Speaker 1: May I have your attention. Please, the situation is dire.
At this time services have been temporarily disabled due to
cost cutting measures. Please remain calm and have a safe day.
Thank you.
Speaker 2: I can don't.
Speaker 1: We landed at the UH landed at the Houston Airport
yesterday at like six in the morning. It was like five.
It was like five in the morning, and the whole
airport was just waking up. And I made it through
customs with all my shit, you know, I had to
I had to get another I had to pay for
an extra bag because I had a bunch of books.
I bought a bunch of books. You know, I collect
these book you have like a little personal library. You
never know when you're gonna need it, especially for a
botanical literature. You know, you might end up there's gonna
be reference texts you might use, you know, when you
go back to that place. Because I fully intend on
doing this for the rest of my life, you know,
until I run out of steam or die or uh,
you know, get some sort of terminal illness, which hopefully
doesn't happen. Knock on, knock on. Fiberboard. I'm cheap Chinese
made fiberboard. Uh and uh maybe with a little bit
of melomanie. And and so I had a who I
was carrying a bunch of bunch of shit, like my
broken luggage too, and uh and so they just it
just kind of spits you out into the terminal e
of the Houston Airport. I had to make a necting flat.
I had like six hours to catch And I've quit coffee,
which is nice, at least for the time being. I
just you know, Yerba mates all they have they don't
do coffee. America is the only place that really does coffee.
Like it's coffee per se, you know. The rest it's
it's all like espressos. I don't like it. And I
was knew I had to quit coffee anyways because I
do it too much. I just overdo it. So I was,
I was, I've been using a mate, you know, with
a little straw, just make a glass jar. I don't
use that stupid gord thing. That's not enough. And and
uh and I make it the night before and cool it.
So that's been nice. I been like, I cool the
mate and then drink it the next day a room
temperature or chillier with the straw. And so I got
spit out into terminally of the Houston Airport and the
whole you know, there wasn't very packed yet, the whole
airport was just waking up. And there's you know, there's
been all this shit in the news. There's been this
ship in the news about you know, Trump's first couple
of days, and it just it just looks bad. You know,
what's happened and Reagan two point zero and it's going
to be a complete assault on everything that I care about,
you know, in terms of you know, wild lands, rampant development, deregulation,
et cetera. And it was just, you know, this like
this feeling of darkness. And then even more funny, the
alarm is going off in the Houston Airport the whole time.
This is for like twenty minutes, and this this wing
of the Houston Airport and surely you know, it was
contracted out to some shitbag company that I don't know.
They had an ai female voice, you know, coming out
over the loud speaker. You could barely hear it. The
alarm was loud, but you could barely hear the voice,
and it just said thank you for visiting Houston Airport.
A situation has been triggered, investigate. We are investigating this
situation like some shit like that, like totally just like
don't panic. We're investigating the situation. Everyone's just ignoring it.
And the thing goes on for like twenty or thirty minutes,
and it's you know, the airport feels like a fucking mall.
It feels like a shopping mall. And I'm just hit
with the stark reminder that I'm in one of the
unhappiest First world countries in the world. Like the degree
of human misery that's evident here and just anxiety and
hatred and divisiveness is so it's so pungent. And then
I look and there's you know, it's just people shuffling
about the walking dead, very unhappy people obviously unhappier, stressed,
you know, paying twenty dollars for a cinnabon, trying to
satiate the spiritual pain and alienation while the fire alarm
is intermittently blaring in this AI voice you know, comes
with a loud speaker, you know, to offer this half
assed reassurance and that the situation is being investigated. And
the whole time, I'm thinking, like Jesus Christ, you were
just hanging out with Gad like two days prior. You know,
it's it's as far as you can conceive him or
her or they done, whatever the fuck it is it.
You know, I like looking at these beautiful mountains, these
steep slopes of volcanic rock and uh, maybe some intrusive
ignius as well, but the Andes, of course are all
volcanic and uh, you know, these mountains that are just
making their way to the sea, slowly coming down, you know,
against all all the best efforts to maintain the roadway.
But you'd you'd be driving down the road and you'd
see a spot where like the guardrail had been completely
taken out by a giant boulder. There's rock falls everywhere.
They had that large cable netting that just looked like
a sagging bag, you know, like because it was so
filled with rock, talus and rubble. You know, the pielines
that hold it had been drilled into the side of
a mountain, but this sagging bag was just holding this
this It almost looked like liquid, you know, because there
was so much talus and some of the incredible plants there,
like these lineages, you know, and you go high into
the andes you can reach places where there's none of
the pine plantations or the eucalyptus plantations that you know,
horrifically dot so much of Chile south of Santiago. And
I was like, this is so you know, it's just
so fucking mind blowing, like to be hanging out with
like these giant alersee trees, the few that are left
in the Patagonian temperate rainforest, and now you're in the
Houston Airport in this monstrosity, this fucking dystopia. Uh, the
whole situation felt so unreal. I couldn't I couldn't help
but laugh at it. You got, you're gonna have to
have a sense of humor going through all this shit,
you know, less pearl clutching and more sense of dark comedy.
And then I started listening. I put on Dead Kennedy's
The Frankin Christ album because it just was so fitting.
There was a forgueret which song it was, but it's
the one about but you know, Elvis becoming worshiped as
a god and people drinking out of these you know,
plastic Elvis toats. It's like this satirical song about this
dark and dystopic nature of like first world consumerism. It
was fucking hilarious. It was just and it made it that,
you know, hearing that that kind of that's such a
great album to Franken Christ the one with the guys
with the fees's driving around in the little mini cards
with the Feza I think the Shriners on the cover,
the one that got them in trouble with Tipper Gore
for the obscene hr Giger painting that came with the record.
In the eighties, it was like a big deal, like
jellab Afron, you know, and Iced Tea were both remember
they had him on Oprah. You could I think you
can watch the video, like a grainy video of it
on YouTube. But that's what got them in trouble with
the Parents Music Resource Center, the PMRC, the Tipper Gore
and all the pro censorship of the late eighties early nineties.
But the whole fucking album is just the gem. It's amazing.
It was. It's too smart for being punk rock, which
is what it is. I wouldn't even call it that.
It's like it's like theatrical. It's like a dystopic musical
theater almost. The lyrics are just yeah, they're their way,
they'd fly over the heads of of most you know,
people that might have gotten into the dead Kennedy's in
the early part of their musical career anyway. So yeah,
So I just got back from Chile and I've got
a whole bunch of shit to go through, videos to edit,
rbarium specimens to catalog and of course, remember anytime you're traveling,
as long as the herbarium collections are not of endangered
plants and they're adequately dried and pressed and you can't
be they can't be propagated. They're completely legal, uh, to
take with you as long as you declare them. But
you've got to get You've got to declare them, and
then you've got to be ready to explain to a
customs official, many of whom no offense to them are
not that smart and if probably no idea what inarbarium
is or why you would be pressing these things any
you've got to be able to explain to them where
they're going and they're going to be cataloged and you
know their scientific specimens. They can't be propagated, et cetera.
So I've got a bunch of stuff to do, and
then I'm head of the Ecuador in a week getting
flown down there for some sort of it's a tour.
It's a tour that that Alan Rockefeller and Mandy Cork
put together for Mycena, which is like their tour thing.
I don't know. They want to drag me along, so
I don't know, you know, I don't know what. I
don't know what's about. I just said, yes, it's it's
for work. I'm going down there. But there's so much
to talk about with with Chile and with basically you know.
We landed in Santiago and then drove straight straight towards
Valdivia and Porto mont which are in the southern half
of the country, very high rainfall, upwards of six to
nine feet of rain a year, if not more. Some
areas of that Patagonian temperate rainforest get upwards of twenty
feet of rainy year. These are very wet areas, and
we were going down there because it was We went
down there first just blazing by all this other shit
because it was as hard as it was, because it
was supposed to start raining there in a few days.
This is like peak Chilean summer. It's mid January. Start
ran in there in a few days, and so we
figured we'd catched a few days of sunlight and then
head back north and that that actually, that was a
very good idea. I'm glad we did that. So we
just just fucking blaze as far south as possible because
closer to Santiago. Santiago, of course, being the first major city,
the first major area to be settled in Chile, got
destroyed very quickly. All the beautiful Chilean wine palms, Jubeat chilensis.
