.
I don't know, but uh. But yeah, there's a lot
of work to do. But it's it's such nice habitat
to see and it's just it always blows my mind
the amount of just barren ground, this barren silty sandy
clay with nothing on it. I mean, there's huge barren
patches of ground between the understory, right because you got
I mean the dominant tree out there is misky. There's
citarox line too. I saw a Texas ebony out there,
Ebanopsis sabano so legumes, and then a handful of other trees.
But these trees don't get tall. They get like ten
feet tall. Max.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: There's a lot butch which is Zizyphus of two soofolia.
It's a buck thorn ramnacy. You get it as far
west as California, as eastern California as well. Very spiny,
and that's that's like one of the saving graces for
a lot of the smaller cacti out there is that
this loat bush is like a barbed wire that protects
them from getting damaged by pigs. But the pigs are bad.
You got to use the thermal drone. So this guy
is gonna come out with this thermal drone. Very kind
gentleman offered to come out and uh find them and
kind of see where they're at and then shoot them.
But this thing is like, you know, it's just technology.
I wasn't even aware. I mean, I knew it exists,
but I've never seen it. I mean, I've these things
come up hot. You could see them. You know, like
a scorpion under a UV light, You ever done that,
You should get a three hundred and sixty five nanimeter,
not the three ninety five nanimeter. Get the three sixty
five nanimeter UV black light flashlight, which is what Alan
is always carrying around, carrying around everywhere. You know, it's
just basically a chemical test and seeing if there's chemicals
in whatever you're shining the light at that that fluoresce
UV light. And then he was saying, you know, in
deserts you don't see it a lot because there's so
much cuticle uh and and waxy protective coverings, et cetera
to protect a lot of the plants from exposure to UV.
But a lot of lichens will fluoresce a lot of
the time, and scorpions of course do as well. But
you know, when we were in the Amazon and the
darker habitat, everything was seemingly fluorescent under UV. The fucking
cave was wild too. We found some something that it
was a phosphorescent so it stayed, it stayed lit, uh
it it it you know, you could charge it up
with the UV light and then it would continue. You know,
it was a glow in the dark, this material on
this wall, and uh, Ethan who has access to a
scanning electron microscope and some other utensils, took it, took
a collected a sample of this this material. This this
was like this white material looked like drugs. Honestly, it
was on the wall of this cave and uh looked
at it and it turned out to be very obviously
human made. But it wasn't smear. It was like smeared
on there. I don't know what it was. I don't
know how it got there, but it was. It was
made of compounds that are totally synthetic. And uh, you know,
we thought it was like a natural phosphorescent material on
the wall of this cave. And I guess in some
places there are there are phosphorescent minerals. There was like
a phosphorescent calcite somebody had mentioned that day that was
on the wall of a cave in Colorado. Very interesting stuff.
But you know, the the the whole, uh, the it
was like a natural glow in the dark. You could
charge it up and it would continue emanating light. God,
that fucking cave was great. Oh my god. The whips scorpion,
what do they call those things? The those giant like
eight foot eight not eight foot, scuse me, eight inch, God,
that would be amazing. Eight inch wide legs more like
ten inch. These things are massive. They look terrifying, like,
you know, like some hr Giga risk creature out of
one of the Alien movies. And there are raknids, but
they don't have any they're totally harmless. You can let
them crawl on your face. But I saw one of
those just hanging out super chill on this boulder in
this cave. And then there was a lot of Cordyceps
fungi that kills spiders in that cave too, And you
would just see like this little two inch tall red
tongue picking out of the mud which was probably half
back guano. Very sketchy, you know, if you're a hypochondriac,
very sketchy place to be. And there's running there's running
water too, like a little river in the cave, like
a little creek. Really cool. God, it was amazing. And
then Bogonia is all outside Bogonias and ox ecuador insis
or what was the exile speci I'll look it up later,
Oxalis equid or something growing lithophytically on the rock walls
of the above the cave entrance, but the cave was wild,
and yeah, there were these cave crickets too, which I
assume are just eating guano. All this stuff's on my
eye naturalist. If you want to look at them, I'm
sure you can just type in cave cricket or or
a whip scorpion. You know what, I'll I'll look it
up for you now, so we'll get you a genus
and species name by the entomology thing. I'm really I'm
really getting starting to get into it a little bit.
I got that giant insect book that tome you could
hit someone in the head with. It's like a twelve pounder. Okay,
spider crickets and allies family felling gopsody. Yeah, no one's
identified it down to the species or even genus. Got
these things looked weird, these little crickets. They got like
a white head this foot women wait for this photo
to Yeah, God, what a weird. They're very obviously crickets,
but they look fucking bizarre, and they were everywhere, and
you know, they've probably they're probably able to eat bat iguano,
and so because of that, now they themselves are composing
the base of this whole food chain inside this cave,
fast calling tree cricket. Oh I forgot I signed it.
Oh that's that's a wonderful one. Those are the one
that's my that's my ambiyond ambiyonce wave machine outside my door.
Oh canthus seller and nick this O E C A
N T h U s Oh can't this? Oh? Wow?
You know the yainamol jisse by an asturalists. Thank you,
thank you for for figuring out what what we're all
looking at here? All right, let's talk about neotropical palms
family Eric Casey aureka ac after the genus Arika, which
what is this? Is this an old world? You got
some of the in the in Central America? Are they native?
I don't know. A lot of these tropical genera are pantropical.
They're all over, you know, due to ocean currents and stuff.
So anyway, the palm diversity, I'm int the palms now
I have a new found appreciation for them. It's definitely
one of those families that was ruined for me early
on by they're really nearly use in horticulture. There's many
horticultural atrocities in his family right, plants that are just
overused and put into landscaping in places where they shouldn't be, right,
like many suburban cul de Sact communities in Arizona. Places.
I would want to shoot myself if I had to
live there, No offense to anybody. Florida. Same thing if
I had to live in like a suburban cul desect
in Florida, I would also want to drink Dreno gargle,
dreno right, gargle Mitch McConnell's balls. Jesus Christ, that's terrible.
I don't know where it came from. Sorry, is that
guy still alive? I don't know anyway, check his pulse.
Many horrible, horrible uses of these things in horticulture, but
it's not their fault. Right, Like to see queen palms
where their native would probably be cool, right, Whereas the
only time I want to see them here in South
Texas is if they're dead in someone's front yard, having
recently died from a freeze. You know, a queen palm
standing like a burnt candle or perhaps a dildo, a
consolid door on a turf composed of half dead Saint
Augustine grass. Right, it's like pushing the boulder uphill. It's
going to come down on you one day and kill you.
But keep doing it despite how hard it is. Right,
That's kind of what the lawn is in general. It's
just it's ridiculous. It can't go. It can't get by
without constant watering and pesticides and herbicides, and you know,
you're literally poisoning the ground that you're walking on, that
your kids are playing on. But it's worth it so
he can have that nice, living outdoor green carpet. Anyway,
I digress. The palm family is uh, these things were.
The palm trees were everywhere, and some really cool species.
Astro Carrium chambira was one of them. It's one it's
used for fiber. They make these nice little bags, some
of which are died. I would love to know what
they're dying with. We saw these little bags in the market,
these little uh you know, these little bags walk around.
You got Cruise out there. He's walking around like some
sort of you know, fucking modern day psychedelic hath no bodanist.
Then his flip flops. I don't know how he's not
worried about getting hip by the mosquitos because that's that
would be the first thing I worried about. You gotta
put oil on your feet. I'd becover my feet and vasseline,
keep the fucking mosquitoes off them, and also just the
grows out the general public. And he's out there walking
around with a bag made of astro carrium chambira. You know,
unassuming Cruise, a friend of mine, you know, looking all
hippie dippy with his sandals and his astra carry jambira
and his facial hair. I love you, Cruise. I'm just
joking around, so, you know, but he was. He's The
Astrocarrium chambira is the material, the fibers that are used
to construct these wonderful bags. Right, they use the leaves
to make uh, the make bags. The fibers basically come
from the leaves, you know. So the young, unopened leaves
at astrocarrium chambira palm are harvested, the fibers are extracted.
You strip the leaves, you dry them, you process them,
uh and uh. And these fibers are strong. I mean,
it makes sense because a lot of these palms in
the Amazon have fucking huge leaves, right, They've got to
be flexible. But they've also got to not completely come apart,
you know, from the from the elements from wind and
things like that. So they these are these are highly
durable fibers, great fiber palms. So it's you know, God,
the fucking ethnobody done and the ethno boton? I see why,
you know, like, uh, I still got to read that
book One River. I haven't finished it. There's a section
on the Payote gardens in there. I wasn't expecting that
I was reading this book. I pirated it on anaz
archive because libgen is down apparently, or I think there's
libgen there's some other what is the fucking hole on?
Let me get this for you. Yeah, lib gen that
gs is still up. Libgen dot is is down. This
is heartbreaking for me. I tried to use libgen dot
gs yesterday. It wasn't working. You know. I may have
uploaded some stuff there for the good of the general public.