That's what the Nacho was telling me that there was
he I guess he found out old map from sixteen
hundred when the Spanish first got there, and the map
shows this drawing. You know, it's like a look like
a like the it looks like the first Zelda game
from the eighties. It's drawn like that, you know, like
the map from the fucking uh yeah, everybody played Nintendo,
didn't you? Maybe not? Now? Would you? Would your parents
give you a slinky fucking glue to sniff? I don't
know anyway, So it was a drawing that looked like
that and showed these huge Jubeia chilensis Chilean wine palms there,
which is our fucking enigmatic, uh, emblematic excuse me, emblematic
trees of the region. They're gorgeous. They got a couple
of uc b that's the first time I saw it.
You see Botanic Gardens in Berkeley. They have a great
Chilean collection. Actually a bunch of these plants. You'll you know,
you'll know already if you go there. Kuilaja Sapan area,
which is like the equivalent of the coast live oak.
It's in the order for Bailey's. It's in the family
Kila Hasey produces these beautiful fruits, these five carpoled fruits
that have a bunch of tiny winged seeds inside. But uh,
but you know, Santiago area was destroyed first to build
a city. I guess there's a burgeoning native plant awareness there,
which is cool. Met up with my friend Michel, who
does Outlast Nativa, which is a cool He's got an
Instagram page. He makes these guides for native plants there.
And the last day I went to UH on Michel's suggestion,
actually went to UH Libro Verde, which is a cool
little bookstore, and and then there was another bookstore too.
There's actually a bunch of shit in Libro Verde had
a whole bunch of fucking books, great books, like more
so than I saw in Brazil. Like Brazil, it seems,
and I talked about this in the podcast with Nico
very Brazil seems behind Chile in terms of the amount
of popular consciousness that makes room for plants. You know
that for native plants, you know, it's still stuck on it,
like horticultural atrocity ship. The way that that all First
World countries are kind of viewing plants for the first
for the last you know, one hundred years, is like
this this archaic uh, you know, ideas of beauty or crops,
you know, anthropocentric uses that are totally disconnected from ecology
evolution in place, right, like the fucking the European garden style.
Everywhere I go in the world that ship, the same
shit gets planted, the same garbage. But but Chile there's
like a growing awareness for these native plants. And you
see it in other places too, like New Zealand, where
they've got you know, native plants of a place in
the popular culture. There's art about them, and they're on
the currency maybe whatever the fuck. So uh, you know,
you want to spend too much time in Santiago. The
thing that was nice about Santiago and we did. I
filmed some you know in vas. I think one of
my little you know, urban botany exploration things like I
did on the train tracks in Oakland. The fucking La
River wherever I did that. The last last day, me,
Matt and Nacho went down into the river. You can
climb down into the Mapocho River, and which is like
the equivalent to the La River, but there's more water
in it, and it's fed by glaciers and ice and
snowmelt and a much higher mountain range that is right
outside the city, you know, the Andes. And that river
was flowing and it was filled with pink silt and
pink sediment. I mean, it just looked like it was
filled with volcanic sentment. Then looked like it was filled
with human shit, which was nice, but it was certainly
cluttered with It's a concreted up, you know river that
runs through downtown Santiago, and there's graffiti all over the walls,
and it's really nice. It's like, if you're a teenager,
that's a great spot to hang out. Also if you're
a bummy, that's a great spot to hang out. Some
guy came out. He was living in a little shack
and when we were climbing out of it, via this
this sketchy pair of pants that's some like pair of
jeans that someone had made a makeshift rope out of
and dangled from the from the metal railing. As we
were claiming out, this bummy came out and he was
like holding a shank like a screwdriver. But he wasn't
threatening at all. I think he just you know, know,
he was just protecting himself. But certainly, you know, it
was it gets a little weird there. You know, there's
a fuck fucking decent amount of homelessness there too, nothing
like the United States, but there's certainly, you know, people
sleeping on the streets, human shit, et cetera. Just the
I mean, it's the kind of you know, inequality and uh,
you know, people falling through the nets you'd expect in
any first world capitalist city. But the thing that was
nice about Chile, all of Chile, was there were no billboards.
Supposedly they're legal, but I didn't see any. And you
don't realize how nice it feels, you know, until you
haven't seen you know, shit eating grins of personal injury
attorneys or stock photos of you know, the stock photos
of smiling assholes that's used in selling consumer products, and
all the garbage, the fucking bright colors, the the plastic signs,
like there was none of that. There's no billboards in Chile.
The billboards add such a dystopic effect. I don't know
what it is.
Speaker 2: Man.
Speaker 1: It's like you go to Monterrey, Mexico, the billboards are
fucking terrible, like horrible, and it's like all these like glitzy, pasty,
too much makeup, smiling shit eating faces. It just feels
like every nineteen eighties dystopic sci fi movie, like Total
Recall and fucking Blade Runner, all this bleak shit. It's like, yeah,
so you feel like those those kinds of movies. Whoever
did the set design for those you got to give
a shadow because they really nailed it. What it's gonna
be like, you know, the most bottom of the brain stem,
primal ape hoarding, greedy, materialistic impulses will be first in
front and center, first and foremost in the coming dystopia,
especially now that we're going through with Reagan two point zero.
It's you know, it's it's so fucking funny how this happened.
I mean, it's extremely dark too, but it's uh again.
I can't help but partially blame the American left, the
identitarians for what happened, you know, the academic left, the not,
the not, the the work actual working class left, if
there even is one anymore. It feels like the working
class has mostly been captured by the right. This all
I say about political shit. I'm not gonna I'm not
gonna delve deeper. I know it's fucking irrelevant, and I
know there's not many, but there might be a handful
of conservative listeners. I don't want to piss them off
too much, because at the end of the day, I
don't give a fuck with someone believes or what they're
what they're you know, they're with their m always as
long as I don't have to hear about it, and
we can agree to disagree and just focus on plants
and science and fun shit whatever. But I will say this,
having lived in an area in the Bay Area where
the quote academic left, you know again, as opposed to
the working classlet was largely in charge. I saw how divisive, mean,
and frankly mentally fucking ill it can be when they're
in charge. They literally drove people to the other side
through constant lecturing, shaming, shit talking, you know, trying to
reinforce ideologies through fear of ostracization and social shaming. Which
is what that which is what they did, not all
of them. There's a very general statement, so take it
with a grain of salt. But it's not an effective tool.
Shaming people into agreeing with you is not an effective tool,
and just being a dick and professionally online is not
an effective tool. It's sloppy, it's lazy, and it's kind
of productive, and not to mention, you know, these bozos
are all constantly fighting with each other anyway, and trying
to cancel each other and get other people to dislike
each other. You know, half of them spend more time
attacking each other than they do the other side. I mean,
this is what the left became the last ten or
fifteen years. And so what happens, what is this? Trump
is a fucking natural result of this, and they're still
not going to get it. I don't have any faith
that people are gonna come around and chill out and
not get it. But like the amount of left became
the party of the fucking school marm, of the tight
ass of the people that tone police and condescent to people.
You know, the left used to be the party of
people that didn't give a fuck and were rowdy and
had fun and whatever, and that they they're not anymore.
They're like the stiff, poudy faced, fucking mean generally from
a wealthy background. Generally not always, but generally it's you
gotta have that tone of elitism there to pull this shit,
you know, and just just really fucking you know, god like,
just trying too hard, you know, and they're clueless, they
don't get it. But now they're not, you know, now
that the fucking right has been able to brand itself
is the party of rebellion. I don't know how. I
don't know how, you know, because everything they do is
rooted in nineteen fifties, you know, archaic cultural bullshit, and
their sense of humor is so fucking whack. But somehow
they've been able to do it. They did, and the
left enabled it, the modern American left. The left isn't
like this in other places, and so this is what
we get. And the modern American left isn't gonna get
it either, they're not. They're not gonna change, they're not
gonna come around. You know. I remember listening to people
on some program. I think it was Pod Save America.
I tuned in for a minute and they were like,
we need a leftist Joe Rogan. I like, no, you're
not gonna get one, because whoever, no one, no one
could be like that. You know, you would never have
a leftist Trump and that because they'd be afraid of
getting canceled. That's what you need. You're right, you do,
but you're never gonna get one because they afraid of
getting canceled or saying the wrong thing, or being criticized
to death or put through the fucking filter or nitpicked.
Because that's what the modern American left us. Where did
it come from? I don't know, but it seems to
be last fifteen years. This is I don't know, is
it the college kids take it over? College kids kind
of live in a bubble. No offense to them, they
live in a bubble. You get this way when you
live in a bubble, When you live in an echo chamber,
when you don't have to go wait for the fucking
Western Avenue bus at two am, have a bad trip,
eat some shit, you know, get punched in the face
for mouth and off to somebody like happened to me
when I was a kid, you know what I mean.
I just I'm not going to get into it much longer.
But I just I'm just sitting back and watching. It's
like that George Carlin shit when he's like that that
statement he said during his last few years before he croaked.
He's like, I'm just here for the show now, you know,
and I have no faith. It's like, anyway, all right, well,
we're not going to get into it too much. I'll
let that go. But uh, it is gonna be really bad.
You know, it's gonna get bad. So you're gonna have
to just find a way to cope, find a sense
of humor, and stay offline unless you're researching stuff or
trying to learn something, you know, go outside and focus
on the fucking plants and the life forms. That's the
antidote to all this shit, all this dark shit and
the divisiveness and the infighting. But it was very nice
to be out of it for two weeks. I will
say that perfect welcome home. I wouldn't have had it
any other way. Perfect welcome home. Though, coming home to
the Euston Airport it was like a work of art.
The fucking alarm in the background, the twenty dollars centabuns,
the garbage food, the diabetic, angry, populous, pre diabetic. I
don't want to assume anybody's medical status. They certainly looked
unhealthy in every way physically, mentally, spiritually, and emotionally. That's
us though, that's America right now. It doesn't matter what
the political party you vote for or don't vote for,
or whether you think you're an intersectional radical, or whether
you think you're fucking you know, standing up against the
woke mob. What you're all it's all part of the
same disease. You're all a victim of the algorithm, and
you're all very very unwell. So uh but I wasn't it.
I didn't have to look at billboards for two weeks.
It was fucking great that. Really the billboards really are
like the turn on top of the ship heap is
figuratively speaking, and not having to see them was so lovely. Okay,
what was my favorite habitat down there that I got
to see? I would have to see. I would have
to say it was not well Buddha. How do you
pronounce this? Not well, Buddha, Not well, Buddha, parka Nacio
Now now well, Buddha. The Coastal Era carrier force in Chile,
fucking incredible. That was my favorite spot by far. You
had to drive through mile after mile, kaliometer after kilometer
of pine and eucalyptus plantation to get there, all garbage
that was incentivized by, of course, a nineteen seventy four
law put in place by hashtag that asshole Pinochet, that
pig dictator Pinochet, who killed thousands, who the United States
helped install after they'd been trying to get rid of
the democratically elected socialist Allende through nineteen seventy to nineteen
seventy three. I think was finally when the coup happened.
So there's some very interesting history podcasts about that. Pinochet
was in power till nineteen ninety, never spent the day
in jail. Hopefully someone goes and takes a shit on
his grave, certainly worth doing. If you could send me
a photo of a turd on a grave, preferably not
up close. I don't want to see your shit, But
if you could send me a picture of a turd
from far back on his grave, or just dogshit. I'll
send you some stickers. But anyway, now a Buddha is
this incredible. I don't know how big it is. It
didn't seem that big. It's oh, it's here right here.
It's consisted of six thousand. It consists of six eight
hundred and thirty two hect there. It's about twenty four
square miles. Yeah, that's not big, and it's surrounded by
pine plantation. But it was probably one of the most
incredible places I'd been to, and if only for it
was a really it wasn't a thick forest that was
relatively open the way that the light came through. It
was a beautiful day when we were there. It wasn't raining.
We'd been at the montane population of Ericaria aericana and
beautiful Jurassic trees the day before, and it was it
was missing and fogging, and it's all very volcanic there.
I think the substrate here at now Buddha was looked
to be metamorphic. There's like a big rocky outcrop looks
like a not a glade. It looks like more of
like a granitic knob, metamorphous granitic knob you can walk
out on and overlooks these forests that were surely much
much more extensive prior to being destroyed for pine plantations.
But the fucking they were just incredible. And some of
the I saw in eric Carria that was eight feet
wide at the base and eric Carria Erkana. Some of
these things can live for fifteen hundred years. If you're
not familiar with the tree, I suggest you look them
up A R A U C A R I A.
They look like mushrooms. When they're fully grown, they have
you know, they when they're fully grown, they lack branching
on the bottom ninety percent of the tree and just
to retain the branches up top. Eric Carria, but williid
does the same thing, which is in Queensland, Australia, eric
Carria and Gustafolia, which seems to take better to cultivation,
and it is from Brazil. Eric Carria and Gustafoia does
the same thing that mushroom look, and they're they're old.
These trees are revered too. You go through a couple
of Mapouche towns, which is the one of the indigenous
tribes down there. You go through these Mapouche. Try these
Mapouche towns and the tree is everywhere. There's like, you know,
sculptures of it, and the little all the little tourist
shops and shit have Eric Carrier aer Kanda, you know,
emblems and logos and ship really cool. I guess there's
a flora of of the region two that one of
the universities put out. I would have loved to buy it.
I wasn't able to find it. Melipuco is near Congio
National Park, which is in the UH Parknasil Congile, which
is like the er Carria population in the mountains, which
I guess was glaciated, and the Eric Carry is there,
you know, recolonized that after the glaciers took off. But
to the west across the valley. You know, think of
Chile like California. It's this long strip. You got the
coastal mountains, you got a valley in between, and then
you got the and these or of Sierra Nevada equivalent
California to the east, but you get this valley in between.
So now now Albuddha is UH is the coastal the
more like the coastal mountains still mountains, elevation there was
like forty five hundred maybe five thousand feet in places,
But that's the coastal range. Now a Buddha and then
Kungio is further inland, and that's basically on volcanics, like
very new volcanics, like nine thousand year old volcanics. You know,
you see these these expanses of pummice. There was an
area where it was just all fucking pummice beneath them,
beneath these these trees and some of this, you know,
these volcanics hadn't even been colonized by pioneer species of
plants yet. There was a species of bacars that was everywhere.
But and that was in Geo, in the volcanic area
that was supposedly glaciated, and then where the erak carrias
had to recolonize after the glaciers habsided. But now well Buddha,
I mean, both places are amazing, But now well Buddha
was this open canopy. There was na tho vegas there,
There was a budleya globosa, this shrub BUDLEYA tons of
mutissias there. It sounded like there were probably cicadas up
in the trees. It was the na Tho vegas are everywhere,
so you know, the southern beaches order Fagali, the same
order as oaks, but they're in Nato Fagaesi. This is
another Gondwanan plant family. This was a theme that we
kept seeing everywhere was Gondwana relics of Gondwana. You know,
plants genera, lineages, genera and families that you get in
the southern hemisphere, in both southern Australasia, Australia and New Zealand,
maybe New Caledonia, as well as in South America, far
South America. And surely they all these things were growing
on Antarctica before it started to freeze over thirty million
years ago. And I think when did Antarctica fully freeze over,
I think last five million years. I think there's not
though vegas, pollen, microfossils up until two or three million
years ago when it finally fucking iced over. But I'm
sure it was a shitty and cold place to live
for you know, ten to twenty million years before that.
But these forests that at Nawa Buddha were just fucking incredible.
I can't believe there's only twenty four square miles preserved.
The rest is all just destroyed for shitty pine plantation,
shitty radiot of pine and eucalyptus Eucalyptus globulus, which I mean,
what do you do with that that shitty would eucalyptus
is pine. You can build some track housing out of it.
Maybe it'll last a few decades, forty fifty years at most.
You treat it with some some anti fungal, you pressure
treat it, maybe it'll last a little bit longer. I
don't know. But you generally built shitty lumber. There's all
the shitty home depot lumber, you know, like that. I
wonder how much of the lumber that's building America's tract
housing and cul de sac communities, you know, for for
our unhappy populace. I wonder how much comes from Chile.
But there's so much pine plantations down there. I mean,
there's it's a surplus. There's far more than the market
would demand. But uh, anyway, but this now, well, Buddha
was just fucking something else.