I certainly did not upload that out of print nine
hundred dollars on Amazon legumes book? What is it? Legumes
that are worth a fucking tome? I forget the name
of it. I'm sorry, I'm getting turned up. I'm really
you know, I gotta get outside. I got to go
on a run or something. After this, it's be I
got to enjoy this South Texas uh spring before it's over,
you know, in three weeks and it's ninety degrees again,
ninety's not that bad. Actually, you know it's gonna be
a brutal summer. We're in a drought too. You know,
stuff's gonna start dying. I was, I was, My daughter
and I were flying the drone around our neighborhood yesterday,
and it's you go to like the park area and
like the place about irrigation canals, like looking at them,
and it's just barren soil, Like the same barren soil
I was talking about earlier that we have at Thorn Scrub,
And you look at that, like big patches of just
beige barren soil that was probably covered in cool native
cacti only one hundred and fifty years ago. And then
you you'd see that and you wonder, why the fuck
are people trying to have lawns here. It's a sick cult.
It's sick. They don't know any better, though. Be mad.
You could be mad at the the ideology, but at
the people. You just got to convince them you know,
you've got to convince them you don't want that stuff.
You got to get rid of that stuff. Why don't you,
Why don't you? Why don't you try this stuff? We
got this stuff. This stuff's pretty nice. You want to
try some of this stuff? Right? Like a drug pusher,
all right, but not malevolent. You're getting people hooked on
something good, right. I planted that. I convinced my neighbor,
you know, someone who very obviously didn't give a shit
about their yard. I mean, they mowed it and everything,
but it was barren as fuck. And I said, you
want the cegave. I got the segave. I caught her
right as she was rolling up get out of her
car coming back from work. I said, you want I
got this extra and I didn't. I picked a nice
looking one too, because I've been planning the gaves everywhere,
because it's just fucking it's the easiest thing to do
a gaves, and prickly pairs can root them easily, dime
a dozen. They get destroyed. Who gives a shit? I said,
you want this? She said, eh, sure, great, I'm there. Okay.
I picked a nice one, the one that looked good,
not the one that was all twisted and had the
leaves fucked up, or maybe I you know, when I
was pulling it off the mother plant, you know, from
an offset from an agave I got in the ground,
I might have damaged the leaves. I picked a nice one, right,
like a sellable one, which I don't do. They don't
I don't do that. But you know, I gave it
a nice one so she couldn't turn it down. So
I fucking rode by it today when I was taking
a dog for a bike riding, and I've seen it,
and I said, that's that looks fucking nice. Like I
see that yard, it makes me less depressed. Like but
because you see like a a mode lawn, I get depressed.
I feel pangs of pain and anxiety. I said, God,
that fucking sucks. God. I hate the fucking world I
live in. Oh what if humans done? You know? I said,
So those are my thoughts when I see that, Like
I see the fucking the personal injury attorney billboards, and
I just I want to drink bleach, right, I want
to vandalize them. I feel negative. I feel negative thoughts.
If you feel negative thoughts, it's okay, it's normal. If
you're in this society, right, you know, I mean, you
don't act on them unless you're doing you know, small
scale petty vandalism to things like billboards, you don't act
on them unless you're doing that. But it's okay to
feel that. It's okay to feel. Let's talk about our
deal with our feeling. It's okay to feel negative things.
When you look around at the world that we live
in the United States, the world we've made, it's ugly,
it's disgusting, all right. It holds up rich fools as
heroes and it, uh, you know, it's just poison it.
You don't want that stuff. You don't want that stuff.
Get a fucking lawn. Get out of here with that.
What do you want that you live in a fucking
desert while you're trying to do this, when you're trying
to have a lawn and in your spring, poison on it? God,
you know so? But uh, you know these are this
is my thoughts. But I don't verbalize some very polite,
very polite, and I'm slowly planting shit all around my block,
through my neighborhood wherever. Not gonna stop. You just you know,
you just gotta you just gotta get it, get it
in the right way. It's like I'm planting shit everyhere.
You should do that too. Everybody should do that. Off
you see some some fucking somebody with the You see
a citizen with a lawn, and maybe they don't care
about it. They just pay someone to come by once
every few weeks and mow it down so it doesn't
look out of control, so the city doesn't mess with them.
You offer, you say, hey, how about this, you want
somebody I could do this. I'll maintain it. Ask your neighbors,
hit them up right, make it and don't do it
in a way that that you know, they could be peep,
be pushy, be politely pushy. So I just like seeing
this stuff. I don't I really don't mind. I'm not
trying to get in. I'm not trying to like, you know,
slip in a hidden cost afterwards or something. I just
I just want to see this because it's you know,
it's nice. It's nice, it's nice. Your lawn isn't nice.
The lawn makes me depressed. It's a cult of death.
So uh, anyway, where were we talking about it. We're
talking about palms. So anyway, the moral of The story
is download One River by Wade Davis or purchase it
if you need a hard copy. You really got to
get out on this tablet thing, though, because you just
get a decent tablet like a Samsung or something, or
your your iPad whatever shit. And uh, I just start
downloading PDFs, you know, and if some only available in
like epub or DjVu, use a file converter to convert
at the PDFs. I like PDFs, and then I use
the app called read Era, which lets you bookmark and
highlight stuff and you know, you can reference it later.
It's really nice. So anyway, Anna's Anna's archive One River
by Way Davis. It's about Richard Schulte's and at the
Botanist then all this stuff he did everywhere he went.
Interesting stuff. There's a I think it's chapter two or
three is about the Peyote gardens and his work with
the Native American Church. Really really cool stuff. So anyway,
we were talking about Astrocaryum chambia, a common palm used
for the fibers that it creates making these wonderful bags
in the market. And when you look at this palm, yeah,
the leaves are huge. I'm looking. I got in at
observations and the whole quote trunk because remember, palms aren't
really trees there, right. If you cut a cross section
of a palm open and compared to the cross section
is something like an oak, an oak will have growth rings.
A palm will have vascular bundles, bundles polka dotted throughout
that cross section. The vascular bundles of course, consisting of
xylum and flow them. Xylem takes water up, floam takes
sugars down and back up and all around passive transport
for the xylum, active transport for to flow them right, right,
So anyway you get the vascular bundles scattered throughout, there's
no growth rings. And palms they're not technically trees, like
maybe they are right good, but they're not. They're they
don't have secondary growth, is what I'm trying to say, right,
Some of the monocots get anomalous secondary growth. Palms don't
get wider, right, I mean they do kind of from
a ceiling, but then they reach a certain width at
maturity and just stay that for the rest of their
lives and just grow up. They can only grow up
and down, not out like oaks or maple trees or
any diekot or conifer tree. Can more on this later,
but but anyway, Astrocarrium chambira, this trunk is covered in
these spines, these like papery spines. It looks like they're
much wider than they are, much wider than they are tall,
and so it'll be like, you know, what millimeter a
millimeter quote tall if you've got this thing laid out
on a table, one of these spines, like if you
cut it off from the tree laid on the table,
it'd be a millimeter tall and like you know, ten
centimeters long. So obviously there was a selection pressure of
herbivores chewing on these things, probably now extinct megafauna like
ground sloths, maybe some other things too. There used to
be monkeys all throughout this region too, and now they're
very rare, like common wooly monkeys. We met one of them.
His name was Pepe. This couple in an indigenous community
was raising him. Very lovely little little guy. But they're
rare now. And I guess though that species, I think
there's like ten thousand left or something. And my friend
Dna told me that, you know, as a kid, she
grew up and she see monkeys everywhere, and now you
don't see him anymore. Does that sound familiar? The same
shit you hear everywhere you go in the world where
there's a growing human population. It's just what we do, right,
like with the disappearing tarantulus and horned lizards and texas
and you know, nobody seems to notice. A few people
seem to care. It's the shifting baseline syndrome. This is
why we've got to bring all this shit back into
our lives. This is how you do it. You plant
the plants and everything else will come. You make space
for it, and kill those stupid fucking lawns and get
rid of the horticultural atrocities that have a place five
thousand miles away but not here right Like crape myrtles.
You could get the brush bullet and shoot a crape myrtle.
You can just go around. That's it. That's it, Okay,
remember the brush bullet. I played that Instagram reel for
you with the redneck with the package no offense to him.
Probably wonderful man goes to church on Sunday's great Guy.
But remember that from only thirty minutes prior in the
podcast You could get the brush bullet and use it
on things like crape myrtles, box woods, Bradford pears. You
are poisoning the ground, but it's a temporary poison, and
it's it's it's for the greater good. Walk around, Just
walk around town, or you know, get if you get
a car full of teens together, give him a gun,
paintball gun loaded with brush bullets, and just have him
go shoot the landscaping in a rich neighborhood, right, shoot
it up into the canopy of the Bradford pears, the
crape myrtles et cetera, the box woods, the Nandina domestica,
the berberous thunbergie eye, the Japanese barberries. I just use
the brush, Just use the brush bullet to start taking
these things down, right, I mean you should be doing
that anyway. Just start just start vandalizing crape myrtles everywhere. No,
I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. That's not how we
institute changed. Start talking about planting natives. Start gorilla planting natives,
unauthorized planting of natives. Anyway, God it, Hey, crape myrtles,
the brush bullet. You don't even have to leave your
truck and you're sitting there in your vinyl panties findeling
yourself and shooting the brush bull. Okay, I'm sorry, I
don't know where I keep going back to that. Okay.