Speaker 2: Man.
Speaker 1: It was incredible. It was such a rich forest, it
was it felt so good to be there. The whole
thing was alive. I'm sure on mushrooms it would feel incredible.
There's beard liking draped on everything. The beard like in
itself made the whole experience feel psychedelic. It wasn't a
very dark forest. It was very open and lit up.
Just the fucking gorgeous living piece of the fabric of
the world. You know, it should be a fucking World
Heritage Site if it's not already. And what was what
I thought was really cool was that the the Eric
Carrier there are so fucking big. I mean, they're just
like these totem poles. The one that we saw it
was a male because they're they're dioecious.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: The one that the largest one we saw, they got
it staked out. You know, there's like a it's a
they call it the Millinario. They got it staked out.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: And it's just like this eight foot wide totem pole
looks like all elephant foot like at the at the
base like the you know, like that wrinkly sagging bark
really fun to drop. But and it's got really thick
bark too. All these trees, these old bastards have really
thick bark, like five inches like five inch plates. They
look like tortoise shell plastrons. They're just these fucking huge plates,
which I guess is for fire resistance. I thought it
was just for cold because it's hard to imagine those
forest burning, but apparently they do, or they did. But
it's like this. You're at the base of this thing.
It's eight feet across, it's got to be one thousand,
maybe fifteen hundred years old. And then it's just a
otem pole that just shoots up for one hundred and
twenty feet one hundred and fifty feet maybe was it
fifty meters forty meters and then all the leaves are
at the top. Those those you know, whorls of very
thick plastic like sharp green leaves are just world that
are just world around. The stem are all the way
at the top, you know, and the branches of course
are produced in these worlds too. We could see old
dead logs at the basis, some of these that had
the world branching. All the bark was gone. But uh,
just incredible fucking place. Man. Like, you're in a place
like that and you just want to take it all in,
you know. That's what I try to do. I want
to take it all in. So I have an anecdote
when I'm in a place like the fucking Houston Airport.
Listening to the fire alarm at five in the morning,
I'm watching people stuff their faces with twenty dollars cinnabuns
to ease the pain of existence in that kind of world,
you know, like, you know, you're in places like that
so you can hold onto it, you know, and remember
that those places exist. Well, you're also you know, trying
to deal with the death cult. But but the the understory,
the not the Vegas were all on the understory, Like
the southern beaches were all on the understory, and it
was like that in Congillo too. But we did see
a massive uh pretty sure it was not the vegas DMBII.
There was not the vegas. There's like four not the
vegas species. In every somewhat intact force that you go
to in Chile, they'll be maybe a pina. Maybe one
of the coolest ones was Pumilio, which doesn't get that tall,
but it's really beautiful leaves. Uh yeah, a glocca was
another one, Obliqua. It was not the Vegas. Obliqua was
the one that was in the eric eric Carria forest.
But they're forming this understory. They're all cover everything's covered
in this usnea beard like in the bark of the
eric Carria is everything. The fucking birds sound incredible. It's
just the whole like, the whole experience auditory, The whole
sensory experience of that forest was incredible. Azara Microphila was
another one. That's a Ozara a z a r A
is a genus in the willow family Sla case. I'm
sure the soil community was fucking incredible. There was duff
all over the ground. Maytinis boaria was there as well.
Meetinis boaria. I think that's the one. Matinis is in
the genus celestrace. We get one in South Texas as well.
It's a dwarf one that likes brackish near shore environments.
But I think Matinus booria is supposedly an antidote against
Lithrea costico, which is a poison oak relative. But instead
of producing you rush you all, it produces a compound
called litriol. I think uh or lithral lithriol. I forget
I read a paper on it. But Maytinis is supposedly
an antidote for the dermatitis caused by lithrea, and lithrea
is like poison oak. It doesn't affect that everybody, but
it affects a lot of people. But Lithrea was actually
one of the cool volunteer pioneer species that we see
saw growing along the the river, the Mapocho River, you know,
which is in downtown Santiago. Like all of Santiago, is
mostly invasives, but there's a couple like Vicelia constricta and
that Metinis that are able to eke it out, you know,
to just volunteer, but it's largely invasives. I saw a
cool fidal lacca I think it was fidal Laca dioeca,
which is a tree sized pokeweed. It's fucking crazy. It's
from Argentina. It's not native to Chile, but they planted
there is a street tree that was pretty cool to see.
I mean, it's got poke weed fruits and flowers. It
looks like a poke weed, except it's a fucking tree.
Looks like a strangler fig to it. It's one of
those they apparently grow very fast and they get those
very ornate bases like the abase of one looked like
an octopus. It just had these crazy flared buttress roots
that spread out all over there. The shitty piss dampled concrete.
But then then the next day, this is the next
day after the river, I'm taking a break here. I'm
talking about the coastal erik Carria Forest. I shouldn't say
coastal because it's a coastal mountain range. The eric Carrier
Forest is not coastal, But that was by far my
favorite place to be there was There was does Mari
metabolis in that forest as well, which is a cool
tropical missiletoe with those hummingbird pollinated flowers related to tristrix.
But anyway, the last day we were there, and before
we flew out we had to catch a flight later
that night, we drove out to the hills outside the
mountains outside of Santiago. Just keep going east from Santiago
onto the hills, drive past a bunch of garbage, bunch
of you know, through a rich neighborhood. I fucking this,
Like rich lady was coming down and her Mercedes or
whatever almost hit me. We were parked on the side
of the road taking photos of Trichosiris chiloensis and spinal leva,
which is a mutisseoid composite that forms this kind of
small tree, beautiful white undersize of the leaves looks fucking wild,
and this rich lady rolls up on me and just
like really aggressively, and I'm like, I didn't have time
to get out of the road. You know, I could
tell she was kind of irritated. I was in her
way and we were parked on this narrow road on
this sketchy mountain side, and so we're like face to face,
like she rolls up and I'm like, could you just wait?
And the lady spoke full English too, and she's you know,
of course got the full fucking like passive aggressive. I
just date a turd face and I wasn't being aggressed.
She spoke like perfect English, but with like a fucking
europe like British or Dutch accident. Oh god, she was awful.
I was just like, I wasn't being a grid I
was like, lady, you like rolled up on me. I
didn't even have time. I was going to move the
car for you so you could get by. You didn't
have to almost hit the guardrail or whatever. It was funny,
and she just kind of put the fucking look on
her face. I was like, oh my god, you are
like you belong in like a wealthy neighborhood in southern
California saying the exact same thing to me, you know,
something belittling and mean. But the last day we went
there and that was cool. The elevations, like I think
it was like five thousand feet. The anties are so
steep because they're relatively new. It's like last twenty million years.
They've been uplifted due to the Nasca plate diving beneath
the continent, you know, ramming into the South American continent,
also subducting beneath. The same thing that causes the volcanism
also causes the uplift from that continental collision or excuse me,
oceanic plate, the continental collision boundary kind of, I don't
plate collision battery. But they're very steep. They're constantly fucking
falling apart. I mean, it's like an incredibly steep mountain range.
Nothing analogous in California except maybe Cone Peaked down in
Big Sir, maybe some places in the Sierra Nevada where
it's exceptionally steep. But the plant community there was cool.
Was Vicelia Constricta. It was We saw gog Nadia folio Losa,
another cool composite from gognatioidi another you know, distinct flower
morphology florith morphology to the flowers that are in the
capitulum the flower head of this member of Astaasi, and
a lot of them are I think almost all of
them are woody shrubs gock natti oidi. There was Trichocyrius chiluansis,
which now that cactus nerds insisted should be called luco
steel I haven't read the paper yet with tristrex all
over it. There was poorly area there, which is basically
a Chilean guyacon. It's in guyacum angusta folium, which we
get here in Texas, which is Zygopalasi to Kreas family.
There was uh uh, I think there was Kaleia up there, Dyscaria,
you know, a handful of Lithrea costica, a handful of basically,
oh yeah, Kaganekia, which is another All these sclerophyll you
know generally waxy leaves or mildly hersuit leaves of a
Mediterranean climate. You know evergreen, you know, the kid climbed
California has many analogs to this, like foothills of of Montane, California.
Really cool to see. There was a there's a part
in a Jessica Gorovitch's Ecologia Plants book. I think it
was that one. Maybe it's Raven's textbook Biology of Plants,
where there's you know, they've got all the Mediterranean regions
and analogs, like the different species but fulfilling the same
ecological role and also displaying the same morphollow g two,
you know, and as an adaptation to this to the
Mediterranean the constraints the ecological and climatic constraints of a
Mediterranean climate. But yeah, also in that habitat was a
Desmia confusa. Edesmia is in Fabaesi. It's another big genus,
lots of really sticky glandular members, a lot of sticky
glandular species in that genus. And uh, but Confusa is
basically a shrub with photosynthetic stems. They've all got the
typical you know, it's it's subfamily Phaboid, so it's got
you know, pea flowers, but they've got all the Adesmias
have are generally pretty sticky, and they've got these fruits
that it looks like a bean but it breaks up
into segments, really beautiful fruits, really cool and in this
aidesmia like so many they were incredibly hairy, like it
looked like it had like the fucking fruit the bean
fruit was wearing a tupe, like ridiculously hairy. That was
up there Malae Serbia, which is a genus in passive
Flora ace, which is pretty diverse in South America. Beautiful flowers. Again,
very glandular, extremely glandular. Everything down there is it got sticky.
You're gonna touch it, you're gonna get You're gonna touch
the leaves, you're gonna get oily hands. It was I
think it was Mala Serbia linear a folia. I was
really stoked to see the spinal leva though, because that
is a cool it's a fucking cool genus of asta Ace.
And again it's like those hypo luca. It's not the
species name. What was the species name on a spinal leva?
Let me look it up really quick. I forget, let's
see this really quick. Cold on God, there's so much
great shit. Uh, spinal Leva elicifolia. Yeah. Oh, there was
ariocice up there as well. I think it was grandiflora
or Curvis spina. I don't know, but that's just the
little little you know, globe shaped cact This gets the
size of a football at most, probably less than that.
But yeah, the spinal eva was wow because that was
the one. I hadn't seen it. It's I got these
tiny flowers with what is it? Is that mutissia I
think it's a mutissioidy as well. But it's got those
recurved lobes to the Yeah, it's Tribna Sauvier. It's a
really cool one. It's got those recurved lobes to the floor.
It's but man, yeah, like right right there. It was
cool because you could see what probably grew a lot
of that ship probably grew in Santiago before it got destroyed.
And understanding what occurs in these places is key to
understanding what uh you know, before before it was developed
and you know, the human modern human civilization was barfed
all over it. Understanding what was in these places is
essential to understanding how to restore parts of it, or
especially from any kind of native plant movements perspective. With
the plant there instead, there was puya everywhere too, Puya alpestras,
which if you don't know about puya ALPESTRASI man I
gotta you know you gotta really come correct on that,
because that's a fucking incredible plant, massive spiny bremeliad that
forms these huge colonies and gets incredible flowers, you know,
bright sapphire metallic flowers, and can form colonies like eight
to ten feet across, you know, three to four meters across.
All right, So we're gonna we're gonna move back to Uh.
There was a brief stop with Santiago. East of the mountains.
East of Santiago is the habitat there. We're gonna take
a brief ad break and then come back to uh.
We're gonna return to the lower the higher latitudes, excuse me,
down by the eric Carria forest. You go, okay, So
we're back. The latitude at Santiago is thirty three degrees
south and the latitude of the eric Carria forest is
a thirty seven degrees south roughly. And another plant that
I saw down there in America Caria forces and in
Nawa Buddha was was Loasa. I think it was a
lot loasa, a canthifolia, which Jesus Christ the Loasa namesake
of the family Lois Sace to velcro lef family of
which in North America we mostly get the Menzilia and Nii.
Menzilia is everywhere, but the you go down to South
America and you start getting some of the Loasa's god
there's like six or seven genera. The subfamily I think
it's Lois Soudi is the subfamily. There's subfamily uh delineations
for Lois sat they're not on Ininet. Anyway, you get
a couple of these general Loasa Pinasa bloomin Bakia that's
his stinger, Kayafra that's his stinger too. I haven't looked
at a phylogeny of Lois Sace, but most of the
stinging ones are in South America. In Texas we get
Sevalia sinuata, which is a stinging one, beautiful flowers that
I assume is probably somewhat related, somewhat close to the
Loasas and the Chiopherus, but either way, these things have
those keeled petals. Loasa has this for sure. Bluemenbaki I
believe as well, and they have stigmo nastic statements, which
means the stamens move, you know, which will happen through
a prickly pear flower too. That genus Soapuncha has flowers
with thigmo nastic statements stamens that move towards the center
upon being triggered. What's interesting about Loasa is that I
think they do it over. They do it over a
number of days, and it takes I think, I think
a few minutes to do it. It's not instant. But
you know, anytime that one of these staminodes, which many
members of lois Ac have as well, and their flowers
basically fertile, are non fertile statements stamens that don't produce
pollen in their anthers. Anytime these staminodes are triggered, and
there's nectar at the base of some of these, At
least in this Loasa there was. You could see it.
You could see the glistening materially at the base of
his staminode. Anytime that staminoda has touched the stamen moves
towards the center. It takes a while, but it moves
towards the center and it replenishes the pond. There was
an interesting article in The New York Times about this
from twenty nineteen. Yeah, the article if you're interested in
reading it. If you can, you can go to archive
dot pH. That's a website and then type in the
link to the page and see an old one. But
it's called watch a flower that seems to remember when
pollinators will come calling. This is about a Peruvian genus.
This is about a Nasa Poisoniana, but it looks almost
identical to a Loasa flower, and it's closely related and
it does the same thing, and they're both in subfamily Loa.
Soity it's by Kara gi Emo the fuck just just
look up Loasa pollination New York Times and it it's
really interesting because it's it takes three or four minutes
for this statement to move, but in this way, it's
it to move to the center of the flower. But
in this way it's constantly replenishing the pollen source. Thus,
you know, instead of just wasting all the stamens on
one bee, you know, it's it's they're keeping them, it's
keeping them cupped and protected in these keeled pedals. They've
got a little cup at the end.
Speaker 2: And uh.
Speaker 1: And then as it needs to be replenished in the flower,
then the stamens move forward. Enormous adaptive benefit and being
able to do that, and it's of course triggered by
you know, a bee a pollinator rubbing around in the
center of the flower. But a great number of these,
uh members of lois soity do that. It's wild, man,
It's it's so fucking cool to see and Loasa can't.
The folia was probably a three to four foot tall herb.
It felt maybe there's probably perennial roots down there, uh,
but it was. It stood tall. It was in the
shady forest of Natho Vegas, somewhat shady, wasn't super dark,
not though Vegas and Erikarria forest, and it was readily abundant.
It was everywhere. And then the fucking stinging to it,
like those sting you, and it kind of itches afterwards.
It's got those stinging hairs, those stinging tricombes. But in
that in that whole subfamily, we saw Laasa Blumenbakia preate, Prietia, panassa,
penitifida grauslater rita. The Loasa cantafolia had UV reflective pollen too,
which was really cool. It fluoresced under UV light. Cei
Scyphantis s see why Elegance had that too. These are
ornate fucking flowers.
Speaker 2: Man.
Speaker 1: I can't like describe the morphology of these. It's so cool,
I mean, and that's the way I look at all
flowers is not from oh it's pretty, it's a beautiful flower,
but rather from the mechanics and the complexity of flower morphology.
It's fucking mind. Every flower is like a puzzle, you know,
whether it's a Chlorea orchid that was a genus of
orchid that we saw down there, again, very species rich.
I don't believe Chlorea offers any reward to pollinators. I
think it's sexual deception and it is somewhat closely related,
probably via that Gondwanen distribution again to many of the
orchid Doughty subfamily, that is, the terrestrial orchids in Australia,
which of course have some fucking wild you know, the
flying duck orchid, the hammer orchid, these orchids that do
they take sexual deception through a whole other level by
turning their labellum into mimics of female thinned wasps. Crazy shit.
If you don't know, I mean, any anybody who's you know,
dabbled in weird flowers or has an interest in plants
there has seen a fucking of it Attinborough documentary. You know,
probably knows about this. Edinburgh did do it. I believe
he did do a piece on the flying duck orchid,
the one that's the got the trigger, the hammer mechanism.