So Astrocarrium chambira covered in spines, the trunk can get
upwards of the trunk. This main stem can get upwards
of like a foot foot and a half diameter breast height,
and then just those huge leaves which are so important
for making fiber. Astrocarrium chambira also bactiss gas apace gasippies gasippees,
but it looks like gasipece bactress gasippies, which uh had these?
When all the ones I saw around where we were
staying at had these hanging nests by our apendulus in
them ari apendulus. Uh sound like this. I'll play your
song real I'll play it your song real quick. It
was so so lovely to hear. God, I love it.
And it was two separate birds, one calling and then
the other responded to it. This is one more time,
Just play one more time. Isn't that nice? Where are
you at right now? You like hearing? Is where you're at?
I hope you're not someplace too unpleasant oropendula O R
O p E and d O l A. Okay, now
here's one I found online. Listen to this. This is
really nice. Sounds like a hammer drill. Oh. I see
palms in the background. I see some of those neotropical
palms in the back. I see the hanging baskets everywhere,
the little hanging basket in I see. You don't have
to be where you're at now. You could go to Puyo, Ecuador.
You can go to Mirror. You have a nice time
down there. You get out of the car slam and
the death cult right and his whole you know, ocean
of retard. It's not actually mentally disabled people, just people
who choose to be retarded, you know what I mean.
It's an American thing. We have fascism now, but you
could say the word retard. Actually, it's not fascism yet.
It's being instituted. It's it's corporate. It's corporate toocracy, it's
the oligarchy is proceeding as planned. Okay, anyway, So Bactress
gas Apiece aka the Chanta called the Chanta palm and
the fruits out a bowl peach palm, the fruit tastes
like a squash. It looks like squashed too. It looks
like kabocha squash. Really delicious. And then you get that
big seed. I wonder if you could grow and probably not.
These are very humid, human loving plants. Maybe in Florida
you could grow these, right, the same thing with thea broma,
theobroma cacao, the chocolate tree, which needs fungus NaSTA polini.
When you see the flowers on a chocolate tree, they
are they are dime sized, maybe a little bit smaller.
And to take into account that that overary inside that
flower will eventually grow over a span of five to
seven months to the size of almost a football. Uh,
is pretty wild to think about. It's such a massive
transfer of energy and and and just material to this
thing to grow that fast. It's nuts. Got the pulp
of those things taste so lovely, the white pulp. And
then of course the seeds you can eat too, but
they're you know, they're like purple. Look at this violet color.
You chew up one of those seeds, you spit it out.
They're a little bit bigger than an almond. Chew up
one of the cacao seeds and spit it out. It's
got like a violet tinge to it. But that pulp
is something else. Man, I'll tell you. You kind of
let it marinate in your mouth too. You don't just
eat it and swallow, you know, American style, like a hag.
You let it marinate for a while. It's got a
like a taste like pink lemonade, maybe mixed with mango.
So anyway, but but I digress. So the peach palm
bactriiss gasipies, which again very important at the botanically. You
see them on the selling these things on the sides
of the roads. These you know, they just cut the
whole peduncle off and uh and they've you know, they'll
cut the whole peduncle off. It's like two feet long,
the whole thing that they're holding, the peduncle and then
the panicle of fruits, and they just sell them roadside,
these little you know, the actual peach palm fruit itself
is probably the size of a baseball, maybe a little
bit smaller. Uh. Gionoma was a cool uh genus that
I encountered. It's got the biffed leaves, looks like a fishtail,
a big broad fish tail. Like a whale tail. The
whale tail palm didn't see any flowering. I only saw
one or two specimens, and I think there was at
one of the lower elevation sites that we visit. Did
tons of fungal diversity here too, Silasi be hoogshigany i,
sharpest nipple, silasso bey silasopes up at the Korum silasipe
young gensis. There were a number of psychoactive mushroom species
in this habitattoo dense forest, shady rich duff on the ground,
et cetera. But the copa palm, of course, was the
dick palm, the ones with the roots that spread out
the copa palm Iriardia del todia, as well as the
walking palm, which doesn't actually walk. It just spreads roots out.
It doesn't actually move, but those roots you can give
the the the the illusion of walking because the old
roots can rot off and it can form new ones,
et cetera. So maybe you might get one that that
changes its location by four or five feet, but it's
not really it's not really walking, you know, as it grows,
it might lean over a I don't know. I'm just
trying to imagine where this stupid name came from whatever.
So Critilla xo riza s O c r A t
e A xo riza. It's got those stilt roots too
that come out that kind of look like a screw
pine like pan, you know, order pandanace, the genus Pandema,
which is Old World tropics. But uh in the the
roots kind of look like Iriardia deltoida, the copa palm.
But excuse me, but they're covered in these spiny protrusions
which are very and they don't have that like that
the dick shape, the notorious penile phelic shape to them
as much, you know, which is mainly the root cap
and Eriardia deltoidia, which does look like a massive hog.
It looks like a dong. That head of the dong
is just the root cap and it's you touch it,
it's kind of mucilaginous. It's a great illustration though, for
what roots are doing, which is, you know, they they
root caps on roots exude mucilage to decrease the friction
as they move through the soil, and that's this is
a great illustration of that. But I really want to
talk about at some point, and I maybe will do
this in another podcast. The difference in secondary the difference
in growth. You know, you have secondary growth with the
dicots or uticosts, we'll just call them dicots, but you
just know that there's it's technically not as cutting dry
as that. You got the basal angiosperm. Look at the end,
look at the angrow sperm. By logic poster you got
the more basal angiosperms, and you get the monocots, and
you got the u diecots. But regardless, you got that
secondary growth, which conifers also have too, they evolved it
on their own. You have that secondary growth that lateral
maris them or secondary you have secondary growth, lateral maris them,
vascular cambium. These are all talking about the same thing,
except you have vascular cambium and cork cambium too. But
these are two extra layers of actively dividing cells that
you get in dicots, whereas monoch cuts again only grow
up and down, except for like the genus Dressina, some Yuckas,
et cetera, which have anomaloists secondary growth. And what would
that anomalist secondary growth look like, because remember there's no
tree rings in the monocots, there's no there's no vascular cambium.
It's it's you know, whereas like in a diecot, the
heartwood is dead, and like in an oak, the hartwood
is dead. The trees only alive on the outer few inches,
the heartwood is dead. It's it's structurally sound. It's just
providing structural support. That's why you know things like redwoods,
which also have vascular cambium, and oak trees can be
hollow on the inside because all that tissue is dead anyways,
hollow on the inside and still alive. You're just like
so many people. I love making that fucking analogy, just
like so many of us living in this consumer hillscape
dystopia being farmed as consumers. So but but you know,
a in a palm, you don't get that, do you
get the vascuar other bundles polka dotted throughout the stem
and cross section. If you cut a palm tree down,
you're just gonna see a bunch of fibers. That's why
petrified palm wood is so easy to distinguish from uh,
you know, petrified wood of like a cypress tree or
a redwood, or a oak or magnolia, et cetera. So anyway, okay,
so uh, copa palm and socrate copa palm irie Rtia
deltoida i r a no i r i a r
t e a deltoidia, the dick palm, the copa palm,
and the walking palm Socritia x riza, which again formed
these these flanged bases that look like an hourglass. The
point is just structural stability. Neither one actually walks, uh,
but it's just a way to create a broader base
and make up for the fact that they can't grow. Latterly,
that palms are minocots. They just grow up and down.
They don't actually get broad or as they grow. And
so since some of these can get upwards to sixty
feet tall, they're gonna they're gonna create that flanged base
using just roots, roots that sprout from buds that root
buds that are three or four feet above the ground
in some cases. And it forms this nice little pyramidal
cage that acts like a flanged base in hourglass shaped
to that base, giving it structural stability. And uh again
eerie already a del toity. The copa palm's got the dickhead.
It's I don't know how else to put it, I
mean to mince words. What come on, I help you approude. Okay,
there was andy in royal palm Dictyocarium lamarque anum. Where
did I see that? That thing's beautiful? Uh Mauritia flexuosa,
maurice palm, Moridia m A u r I t i
A flexuosa. All these things are beautiful again. And when
you see something in the context that evolved in instead
of as this bastard child of human horticulture, of someone's
bad landscaping choices, you really appreciate it more. And then
one of the definitely deserves mentioned Onacarpus batua oe n
O c r p Us Onacarpus batua, which I think
has the longest leaves of any angiosperm. Let me check
that really quick. Let's look that up really quick. Okay,
I'm giving you bad information. I'm glad I checked this.