There's quite a few in Australia that do that. But
they mimic female wasps in shape with their labellum, and
then they also actually produce the pheromones, the chemical signatures
of these fucking wasps, which is wild man, it's it's
you know anyway. Chlorea, I don't know, I don't. I
don't know much about Cloria, which is the Chilean member
of that subfamily book. The Cloreas do a sexual deception
as well. They're not offering any reward, they're just duping insects.
One of the species of Chlorea that we saw I
noticed that had cali those little studs on the labellum,
which is that's an indicator to me, okay, this thing
is is tricking insects, you know, because those those calai,
those studs especially seem they're darker color. They certainly you know,
in all the not all, but a lot of the
the Australian orchidody have that as well, like some of
the Thelomitras and et cetera. They produce these I'm sorry,
not Thelomitra. Thelomitra doesn't produce a notable labellum. Thelomitra's whole
other they're fucking dope orchids. But they do it. They
do it differently. Thinking of the genus Caledina produces those
studs on the labellum, those calais they're called many many
species of Caledina do and have that hinged labellum as well,
and the Chlorea had that same thing. So these, yeah, definitely,
you see that. That's a good indication. This thing is
duping insects via deceit It's got this deceitful pollination strategies.
And then on the other side of this valley, it's
roughly the same latitude of thirty seven degrees latitude south
in the montane eric Carria forest, the Andean eraic cort
eric Carria forced by Melpuco Melipuco. Fuck, sorry if I'm
mispronouncing that town. Wonderful little town right outside Kungeo National Park,
that was where there was you know, eric carry is
growing on these extremely steep slopes covered in fog. Wonderful
day to be there. It was super misty. It pissed
on us. It rained the whole day, and that was
a fucking treat as well. It's all again the substrates,
all pummics. It's super crunchy. Easily you could destroy a
pair of boots there. But some of the same species,
except I don't believe now a Buddha had Austrosedrius, which
is looks like a Chilean incense cedar. If you're familiar
with the incense cedars Calosedrius. The currents of California, Idaho, Washington, Oregon,
et cetera has similar shaped cones to beautiful fucking trees
get like, you know, seventy eighty feet tall, what is it,
you know, almost thirty meters tall, and they grow in
on these you know, steep rocky slopes or out of
pure pummits like they were growing in Kongeo Premnopotus Andina
was there as well, which is a potocarp that I
think might produce edible not fruits. They look like it's
like a it looks like a u. It looks like
a torrea, which again to make an analogy to California,
like the Torrea Californica. You would see it's got it's
got a similar shaped cone. It's not a fruit, it's
a cone. It looks like it'd be a droop or something,
but it's a cone, and it's a similar size. And uh,
Promnopotus and dina is a strictly Andean species. I believe.
I don't think it grows. I keep miss I kept
mistake in Saxagothia conspicua, which is a really cool looking
potal carp that can get fucking massive in the Alersee
forest down south in the Patagonian temperate rainforest, I kept
thinking that was prenopotes before I had seen promnopoties, because
you know some of those Saxagothias I'm used to seeing.
Sathagothia conspicua in arboretums in botanic gardens is a small
tree to ten or fifteen feet tall. I had no
awareness that it could reach heights of like one hundred feet,
you know, fucking seven feet across at the base. I
didn't know it was it could be turned into this massive,
long lived potocarp. Saxa Gothia, of course, doesn't even look
like a potocarp. You know, potocarps normally have that epimadium
and the bait berry, and they're the bird to sper
Saxagothia produces what looks like a cone. It's all those
inflated bracts, those inflated scale leaves. It kind of looks
like a like a mini cone, and so you almost
it'd be easy to mistake for not being a potocarp
The bark looks very potocarpaceous though, looks like the bark
of some of the other poto carps Potocarpaci of course,
So that hemisphere conifer family they expect that early Jurassic,
maybe Triassic. You get a few members in Mexico and
it gets you into the North hemisphere a little bit,
but it's mostly Southern hemisphere family, the critiums, the removes
of New Zealand, the many fucking the strawberry pine, which
of course is not a pine. It's just in Australia,
in Tasmania, it's this creeping, really cool conifer that produces
these epimdia, these swelling you know, swelling ovules because it's
still a gymnal swim, still a nakead see that look
like strawberries. You know, in Australia they use the word
pine like Americans use the word cedar. There's no true
cedars in North America, but everybody in the US calls
you know, many of our conifers sears western cedar. Uh,
you know thuya arbor, Thuyia occidentalis, they call arbavity or cedar.
Every fucking juniper they see gets called the cedar. It's
the same thing in Australia with the pines. There's no
pines in the Southern hemisphere except they barely make it
into the Southern Hemisphere except for one species. I think
it's Pineus marquci and it makes it just over the
equator in Indonesia. But in Australia, everything that's a conifer
is called a pine. You know, the King Billy pine,
the fucking the strawberry pine. Whatever. And it was in
Congillo too that I saw solid Digo chillensis. There's a
golden rod that's native to Chile. Apparently it made it
down there at some point via bird migration. Lots of
plants did this. If you look at a migration map again,
you'll see And I realized this, I mean I kind
of already knew it, but I realized that when I
looked at up a migration map of migration pathways of birds,
and saw that almost none of them go across the Atlantic.
Certainly they don't at the lower or mid latitudes, and
they're all primarily north to south. And so you got
a lot of birds migrating from western North Americas following
the coast, headed south to Chile, and apparently one of
them brought a golden rod down there at some point
in the last I don't know, uh fucking however, many
millions of years, ten twenty million years. So it's a
great place Chile was. It was great to see the
biog geography of a lot of plants. You had lots
of plants that came from you know, a Gondwanen distribution
or illustrated showed that members of Proteace, a lot of
the orchids, a lot of the conifers. Of course, Fitzroya
Cooper Sodi's closest relative or that and Pilgero dendron. I
think I think their closest relative is Diselma archery, which
is in Tasmania. Another really cool member of the cypress
and redwood family from Tasmania that grows in alpine Tasmania,
which is not very high. It's like three thousand feet.
You're already so high latitude you don't need to get
much elevation to become alpine. But anyway, yeah, the prote ace,
I haven't even gotten too yet. And both coxinem Coxinium.
Holy shit, the firewheel, the Chilean firewheel tree. The Lomesia
Lameysia farruginea hersuda or Thenada ohrides is another genus that
we saw, just fucking wild shit man, all prote ac,
all Gondwanan relics, you know, uh, a illustration of the
plant distribution via tectonic breakup in long amounts of time.
So there was the Gondwanan relics, or the distributions that
occurred as a result of bird migration. We saw Facilia's
down there, We saw the saladago. I mean, there were
so many more genera that you know, you also get
in California and the American West that were also done.
They had different species down here in Chile. This is
a reoccurring thing, you know, Okay, I know how this
got here. This is probably via birds because this the
rest of this lineage is in North America and western
North America. You know, where you could see this now,
this guy here. The rest of this lineage is in
fucking Australia, and you know, relatives of this were probably
growing on Antarctica, you know, thirty forty million years ago,
et cetera. Cicernkium, which is iridacey is another one. There
were plenty of Cicernkium members down there. There was eryth Ranth,
the monkey flowers, huge genus erythrant and the Placus family
is freimacy in the lamy Aleis order, the order of stages.
Tons of diversity in western North America, especially California, and
there's also tons of diversity in Erythranth, not the placius.
In Chile, we kept seeing aerthranth Lutia. We saw smaller ones.
We saw aerythranth niandina and our another red one that
begins with the sea, which were fucking incredible because erythranth
Lutia is just the yellow monkey flower, and there's you know,
probably a million different ecotypes and possibly subspecies or lookalike species.
But nian Dina is a is like a pink, pink
and white speckled, you know, huge flower grows in wetter areas.
I think it used to be offered in cultivation in
the Bay Area. I think Annie's annuals used to sell that.
And then aarth ranth was a cufea I think it
was aerthranth cufea, aeryth ranth cupri excuse me, which is
a bright red one. Was abundant in certain habitats too,
like higher elevation volcanic soil habitats growing in creeks and shit,
there was epilobium down there too. There was an onnathro
which I couldn't tell if it was native or not.