H Raffia regalis is a species of flowering plant in
the palm family eric case. It is founded in Gola, Cameroon,
so Equatorial Africa, Republic of the Congo, Gabona, and Nigeria.
It's natural habitat is subtropical or tropical moist lowland forests. Yes,
of course it is threatened by habitat loss. Not surprising,
is you know there's a human tumor grows and takes
more for itself and leaves little for the rest of
the biosphere. Raffia regalis has extraordinarily large leaves. Botanisty collegist
Francis Hally Hally encountered a specimen in the Republic of
Congo bearing a frond twenty five point nine to one
meters eighty five feet in total length, of which sixteen
point forty seven meters is the blade or lamina, while
nine point four to four meters is the stalk or petiole,
of which thirty two inches was below soil level. These
near vertical frinds are arranged in the very rare one
four PHILOTAXI well, thank you Wikipedia. Let's see photos of
Rafia regalis. Oh yeah, this thing is those those where
the petiole attaches to the stem, doesn't get too high
above the ground. It's got kind of like a vase shape.
Interesting growth habit Yeah, man, palms are cool. I take
it back, I'm sorry. Well what is it? That is
that the inflorescence? Holy shit? What is this thing? God?
The inflorescence on this thing is wild. It looks like, well,
I guess this is an immature one, but it looks
like it looks like some sort of worms. This is
the I guess it just hasn't opened yet. But it's
a very bizarre looking structure. And you got Raffia vinifera.
How many species are in this? Uh? How many species
are in the genus Raffia? God? You know this is
this is exciting. I love feeling that excitement when you
learn about a new genus or a new clay, a
new evolutionary group of of some organism that you're just
fascinated by, and then you just go down a wormhole
of looking up, you know, all the different variations on
a theme. Here's here's Raffia far aniffra from Madagascar with
there's an inflorescence and it looks like it's got upside
on pine cones, upside on conical spiraling bracts, spiraling bracts
forming a little looks like a conifer cone on the
inflo And so those are fruits. I take it. Now.
You gotta wonder what the ecology of this thing is,
what pollinates it, what disperses the fruits? God? I'd love
to go to Madagascar too. How many species on A
naturalists have been observed eight Raffia australis. Where is this
it Raffia vinifra raphi, which is also a genus of
moth as it seems, so, don't get confused, don't get
thrown off. How many species in this genus are quite
a few, only eight of which have been documented on
I Naturalists, Like, there's twenty species Raffia sedanica. God, there's
so many wonderful end list forms, most beautiful that I
wish people could research, but they unfortunately they can't in
some places because the human situation there is too fucked,
you know, and you gotta be bribing people. The whole
system's corrupt. Whatever. Oh, the human situation on Earth, Jesus,
you know, I guess it's better than dealing with like
predatory stick megafauna. Well, that's kind of the same thing.
Humans can act like that. But you know, I was
just thinking, if you could go back in time, right,
you could go back, you know, one hundred thousand years
to some of these locations throughout the world and study
the plant life there. About having to worry about getting
abducted or having to pay a cop or getting shaken
down by the cops or you know, uh, it's just Jesus.
I don't know. It's sad too. I mean, I think
about places in the world to go and just the
fucking poverty level there and the despair. It's it's awful
shit to think about. You know. I got to bring
people up. I got to bring people up out of
that shit. Okay, So anyway, Uh yeah, so Raffia. But
but so owner Carpus is not Owner Carpus Betua is
not the largest what the fucking big leaf? I mean,
they're probably maybe maybe the largest neotropical palm leaf. They're
upwards of probably fifty feet. It looks like I'd love
to get somebody on here to study maybe somebody who
studies palms, maybe maybe contacts Scott's owner or something. Have
somebody on here to talk about palms, because I'll be honest,
I was not interested in them before. And then, of
course down in Brazil and the you've got the dwarf
palms that grow in the campus for pestorates, haveitat with
all the interesting cactirom bromeliads in the genus Syagris s.
Y a g r u s siagris do rdi d
u A r t Ei. Excuse me, did I see
any other palms Dictiocarium lamarchian. I mean we talked about
that already, uh with Tinia. That was another one that
I saw there. I mean, it's so easy to say
they're just large grasses, which they kind of are, but
they're also a lot more complex than that. They're and
they're not actually grasses. They're not even in the order Poelis.
They're in their own order the poems. They're in the
order Arakles again, not not like the genus Erica e
R I c A, but Aureka a R E c a,
which is a genus of palm arek ac. But the
what is the other family? Is it dazipogan Ac? I
think it's the other family that's in uh order eric Calees.
I think it's just the palm family and the Dazi pogons,
which I believe are all Australian. Oh no, maybe not.
Genus Bexteria Callectasia, Kingia king Ya australis monotypic genus extremely weird.
The Australian grass trees, one of the two unrelated monocot
genera referred to as grass trees Kingia only as one
species king of Australis. And that's in again family daz
apogan ac, after the genus das Apogon, which I encountered
a lot in Western Australia. I guess that family has
four genera in it. But then then the other grass
tree is Xanthoria, which is a very species rich throughout Australasia.
Some really cool, but they look so much alike when
they're not in flower Kingya and Xanthoria. What are the
other what are the other genera? There's a pogon, they
see Baxteria and Caliktasia. Where's Baxteria native? Ooh, this is
a game been monocots? Huh monocots. You didn't think you'd
get into them. You didn't think you didn't think they
were that that fastening. Oh that's a Western Australian genus too.
How many species? Oh? Just back, just one Baxteria australis
and that's I got to see that. Now that's a
weird one. I want to log all this stuff, so
I just have my own reference, my own my own
photo reference library of all these uh, all the Earth's
plant diversity Oh wow, Jesus Christ, what is this? Calctasia
one of the other one of the four gen era
in dasipogan ac have h you have Baxteria, Calctasia, Dazi Pogon,
and king Ya some really cool Dasipogons too. But Caliktasia
C A L E C T A S I A
is a fucking this thing? Is? This has showy flowers? Man?
Jesus Christ six teopled purple people's flowers with red anthers. Jesus,
what is this? Oh my god? Have I never heard
of this before? I want to see this? Where is this?
This is a western Australia throughout the Australian continent or what?
Oh you got some in Victoria too, so western and
southern Australia. Calctasia. That is a beautiful genus. Holy shit,
probably really cool too. I wonder what it's pollination biology is.
I wonder what it's ecology is. That's how have I
never heard of this before? Let's check out the species diverse?
How species rich is it? You got fifteen species Calctasia
Browniana syanea, the Marzii grassless granted Florida his Buta intermedia
jubilea Kigiia. It sounds like a European name, Naragara, Abtusa, Pallustris, Pignadiana,
and Valada Calctasia. Fucking I gotta go back to Australia.
I love Australia over there. It might be my escape
eru when this country gets too miserable to live it
or just you know, when it's just so revolting to
look at what we've done of the landscape here. You
know that'll happen after Trump sells off the national parks.
They're gonna put the see That's what it's gonna be,
just like this. It's gonna be dystopic. Don't get me wrong,
but it's gonna be like idiocracy dystopic. It's gonna be
just you know, the the the billboards, this consumer cartoon hell.
You know where you can feel people getting dumber around you.
That is what you can feel, the populace getting dumber.
That's what is this is that that's not Kingia australis
what is this thing? I'm looking at? Dazapoganace two what
call the only other family in the Palm family. You
got arik Ac and then dazipogan Ace, the only other
family in the palm order. Excuse me? Oh wow, there's
only three species of Dazipogon too, so this is not
a super species rich family dazipogan Ace. Wow, that's wild.
For some reason, I thought there were more, but I
guess it's just the only only a few species of Dosipogon,
one species of Kingia, probably twenty species of uh Calectasia,
and one species of Bexteria. Anyway, Okay, I digress, But
but yeah, Eric Cayley's ariks the palm order. And then
how many fucking species of palms. There's probably a shif
ton twenty six hundred species of palms, jeez, all over
the world, and of course the most cold tolerant one
in New Zealand. No, I'm sorry, I was. I was
thinking Ropelo Stylus sapada in New Zealand, though it is
a beautiful palm, is certainly not the most cold tolerant one.
The most cold tolerant palm is here in the US's
in Florida. I saw it in April of twenty three.
It's Rapidophyllum historix, can reportedly survive temperatures as low as
negative ten degrees fahrenheit, and it's abute. Here's a picture.
One covered in snow, thrives in moist environments, ideal for
USDA zone six to ten. You could grow to us
in Cleveland. No, it's Cleveland zone sixth probably now a
climate change. Yeah, throw a sheet over it. Throw some
plastic painters, tarp over it. During a really cold days,
midjeweled date palm, drooled date palm. They they got one
of those planted in a parking lot near where I live,
a parking lot of some depressing shopping center. But it
puts out actual decent fruits. You can go get them.
You go harvest, fill up a bucket like an old
Italian lady harvest and dandelions on a median strip is
Cicero Avenue. Not that I would know anything about that.
That's what they used to do though, reportedly, and they
liked it. On the Median strip. The old Italian ladies
would get the they'd harvest the dandelion greens on the
median strip because supposedly that was where the dogs couldn't
pee on them. But it was also where all the
tired dust leaded gasoline particulates. Because this is back in
the day and uh break dust tired dust. You know,
the plethora, the bounty of carcinogens produced by our car
centric infrastructure that's ready with all land on a median strip.
So but at least you weren't eating dog piss. I'd
rather eat greens with dog piss and greens with the
diesel exititates. I mean, in an ideal world, I have neither.
But you know, since this is the modern day, you
got to take your pick. You want you want to drink,
you want to eat dog piss, or you want to
eat the car syn engens. Anyway, I want to talk
about the family cyclant thesy, which I've taken an interest in,
the Panama hat family in the order Panda Nale's Now.
I I first saw one of these in Mobot, and
I had forgotten about it. I forgot I saw it
in Mobot. I had a nice little label on it.
It had a flowering structure that looked absolutely insane. It
looked like one of those uh uh, you know, knockdown
characters that you hit with the balls in like a
carnival carnival game. You know, like they got the little
like the thing that looks like what is that guy's name?
Beaker the Muppet beaker. You don't know what the funk
I'm talking about. That's okay, need to do I apparently.
But it's got these these long thing, these things that
look like long white hairs, sometimes four to five inches long,
coming off of this rod. It looks like, uh, you know,
some some guy wearing like a white wig. H you know,
like some like you know, Rocker wearing a white wig.
I don't know. It's a fucking bizarre looking thing. But
then the leaves look like palm leaves. You would think
that this is just a palm, but then you see
it inflorescence and you realize this is not a palm.
This is a member of the Panama hat family cyclanth
they see, which is neotropical. It only exists in the Americas.
It's the only New World I saw this thing. What
did I say? I think I saw a species of
a splendia, But I had no idea what was going
on with the inflorescence. I had no idea what were
the male flowers, what were the female flowers. It was
one of the most bizarre plants I've seen as of late,
and I was at elevation thirty one hundred feet. But again,
if you're into Saint Louis Aria. You just go to
Missouri Botanical Garden and a mobot greenhouses in there and
check out what they got. They also have a thea broma.
They also have a chocolate tree, which is cool to
see if you could see it in flower. The flowers
on chocolate are nuts, and you can also look at
the flowers and see, Okay, I see how that's in
the cotton family mal As. It's got the pentamerous associated
you know, the pentamerous form. But I saw one of
the genus uh. The genus was a splendia. These things
are like low growing palms. They don't get too tall.
Some are scandent and grow epiphetically. They can kind of
vine up other other plants. I saw another a splendia
doing that. They often have a very distinct leaf to them.
They've got this V shaped leaf. It kind of looks
like that Geonoma palm. But then the rackies the stem
that holds the leaf. The petiole UH is in in
cycling many members of Cyclone, the sy is round, it's
not flat. Cyclanthus is another genus Cyclanthus a Spleundia carludovica.
That's the genus of of the Panama hat, uh, the
Panama hat because Panama hats were made from the leaves
of these days and Dicranopigium. There's a number of other
I've I've downloaded some papers. There's a number of other
genera in this family. But it is a fucking weird family.
And again it's in order Pandinales, which not many people
will have heard of, especially in the United States, because
Pandana or Pandanas, the namesake genus of his family is
Old World tropics, and you don't really get any members
of his family in the US. Maybe one or two,
maybe a couple planet as horticultural specimens, but it's very
otherwise unknown. What's cool about them, though, is they're almost
all pollinated by beetles. They kind of mimic aerids, both
in their inflorescence shape or they've got a spath in
a spaedix, and also that they're pollinated by beetles. The
long white hairs that looked like the white hair on
his seventies rocker Muppet that I was imagining when I
was describing the inflorescence to you, those long white things
are staminoes. They're sterile statements. They're generally interpreted to be staminodes,
but they're also there. Their benefit is in being osmophores.
They're kind of like these scent producing structures that help
attract the beetle pollinators. This is some really interesting shit
to me because ecologically, first off, using beatles as pollinators
is kind of unusual. It's more of like a basal
angiosperm thing, right, or a psychad thing. It's it's unusual
to me because it's it's just a notable pollination syndrome.
I mean it's and the beatles don't just they're not
like bees where they come and they dabble for a
little bit, collecttion pollen and take off. These things are
hanging out for a while, all right. They kind of
like use a magnolia's do this too. The beatles kind
of use the inflorescence as a sex hotel. Maybe they
hang out, you know, have a buffet, right like they're
like they're at the Louby's buffet or they're one of
the buffets as you would go to, you know, steal
food from and uh some horrible casino in Las Vegas.
I fully, uh if you can still get away with that,
please try. But it's a it's a notable pollination syndrome.
And of course you've got this bract, this this sheath,
this spatheu protecting this whole structure, and then it's got
this like cone like structure. When it's done. The female flowers,
I think there's there's let me, I gotta look up
this flower diagram again. It's got this four sided structure
and they're arranged in a spiral, which makes it look
like a cone. It's elongated on a rod. Their their
female first, and the staminoids are out when this in
the female phase, so they are protogynus protogenous, just like
aeroids as well, which is again expremely fucking unusual in
the angiosperm world. Not extremely usual, but it's unusual, it's noteworthy.
And so they're they're female first. And when they're female,
how those staminoids are out attack, attracting beetles. And then
the staminoids start to fall off as this inflorescence is
entering the mail phase and the stamens are pretty reduced.
They end up you can't really see the filaments, you
just see the anther so they end up looking like
these kind of wardy protrusions all over this rod. It's
a really unusual flowering structure, a really unusual pollination biology,
and a really unusual habit. And they all have this
kind of fishtail leaf, these palm looking leaves that split
into a fishtail or a whale tail, so it looks like,
you know, you got two leaflets coming off of this petiole.
So anyway, so cyclant These, it's the paper I'm using
for one of these. There's two papers I was looking at.
It sent emissions in floral nutrients of Carludo viccoid E
cyclant these and they are importance for associated beetles. That
was a really good one. The cyclant These is a
monocof family of approximately two hundred and thirty perennial epiphyt its,
vines and terrestrial herbs. They're tall herbs. They're five six
foot tall herbs in some cases, with all extant species
restrict restricted to Central and Southern America. The leaves are
relatively large and palm like, and the flowers are small, unisexual,
and aggregated into dense monoecies, so having both sexes on it.
Spaduses Cyclanthacea are considered members of the order Pandinalias and
the closest relative to this family is most probably Pandinace.
So anyway, in the in the family cyclanth these we
got two subfamilies, Cyclanthoid which just has one genus in it, Cyclanthus,
and Carludovicoide, which has a number of genera. And what
do we got here, Oh, fuck Jesus, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten,
eleven genera in it Asplundia, Carludovica short, shorty, giny, diante, Dichronopigium,
evident if if Odianthus, Ludovia, et cetera, steele A, Tilis, Feradia, etcetera.
So anyways, uh, Carludovica, of course, uh, in A Splendia
I think are by far the most species rich. But
they've all got this beetle pollination so far as I know,
and they all have this same general habit of being herbs.
They are not very tall trees. They don't have this
main stem that you know, it's colescent and above the ground. Yuh,
et cetera. Some some do, I guess, the epiphytes, but okay, regardless,
Carlutovica palmata again the the famous hat for the famous
plant for Panama hats. It's started to make hats out
of it fiber. There's the ethnic botanical importance here, but
we're interested in the pollination biology and the beetles that
use it as a sex hotel. And so it's we're
talking about the inflorescence structure. You have two spades, these
long bracts protecting this spadix, this kind of coolike spadix
consisting of unisexual flowers, both male and female, and then
these long ass staminodes which give it this utterly bizarre look.
And we got we have a protogenous a thesis, so
they're they're the the inflorescence is female. It's protogynus g
y n o us protogenists just like a lot of
aeroids are so so unisexual flowers. But the spadix itself
is monoecious. It has both sexes on this inflorescence, and uh,
it's a female first, so it's the protogenists and thesis
last two days, so it's female for two days. The
female flowers open for two days, at which point the
staminodes are out emitting scent. Okay, but what's what's interesting
is the night before the female flowers open, the spades
opened a little bit and the light orange and still
folded staminodes become visible. These are the long hairys. These
are the osmophores which are emitting scent and attracting the beatles.
And in the first night of anth thesis, you know,
between three and four am, the spade is fully open,
the staminode stretch and the inflorescence enters the pistolate stage, right,
so they're just female, all right, which was regarded as
the phase when the stigmas were receptive, all right. And
this goes from about three am to seven am, all right.