It looked native. You can generally tell what's native or
invasive or get hints at it by seeing where it's
growing and how it's behaving in an ecosystem. If it's
near a road and it's forming monocultures, unchecked monoculture is
probably invasive. If it's in a somewhat remote area and
there's always there's always exceptions to this, and it's you know,
there's not many, it's there's only it's scattered. It seems
relatively kept in check. It's not taken off forming monocultures.
It's probably a native. And we saw a couple of
nathra that were like that. As well Epilobium definitely a
native Epilobium, which is same family owner Gracie so at
a lot of really cool to see all these all
these different patterns of distribution and see you know, then
think about, well, how many fucking millions of years has
it been here, you know, and and what is it?
What what cut branches on this phylogeny once existed that
are now extinct? You know, what? What was there? How
big was it? Like I think about that with the
Fitzroya for us? You know what was fitz What were
the intermediate forms of Fitzroya or any closely related members
of this lineage that existed in this habitat in the
last fifty or sixty million years? And how unchanged is
Fitzroya compared with other species. There's a there's fossil Fitzroya,
which is the Alerte tree, which I haven't even talked
about this fucking habitat yet. It's so fucking cool. There's
fossil fits if it's royal, A cute of folia from Tasmania,
from Oligasine Tasmania, which is what was at thirty two
million years I think is when the fossils were dated,
so this thing was everywhere, and surely there's fossils on
Antarctica beneath however, many fucking kilometers of ice. You know,
the got to see Antarctica. That's another thing. If you know,
I go to the Silurian when people ask me what
time Perio would you go to to go fucking botanizer survey,
go to Silurian, Devonian and then uh, and then certainly
like Antarctica during the ECNE, I'm so curious what was
growing there. It must have been fucking incredible forests down
there of wild and just wild shit stuff that you know,
you would probably be able to tell what it was
or what it was related to, because there's modern day
members that exist in both Far South America and Australasia.
Osma Riza, which is apac is another Amphi tropical distribution,
you know, both similar latitudes on opposite sides of the equator.
Another thing that was and it's got those barbed fruits too,
so that was probably brought down by birds in the
last twenty million years. Riby's same thing, Riby's magellanicum, Riby's cuchulatum.
There's like five different ribi's species that we kept seeing.
The gooseberries ribies, of course, is super diverse in Western
North America, though there is I think there's a species.
I remember seeing a cool species up on top of
a mountain in the Wivalon, which is just you know,
if stones throw away from me here in South Texas.
But they definitely don't like it super hot. They like
it the Mediterranean climate. They don't like it super hot
and humid like a Mediterranean climate or higher elevation. But god, yeah,
the Congio National Park in these montane eracarria forces, these
volcanic eracarria forces, was fucking wild man, because again it
was it became a dominant tree. At the higher elevations.
You hike up this what's basically a mini volcano, it's
a crater. You hike up this this trail and the
substrates sell pumis, and you're going through Natho Vegas and
most of them don't get that big. These southern beaches
don't get too big. And then there's a massive not
though Vegas Dambii that we encountered and that was a
fucking wonderful experience. And then there's chiskea everywhere too, And
the higher you get and you start to get out
of the noatho vegas zone, then the eraic carriers appear
and there's just these monolithic beasts, these beautiful trees, and
there's recruitment too, there's younger ones, and then the understory
is mostly Chiskea, which is a New World bamboo genus.
I didn't realize just how ubiquitous the genus Chiskeaya is.
We saw it everywhere, was everywhere, and some of these
things can take twenty or thirty years to flower, and
then I think that when they once they flower, they die,
like the whole colony dies, and it's sending up multiple
new shoots of bambo I'd love to I'd love to
get a Chiskeya research around a podcast and talk to
them about it, because I'm sure you know bam bamboo soidi,
the bamboo subfamily of the grass family originated in Southeast
Asia or in Asia and the New World bamboos, which
I think is three different clades. I'm not sure how
many genera. You know, Giant cane, which we get in
North in the United States, is a is technically a bamboo.
It's in the bamboo Soidi subfamily, but it's part of
this clade. But the Chiskeya are massive, they're they're so
ecologically dombina, and I think most of the diversity in
Chiskeaa evolved in the last eight to eleven million years,
and then molecular clock dating pointed at roughly a twenty
two million year old dispersal event of those that clade
of New World bamboos to the Americas to the Neotropics
in South America especially, which is where they're they're dominant.
But hell at Chiskea is the point. There was fucking
Chiskeaia everywhere. And again it was super foggy. These giant
eraic carriers start appearing. And then you get out to
this like overlook and you're looking out over this You
couldn't see too far because it was we were basically
in a cloud. It was raining that day. But you're
looking out over this lake and there's these monstrous Eracaria trees.
There's back risks, there was a there was a Fragaria there,
there was a native strawberry Fragaria chillensis. Probably another you know,
bird dispersed uh bird dispersal. But that was growing on these,
so we gotta wear like five thousand feet elevation here.
And there was Chlorea picky chin I think there. I
think we even saw hydrangs through atafolia, which is the
only species of Hydrangea I believe in uh in uh Chile,
and it's a climber. It's got opposite leaves. They were
all post flower when I saw it, so I didn't
see any any flowers, but it's ubiquitous. Hydrangeous serratipholis ubiquitous
grows in the you know, you'll see it in the
in the temperate rainforest a little bit. You'll see it
in the fucking you know, lower latitude areas and the
montane with the sclerophyll forest, and it was here in
the Ericarria forest as well. Backris saw a ship ton
of backris Bacris linearis I think was the one. I
don't know, it's so hard to say. I gotta get
gustavohyding to go through these ideas and research it. There
was Aristotelia chillensis, which produces edible fruit. It's called the
Chilean wineberry.
Speaker 2: That was.
Speaker 1: That's another very common plant as well, and fucking delicious.
It's an Lao Carpesi, which is order oxalid dais oxalid dailies,
and it's almost it looks, you know, in leaf, it
almost looks like it would be rosece, like it would
be a prunus or something. But it's got kind of
opposite leaves, kind of almost world leaves in some places.
And that's the big throw off. Okay, this is not
rose si, this is not a rose, but it's got
that dentate margin on the leaf, kind of a one
inch long pink petiole. And then the fucking berries are
delicious and edible. Another cool genus that we saw was
Archidaceophylum diacanthoides, which is basically a tree that's in the
sunflower family Astoraci, but the barnadiesioid subfamily named after Barnadisia,
which is the most basal subfamily of Astoraci, that lacks
this like twenty one thousand base pair inversion in the DNA.
I think it's in the chloroplast DNA that the entire
rest of the species and Asteraci haven't. But the barnetiesioids
look weird as hell already. I mean, they're, you know,
very often they're spiny, chucky Raga Barnadisia dasiphylum. They're entirely
new world. They have spines, they're armed, they've obviously evolved
with their bivery, and they've got a specific type of
tricombe as well, and often showy flowers, often hummingbird pollinated flowers.
I don't think archidasa phylum has hummingbird pollinated flowers. But
the species we were saying, it's still a tree that
can get like two foot diameter breast height, you know,
more than half a meter diameter breast type be sixty
feet tall, twenty meters tall. Archidasaphylum diacanthoides was the one
that we kept encountering, a very common one, alternate leaves,
they're folded, they got a little point at the end,
and the new growth is spiny. But there's an endangered species,
Archidasaphylum excelsum, which is probably only endangered because it was
a coastal species that occurred closer to Santiago, so all
the fucking habitat, you know, got mrked one hundred two
hundred years ago, and it's still extant. I think there's
like eight populations, but it's it's almost critically endangered, highly
protected I don't know if I think I think it's
been hard to grow. I think it is not. I
think there's not been a lot of success growing them
because it's the seeds aren't often fertile.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: But god, I would have loved to see that tree.
What a fucking cool one. Go more Tega is another
cool tree I would have liked to see, But we
didn't make it to the preserve where it grows. I
guess it grows in this little preserve with this rare
not though Vegas, not the Vegas Alissandriae or Alissandria, I think,
which is entirely surrounded by pine plantations and garbage like
pine forest. The funny thing about these pine forests too is,
and this is what Nico talked about in the I
think it was Nico told me about it. Maybe Nacho
did too, but that these these pine plantations, like you,
basically people don't want to live around them because it's
such a fucking tinder box. They go up in flames
so readily, actually in a Mediterranean climate where it doesn't
rain during the summer and then if you get a
big wind, and so people don't want to live around them. Understandably,
so because it's just like living in a fucking bomb,
So it renders the land unusable for all. But you know,
selling this shitty, low quality lumber for the timber companies,
and I think it's still incentivized. It's like seventy five
percent government subsidy to plant these shitty useless pine plantations
that destroy forests and you know, take space away from
fucking wreck to soil, takes space away from native plants.