And during the following night around two thirty four am,
the inflorescences of E. fIF e funiferer E. Funiffer which
is Evodianthus Evodianthus funifer Ludovia, Lancefolia, and A. Splendia heteranthra,
where the species used in this study. And this took
place in French Guiana, which is a little bit northeast
of where I just was in Ecuador, and reportedly already
you know, from the beginning of the scent emission stage,
which is when these staminodes are emitting scent, that the
pit during the pistilate stage, the female stage of this flower.
A lot of Coculionid beetles were attracted. These are like
little weavils, and so at the time the still closed
staminate flowers cover the receptive pistilate flower. Four of the
six attracted morphospecies Coirculioni Coculionid d were pollinators, and they
had to enter deeply into the inflorescence to contact the
pistilate flowers, which are hidden below the staminate flowers in
a kind of pollination chamber. They cut the staminodes at
the base and fed on drops of the resulting secreted liquid.
They made it and oviposited in the ab axial surface
of the still closed staminate flowers. Jesus, so are they
destroying the plant or what? These somebody's beetles leave? You know,
they overpositi leave the leg the eggs and the leaf litter.
Others are just doing it a currently right on the
flowers themselves. The non pollinating beetles only visited the service
of the inflorescence without entering it. So you actually have
to crawl through these stamens, these these anthers, which are
not open yet to get into the female flowers at
the base this is already getting fucking weird. You gotta
crawl into this thing, really, and the beetles are doing it.
They're hanging out again, not like bees where they just
they just you know, show up, hangout for five six seconds,
maybe ten, then fly off. These things are like they're
going in, they're banging. They're having a sex hotel. And
then they're overpositing inside these flowers or in the leaf
litter below. And more importantly, they're hanging out for almost
twenty four hours. Right in the following night, the anthers
of the stamine flowers open and touched each other so
that only small holes offered space for the pollinators to
crawl out. So when they're crawling out, they're picking up pollen,
right and you know they're they're they're they're hitting the
contacting the male parts of this inflorescence after they've already
been contacting the female parts why to avoid self pollination,
at which point they crawl out and they get pollen
all over themselves, and then they move to another inflorescence,
bringing pollen with them and having to crawl in past
those closed anthers into the attracted by the scent emitted
by the staminods having to crawl in past those closed anthers,
you know, kind of like squeezing through to get to
those female Yeah, see it says here. As they're crawling out,
the beetles now move from the post receptive pistolate flowers
at the interior of the inflorescence to the surface and
became completely dusted with pollen while passing the staminate flowers
and the other two species Ludovica lancefolia and Splendia heteranthra.
The ecalyptiny beetles acted the same way. Unfortunately, the visiting
beetles have not been identified to genera or species. Jesus Christ,
that's crazy, man. There's so much we don't know about
the living machine while we're taking it apart. This is
why you know, we need more people in the natural sciences.
There's just so much to study figure out how this
living machine works, especially considering how imperiled it is by
this species of bipedal ape thermogenesis. There was only a
slight elevation of the floral temperature in E. Funifer during
the pistolate stage. The spadix what is this The spadix
reach twenty four point one degrees celsius zero point four
degrees celsius above ambient temperature, so not a whole lot
During the day, the inflorescence temperature was lower than the
ambient Since the sense of the three studied species differed
considerably in their composition, with the exception of three trace
compounds which occurred in Bodianthus funifer and Ludovia, excuse me
I was saying Ludovica Ludovia lancefolia, all compounds were species specific.
The scent of evodi Anthus fuenefa are mainly consisted of
turpenoids in two unknown components, with the sisca terpene a, farnacene,
diax epoxid being by far the most abundant component. The
two aromatic compounds of menzolacetate, cinemil astate, et cetera. So anyway,
the presence study confirms that avodi Anthus fen for funifer,
Ludovia anceifolia a splendid heteranthra areponated by small sized ecalypteny
flower weavils. So these things, but still, these things are
going in hopefully bringing pollen from a inflorescence of another
plant they visited the night before, bringing this pollen in
with them into these little sex chambers where the female
flowers are. These tetramerous female flowers hanging out there for
a day, copulating, potentially overpositing, getting pollen all over the
female flowers, not off the staminodes, sucking a juice out,
so they're eating too. They're banging and they're eating, and
then they just when they crawl out twenty four hours later,
the male flowers are opening, the stamins are opening, and
they're getting dusted with pollen. This is really weird. This
is cool and weird. So it's not really trapping them,
but it's inducing them to hang out for a while.
This is like a wonderful coevolutionary strategy here, right where
both species benefit. Right the member of cyclant they see
in the beetle pollinators, Oh, this is interesting. The staminodes
these long white things that look like the hairs you
know for the seventies muppet rocker wig. The staminoids are
slightly flattened and have two ducks that are filled with
a mucilage like liquid. Although not investigated in this study,
we speculate that this liquid has two functions. At the
beginning of anthesis, the liquid is probably pumped into the
two ducts of each staminode and helps the curled staminodes
to become stretched and rigid so that they can function
as osmophores emitting scent. The liquid exuded along the staminodes
was found to contain sugars as male uglossene and meliponine.
Bees occasionally collected liquids on the staminodes. Oh, this is interesting,
so they're not this plant is benefiting other insects though
they're not pollinating it, and just coming by to collect
some of the sugars and other liquids that are being
exuded by these staminodes. It is assumed that the liquid
also transports other compounds into the osmophores. Moreover, the liquid
is consumed by the pollinating or maybe they're collecting scent
I suppose. Moreover, the liquid is consumed by the pollinating
and non pollinating beetles. Cross Sections of staminodes revealed that
the u selage like liquid is accumulated between the parentkama
cells and in the epidermis cells. However, it is not
clear how it is secreted. The surface of the staminodes
is roughly corrugated, which seems to be an enlargement of
the liquid secreting area characteristics which are often found in
scent emitting surfaces. God, this is weird, though, this is so,
this is very complex. This is a very complex pollination system.
The staminate flowers are used as ovipositioned sites by the
pollinating weavils, which is not at all harmful for the plant,
since staminate flowers are dispensable after an thesis. There you go, right,
they're just stunt cocks. Get rid of them. They're just dumb,
dumb males dime a dozen. So the stamens are falling
off anyway, it doesn't matter that they've had eggs deposited
in them. Frans two thousand and seven discovered that eggs
laid on pistolate flowers did not survive when the infratessence
is matured, successfully resulting in reduced risk for the weavils
to lay eggs and staminate flowers they drop soon after
an thesis, and most cyclith species but still provide the
eggs and larvae a medium in wish to continue their
development in the leaf litter. So the stamens fall off
and then with the eggs in them, and then and
uh and uh, and then the larva just continue their
development and the leaf litter. It's that's nice. This is
nice that this is working out for everybody. Everybody's we're
making it work. When the eggs are laid in staminate flowers,
the larva developed within two weeks. There are also records
showing some species of Acalyptiny to have ovipositive successfully and
pistolate flowers of Carludovica palmata with larva and pupe developing
and the pulp of the berries without significantly damaging the seeds.
It's nice. They're just eating the fleshy stuff around the seeds.
They're not, you know, they're in a harmless seeds. The
composition of nutrients in the flower organs is quite variable,
and both species study the highest energy content was found
in the staminodes and or staminate flowers. Perhaps the choice
of the visiting beetles use staminodes and staminate flowers for
ovipositing is an additional adaptation to utilize the flower organs
with the highest energy content. Uh God, what a fucking
you know. You don't got to read the whole paper
of some of these things, but it's definitely worth perusing.
Through it, you know, on a again on an app
like read Era or something, and then highlight uh, you know,
in quotes. You could you know that app allows you
to quote quote something just by highlighting it and then
selecting quote. But I do all this stuff on my phone. Man,
it is there's some really it's really useful. Shit. You
stand in line somewhere or you got you know, you're
trying to kill time at your job in a bathroom
on an extended shipbreak or something. Read read plant systematics,
Read a paper you're downloading, Read a you know, a
pirated PDF textbook or something. You know I'd be asking questions.
Stimulate your mind anyway, I digress. The non pollinating staminode
cutting and floorivorous beetles seem to take advantage of a
well functioning beetle pollination system. However, without disturbing the pollination.
The ephemeral staminodes are only important at the very be
getting of anthesis and emitting scent to attract beetles and
provide nourishment for them. After attraction and upon arrival of
the beatles, the staminodes lose their main importance for the plant.
Thus the additional destruction of staminodes by predatory beetles seems harmless.
God damn it. So that what I saw when I
saw this a splendia species flowering those white the staminodes,
I didn't appreciate that those were only gonna last for
a day or two. I should have really taken a
whiff and seen what they smelled like. I did. I
wonder if I recorded a video, but I didn't. I
wasn't really aware of how fucking cool this lineage was.
God damn it. Now I'm interested, you know. Now I
want to grow these things so I can study them.
Is are there any university greenhouses out there in the
United States studying any members of cyclant they see? God,
you know, university greenhouses. I feel like used to used
to stock all all this weird shit from all over
the world, weird plants, and they don't do it anymore.
There's no funding. There's no funding for that. What does
it do? What's the benefit? Why do we want to do?
What's what's the point of that? With The point is
knowledge in creating a more educated and aware and uh
you know, enlightened, populous and just excited about life. A
population of people that's excited about life and can see
it firsthand and study. It doesn't matter if it's already
been done or whatever it's I mean, this is why
institutions like misera botanical garden, which has one of these
a member of his family, are so important to have around,
and it makes me worried for the future because administrators
and the business elite are always in their fucking depoperate mindset,
are always looking for ways to defund things like this
because they seem they deem them useless, They deem that
there's no benefit. You're enriching, you're populous, so that you
don't end up with a population of dummies. Right in
the fact fact that countries like China do fund these things.
For all the eels you could say about China, the
fact they do fund things like this, right there doesn't
need to be it doesn't need not everything has to
make money or be a profiteering enterprise somehow. The fact
that China does do things like this is why they're beating,
why they're beating the US, and why the US is
just getting dumber and dumber and dumber every fucking year.
So you end up electing these cartoon reality TV showmen
fucking frauds with this ketamine induced pet Imagine Trump holding
Eline and a little fucking gimp outfit, right with the
little caddiers and shit, some real six shit. I'm not
a I can't stand furries, right, Well, I guess this
wouldn't be for you. They're not furries. Would be vinyl?
This would be like black black vinyl? Right? Or would
it be the other way around? What it be? Elon
holding Trump? I don't know. They're both fucking morons. They're
both fucking retards. You could say retard. No right, I'm gonna.
I'm gonna. I'm gonna really dive headlong into that. Got
it just again, all enabled by how deranged the left got,
the modern American left, the identitarian left. It's so sad.
I don't understand. I just shit on people repeatedly and
told them they were privileged and and and condescended to
them and morally spoke down to them and told them
how terrible of a person that they were. I can't
understand why they went to the other side and became fascist.
Jesus Christ, rich kids, you know, just isolated from reality
and from the working class. Just no clue how this works.
Don't know how to be fucking nice on how to
be humble, don't know how to reach out to people
and have fun, loosen up, unpucker, laugh at things, et cetera.
You know, just don't know how to fucking organize, don't
know how to you know, see again, this is a
this was all I don't know. Maybe it was a
sy op. Who knows. I'm sorry, we're going there again.
Let's look at this other paper on cyclant theacy. Then
I'll let you go. I'm amazed if you even still listening.
Maybe you're you're you're in a wood shop or something.
You got this on a podcast and you just don't
You're just too lazy to change it. I don't know,
I don't fucking know. What are you doing? Why are
you still listening to this? The ads are normally pretty bad.
Hopefully you sign up for the patren Okay, let's go
over here to Gottsburger. Is that his name, Gerhard Gottsberger,
Gunther Gunther, Gunther, Gottfried? What is his name? Oh, Gerhard Gottsberger. Sorry, girheart,
I'm not making funny, okay. Amongst this is a pollination
of some species of the Carludo vicoidi which is that
other subfamily, and remarks on the origin and evolution of
the cyclant these. Among cyclant these, Carludo vicoidy from Amazonian
Peru to a splendid species of Vodianthus funifera we already
touched on a Vodianthus, and Carludo Vika palmata were shown
to be canthro Fhilus. This is beetle pollinated. Can't theo filus? Right?
Whereas and Tamophilus is insect pollinated? Anamophilus is wind wind pollinated? Uh?
Caranthophilus is that? Is it caranthophilus or is it what's
the what's the what's the bat pollination? Chiropterophilus for Chiroptera,
there's scientific order of bats. Excuse me, I apologize. So anyway, Uh,
Canthophilus just just pollination? Cross pollination by beetles thought to
be one of the oldest forms of insect pollination. Psychads
were doing this early Cretaceous, probably in a Jurassic All right,
So let's see what is this. It's in good photos
in here. Yeah. The pistolate flowers are tetramerius and tricyclic
with one perianth whirl one whirl of staminodes and one
of carpals. Oh wow, that's the Really you got to
get in there and dissect these things to see it.
And again you he's got this nice picture of these
staminodes popping out of these little holes in what is
otherwise looks like a potato that is just comprived like
a wardy potato, and the wartz are just the unopened stamens,
and then the female flowers are deep in there. Does
he have any any dissections here to what the female
flowers look like? No? But oh there's a two. There's
two post pistolate stages of the inflorescence. A splendid proviana.
Ooh male, you glassy and be hit ennick clinging on
the fragrance staminodes. Oh this is? This is on a
up there, Yes, C and D inflorescence without staminodes. During
the second morning, shortly before the beetles fly away, this
is the staminods have already fallen off and it's going
into the male phase. The beetles are eating pollen and mating.
What a life. D and inflorescence the second day, after
the beatles have left, the male flowers are withering and shrinking,
and the four stigmatic press of the female flowers become visible.
Oh yeah, so after the stamens fall off, that's when
they get this really cool, beautiful spiral cone shape to them,
with these like these little squares or diamonds spiraling around
this rod. Let's see what else though? Is this? What? What?
What is this? What? If the cyclant they see are
indeed pollinated by beetles only, as all the observations up
to now available indicate this is an earlier paper, they
are pollinated by beetles only, it would be the only
exclusively Canthrophilus family among monocatleitans. Because I think some aeroid
I mean, obviously aeroids are not entirely beetle pollinated, but
I believe all of I believe all the cyclants are.
I'm curious to know. I'm curious to know. The fruits
are certain some of the fruits are certainly dispersed by birds.
The whole infuit tessens on you know, Carludo Vika Palmond
of the Panama hat plant. Once it's done, I mean,
you can see the yellow scales, these tetramerius foresighted yellow scales,
which were the female flowers. But then and then that's
on the outside and then as the whole infro testins
kind of unfurls from the top down. It's got this
bright red color to it, certainly attracting birds. Oh yeah,
absolutely looks like it. Two tons of tiny seeds. It's
basically these these orange berries, these four lobed orange berries
containing many seeds which are bird dispersed. God, what a
fucking cool family. I want to grow one of these now,
you know, just in a pot out here in South Texas.
I don't know if it could handle the aridity, and
need to. I got misters, you know, start my own
little botany lab greenhouse. Who's great. Seriously, if you go
to a if you got like a good university greenhouse,
which you probably don't because it's the US, and uh,
these aren't just these just aren't a thing anymore. The
funds are being cut everywhere. They're cutting or barrier and
university greenhouses. But if you are and you have some
of these specimens, reach out to me, right if you
maybe I'll come visit, maybe I'll come lurk, or maybe
you could just preserve an old flower or something, dry
it out and send me some of old inflorescence. I
would love to get some decent dried or barium specimens
of some of the members of cyclanth they say, what
a fucking cool family. Jesus Christ, and I had no idea,
what so species rich. It's amazing you can be into
something for so long and still learn so many new things.
I mean, it's not amazing. That's that's the way the
world works. I guess with a lot of things. But
I had no idea this family even existed until you know,
a year or two ago, and then also knowing it's
in Pandinales and related. The weird ass families like the
velozi ace. God, you want to talk if you're into
like xeric plants, dry land plants, velosi Ace is fucking
wild one of the few families of plants that contain
members that can completely dry out just like ferns and
some mosses, or just like some ferns and mosses and
come back to life a resurrection plant, right, just like
miro Faminis, which is in the gunner Alis another weirdo
from the mibia. But not many, not many angiosperms can
can do that, but the Velosia see a lot of
members of Alosias can I sell a lot of alosias
in Brazil and there was some. Really, what is the
what there's a genus in Africa that can do the
same thing. My friend Kiamara was obsessed with for a while.
Another another quote, resurrection plant Zerophyta, which is in eastern
southern Africa and Madagascar. It goes on, it goes on
up at the Kenya too. I guess you gets some
in Namibia got a very species rich genus zero Phyt
with the Z again, we're talking about the genus Zerophyta,
family velosiace, the family of resurrection plants with incredibly beautiful
flowers too. From the New World Tropics Old World Tropics
order Pandinales, the screw pine order. How many other families
are in Pandinales? What is it? Five cyclant a c
Pandinace steam on ac. Never heard of it, stemo ace triuridece.
Oh my god, there's some fucking micoheterotrophs in that family Triuris.
Jesus Christ, Oh, this order is so fucking cool man.
I had no idea. And then velosi a C so
cyclant a c Pandinace steam on a C, TRIURIDEC and
Veolosi AC pandinace. I saw pandanus in in Uh the
screw pines. I don't know why they call them pines.
They don't look anything like a pine let alone a conifer. Well,
I guess the cone, the infratestens of kind of like
a cone looks like a pineapple. So those in New Caledonia.
So those again, there's like an old world tropic family pen.
You know, there's probably I think does Garfield Park Conservatory
have any pandanus members? Probably? So you can travel the
world learning about botany without ever leaving the shitty US.
I'm sorry, I trying to dog on here too much.
You know, it's shitty everywhere you go. How do you
keep a positive out look? Hey, you know it's shitty
everywhere you go. I'm sorry, but it really is. You know,
you say, it's what we do is humans. We're not
enlightened yet. We'll beat her one day, hopefully, if we
don't go extinct. But but you know, it's a different
flavor of poison everywhere. California, Texas. They both suck in
our own way. Okay, but my point is you can
travel the world. This is the point of conservatories. If
you have one around you. I suggest you go find
it out right, and if they got shipped like Nandina
domestica planted in the glasshouses, I would you should, really,
you know, beg them to get rid of that home
depot garbage and put in some members of pandanal some
of the more weird and rare plants from around the world. Right, Well, network,
we'll get your seeds, you give it to them, you
grow it yourself, whatever the fucking then donate it to
the greenhouse. I was in a greenhouse in Columbus, Ohio,
when Al and I were on tour last year, and
it was God, it was so depressing. It was like
that you could be showing people such interesting things and
they had like it was like it was like some
Hallmark wife got in there and designed the greenhouses, and
it was just it was home depot garbage. It looked
like the inside of a floral boutique from the seventies,
like the oh God, it's just you know, you got
this opportunity to show people the diversity of Earth's plant life,
the diversity of the living world, and you're planting horticultural
atrocities like Nandina domestica and English ivy and a glasshouse.
It's that's that's shit for old ladies, no offense for
you know what I mean. You know what I mean.
There's some dope old ladies out there. There's some you know,
old ladies that will stab you in a head with
something rusty. There's old ladies out there who are still
taking acid, you know what I mean. I'm talking about
the genteels right right, the stiffs, the citizens, right, That's
what I'm talking about. The people that would see a
place like that with that kind of plant selection and
be like, this is lovely, this is beautiful. Whereas I'm
going in there and I'm like, oh my god, this
I just want to puke. I feel this is making
people dumber. This is missed opportunity. I'm not hating on
anybody for it, but Jesus christ Man, come on, there's
so much you can get people excited about the world.
This is like teaching a geology class, and instead of
being excited and explaining concepts in the geologic timescale and
how could be used philosophically to make you feel better
about the terrible things you might see in the world,
or just get excited about having an understanding of things
like plate tectonics and how they explain current distribute shoodents,
distributions of animals and plants. You're up there talking, you know,
like like a seventy year old, you know, suffering from
an autoimmune disorder, who's on coludes, you know, just boring
people to death. It's just the missed opportunity. And that's
what that's my main beef with those kinds of gardens.
And also it just exudes more of the culture of
the lawn. The same mindset that brought us the lawn
is that like, plants are just supposed to be attractive.
There's no ecological context, there's no being tied to a place,
there's no effects of natural selection sculpting the morphology or
the phytochemistry or the pollination systems of a plant. They're
just supposed to be attractive and beautiful and green and hmmm,
a nice backdrop for a wedding makes me want to die.
It makes me want to drink my own piss, and
then I'm gonna drink some draino. So anyway, I know,
we get to talking about this. But anyway, pandinales the
screw pine order, They're fucking incredible. Look up and You
can explore some of this diversity on I Naturalist if
you have an Apple phone. The I natural staff sucks.
Hopefully they improve it. I don't know if they're going to,
but just go to the website instead. The website is
where it's at, and be sure to explore the taxonomy.
There's so much good shit you can explore on our Naturalist.
I'm tired of fucking repeating this. Nobody's listening to me.
All the dumb shit you look at on your phone.
You can explore Earth's diversity and look at some of
these weird fucking forms as well, like the order pandinals
and the families. It's like a choose your inn adventure
books like plant ac pandinac. I'm gonna read about steam
and as the fucking steam and ac. Where does it occur?
Where's the distribution? Then you can click on the map
link look at where it's distributed. Oh, I see it's
Southeast Asia. It's tropical Asia. How about that? Never heard
of this family before? What the fuck is in it?
It's got a link to the Wikipedia page taxonomy. I
could see there's four genera in the families Steam and Ace,
Stemona sticio neuron cromia. What they look like. They look bizarre.
Another cool family of monocons. Right, but let's look at
I want to go back to this. I'll let you
go here. You can get off the phone. You can
get off the phone with me in a minute, because
this is like a phone call. It's like we're having
a phone call. And I'm I'm lecturing you, right, I'm
I'm like the Tony Santaura. I'm like the exasperated one
foot in the grave fifty year old West Side Chicago
geriatric Italian crooning about how nice the Austin neighborhood used
to be. But you don't want to hear him go
on at because it's probably going to turn into a
racist brand. Right, That's what a lot of these fucking
old wops do. They all I don't know how they
did it, right, but they all turn like racist, old
fucking right wingers. It's so depressing, it's so predictable. Don't
Why do you want to be a Why do you
want to be someone's prediction of what you're gonna be?
You know, you see an old I see an old
Italian and I'm like, this is a guy who forgot
his roots. Who you know, wanted to be white so bad,
turned a little racist, started saying stupid shit, it's a
very narrow perspective and the reality of the human world
around him and probably voted for Trump. How depressing. I'm
still gonna be nice to him. I'm sure he's got
other elements of his personality that might be enjoyable, probably
a decent sense of humor. Just don't get him talking
about politics or ideology, because it's gonna be fucking predictable
and you're gonna realize he's a moron on that front,
just on that front, and uh, it's gonna it might
taint your appreciation for other aspects of because here's what
we gotta do. You no lecture people and then you
just hope they change. You start slipping it in You
befriend these people, and you start slipping it in there
this shit, you know, it's how you change people. You know,
lecture that my line, and it's like really fucked up.
What you're doing is actually really fucked up. Okay, So
I'm sorry. Here we go. Family trier a day. See
how many genera e genera is the whole family. Microheterotrophic
is the whole family. Micro they look like it. I
don't see any chlorophyll in any of the photographs I'm
seeing as a species in here, God damn it. And
I only heard about this family when I look at
one of those Field Museum ped of God, it looks
fucking weird. Jesus, it's so cool? Are those seeds in
this tiny tiny thing? Not a drop of green in
any of these photos? One of them looks like arach nitis. God,
tri rid deci is gymnocit, No Gymno. Sciphon's in another
family genus Cahansia, Kupia, Lacendonia, Peltophylum, Syaphila, Sauridium triidopsis. Let's
see where's the distribution at? Yeah, yeah, Southeast Asia, Central
and South America, Madagascar, God damn it. And I have
not seen any of them. And there are plants that
parasitize fungi. What the fuck? Another family i've i've I
had never heard of until I sawt at Field Museum,
PDA Field Museum in Chicago. Maybe I'll go there next
week when I'm in town for the Wild Things conference,
which is going on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. And yeah,
I don't know. It should be that should be a
fun experience. I wonder if they'll give us a table
for me and now to sell some merch. You know,
there's a lot of there's a lot of easy you know,
it could be academic stuff over there. It could be
people giving pd you know, PDF presentations, PowerPoint presentations, Google
sights presentations about all kinds of important stuff that they're
noticing in the world. And then they're gonna have me
running my mouth and talking, so uh, you know, let's
hope they don't regret it. I think, I think though,
I think it'll be nice. Okay, I'll end it there.
Please check out the order pandinales. I hope, I hope
you enjoyed that last forty minutes of ranting about the
family cyclan thesy and they're bizarre beetle pollination syndrome, which
is are there again? Do we know is the family
cyclant thes exclusively beatle pollinated or what? Because that's pretty uh,
it's pretty interesting if so, is it exclusively can't throw
filets anyway? Palms cyclantesy some rants about you know, horrible
songs incurred as some sort of divine retribution on the
United States, as this episode covered everything. I'm gonna have
Thorn Scrub Sanctuary shirts for sale forty bucks shipping included.
It's actually not that bad, right considering it's like a
five color screenprint next month. You can email me if
you want them. All donations will go strictly to Thorn Scrub.
Everything everything we make goes towards Thorn Scrub, towards getting
us a well, towards setting up fencing, shooting pigs, et cetera.
And don't hesitate to look at those bugs. All right,
I know it's still frigid up there for some of
you in the Nordon latitudes. I get a prey present
to a bunch of Canadians last night. Three hundred people
showed up for an online presentation and we had a
great time. It was really fun. You know Canadians are
you know, there's a very very pleasant group. The question
and answer session was fun, it was. It was a nice,
nice time. I'm giving a couple other presentations. I'm gonna
be in the Atlanta area, uh one of the last
weeks of April. Maybe we'll do a plant walk, maybe
we'll do some stuff out there. I don't know what's
going on, you know, we're gonna be in northern Georgia,
And what else am I doing? I forget what I
signed up for. I forget people where I asked me
to come to these spots. I forget what I'm doing.
Even I'm doing something in Austin in June. I forget.
I forget. I forget a lot of this stuff. I
gotta start planning the trips of where I'm going to
be going this summer, after I can get this fucking
book done too, which I god damn it, I can't
wait to not have to look at uh Google docs
anymore for hours on on every day. Okay, that's all.
I got to have a grocery day, And please won't
you go fund yourself by