It's like, they got to repeal it. I think they
tried too. There was a ballot initiative maybe in twenty
twenty three to repeal the forest law that subsidizes pine plantations,
but it didn't make it through, so hopefully they'll try again.
But anyway, yeah, so anyway, at this Congio National Park, Yeah,
there was Promopotis and Dina Austro sedars to lensus rybis
and then you could see them on the cliffs from
far away, these massive era Carria forests which were just
fucking unreal, just intoxicating. Diascoria was another one that we saw,
Diascoria bryan a folia, a vine with these tiny tiny flowers.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: Diascorial's order of monocots. Uh diascoriacei, which I don't have much.
What do we got, what do we got in the
what do we got in North America? Dioscoria? I think
there's only two or three that I've seen the y
the yam family, diascoriac there's actually, I think correct that
there's quite a few. There's almost ten, some of which
are invasive. I remember seeing Diascoria of Alosa. I forget
where where the fuck was that was that? In the
south somewhere there's Diascoria bulbifra pentophile of florid Dana. Anyway,
they're they're monocuts, you know, are vining monocots. Looks like
almost like a kinder smile ax, a plant that I
found exceptionally cool. Which there's another California member in the
genus again. This ampatropical distribution was a dino Collon chilentz.
It's this small herbaceous plant. It's a roset of leaves
and then sends up escape. The leaves have a white
abb acxial service. They got a white underside, which is
quite beautiful, but you know, and they're covered in like
an indumental little felt but the flowers are fucking wild.
Especially considering that it's asta racy. They look like they
look like nothing else. They look they're not showy, but
they've got this marginal ring of akenes, you know, so
the marginal florets in the capitula, the marginal flowers in
the flower head, if you can even call it a
flower head. It seems to like be lacking an involucar,
you know, a ring of fieries altogether. They're probably there.
They're just very vestigial, but it's got the These akenes
are sticky and they'll stick to your pants. It's probably
how I got done or got stuck in the plumage
of a bird, or got taken up to California, maybe
vice versa. Because it's mutissioid. It's the mutissioid subfamily for
the namesake genus Muticia, which is most of Mutissioite is
South American, and they're they're a fucking dope lineage of
aster raceda. They look really weird. They got instead of
having five lobed flora corollas, they've got two or three lobes,
and they're bilaterally symmetrical and tend to have these like
cool record like trixists in accordia are a mutissioid if
you know those genera at all in Texas, California, et cetera.
But Adino Colon has you know, staminate male floor. It's
in the center. They've just got the anther tube and
then a little you know style that pokes out. But
I don't even think it forks because they're they're male only.
And then the ring it doesn't look like it would
be astracy at all. It looks like it would be
apac or something. It's a really weird, uh, influorescent shape.
It doesn't look like the standard ASTERRAI see flower head.
The male floorits are tiny. They've got like this little
white corolla and then the female florets are intensely glandular,
you know, probably four times the size of the male florets,
and just forming this little wagon wheel ring of a
keynes around the center of the male floor its. It's
it's again, really fucking cool. When you think about that
it's an aster, You're like, what the fuck man, how
did this happen? Oh, it does have fileries, very small,
vestigial looking fileries. I have no idea what pollinates is
if it's wind pollinated or what, probably small flies. But
speaking of wind pollination, and I don't think this is
wind pollinated, but I certainly did when I first encountered it.
The genus Mesodendron from Meso dendracy, which is in Order Santalles.
So it's a parasite. It's a it's a photosynthetic parasite.
It's a hemiparasite. And you'll see them on nathol vegas
all the time. But they're fucking weird as hell, and
they're dioecious, and the male and female plants look very,
very different. The females have these I guess they have
wind dispersed fruits, but they have these little tassels that
almost look like box cellder flowers. If you've ever seen
the flowers on box cell, They're they're pendent, they're dangly,
as you would expect the wind pollinated plant to be.
But I guess in this case these tassels are for
wind dispersal, and supposedly the flowers offer nectar. But I mean,
I remember hitting a male in fluorescence and pollen coming
off of it. It might have just been road dust,
but that would be a lot of road dust, and
it didn't really look like it. I'm wondering if there
are any wind pollinated members of Mesodendron, But this is
another genius with a lot of species in it, and
they're all parasites, I think, mostly on not tho vegas.
But it was cool because I've been seeing that family
in the order Santaleles and the angiosperm phylogeny and had
not encountered it until I saw it there, and the
fact they're dioecious, and the male plant that looks so
different from the female plants. They've got green stems, but
they're there. They've got a juicy hostorial connection to their
host plants, the natho vegas that they grow on. The
first one we encountered, we saw outside of a Pilgero
dendron bog Pilgero dendron, another antarctic conifer. Anyway, So the
first at Kongio, we hiked up this mountain through this
forest of erikarias and it was fucking intoxicating and wonderful.
And then afterwards it it stopped raining. We drove out
to this kind of volcanic flat that was entirely pumpused.
It was these undulating hills of a recent volcanic flow
dominated by Ricarria aericana, and it was had a small
understory I think was not the Vegas pumilio, which doesn't
get that big eight to ten feet. This is kind
of a short not the Vegas. Everything is still covered
in Usnia Barbada, that drape lichen, that draped lichen, the
beautiful fucking green defining psychedelic dec core of these these forests,
these this living fabric and so uh covering the the
pummice though the substrate was a really cool moss in
the genus Racometrium. I don't know what it was, but
it's one of those mosses that you know, it's I
think most of what we saw was alive because it
was wet, But in some areas it looks like someone
throughout an old, filthy shag carpeting and it's, you know,
like you'd see in like a garbage pile somewhere. You know,
if you've ever been through parts of Appalachia or northern
California where you see some illegal dumping piles full of
household goods, especially, you know, like someone renovated their trailers,
some shit throughout a bunch of fucking I don't know,
but it looks like, uh, it looks like a like
a used carpet that's been thrown out all over the
land here. But it's this really cool moss and it's dominant.
It's obviously getting by just fine growing in the wet
pummice here, you know, five thousand feet elevation in this
open habitat, I mean, this is an open habitat, this
Ericrria and not though Vegas Familia forest is open. It's
not shady. It's very open. It's like my favorite kind
of habitat. I don't like shit when it's super dark
and shady, like the Redwood forest. I like it when
it's kind of open. There's more lighting, it doesn't feel
as like confining or dark, and there's more generally more
diversity too. I remember there being a lot of diversity here,
but there was this matted back ris everywhere as well.
There was a lot of their fucking backrist was everywhere
we went, man, I mean it's South America. Back rist
is huge.
Speaker 2: There.
Speaker 1: There was anemone coming up too. I think it was
done already. That's one of the first generally one of
the first to bloom anemone multi feta, which is vernunculesi.
There was saw a couple of Parizias purple flowered, generally
purple or white flowered Mutissio composite. There was Calorizia print
anthoides as well Mutissia the currants, orange flowers, Mutissius spinosa.
The Mutissius are so fucking cool because they're like these vining,
generally vining, coreaceous, holly like leaves, plastic feeling holly like leaves,
often armed at least in leaf they've got, you know,
not may may not have spines, but the leaves have
very sharp teeth on them. There was a cool Euphorbia
two I remember seeing, and Desmia Ribi's cuculatum just a
fucking rich habit that tons of gul THEORYA Gultheria in
the blueberry family. Rak Case was everywhere. We saw like
probably seven or eight different kinds. Easy to see how
that would be a bird dispersed genus. I think it's
the only non epacrid of the Pacrid subfamily member of
eric Case that's in uh. It's in Australia as well
as Gultherius so Gultheria got around in the last thirty
million years, easily got around. There's tons of gul Theia everywhere.
What was the gulf, There was a Gultheria was at
mersin Noidies. I saw at LOSAs Zuofras at Michiakon, Mexico,
basically growing on like sulfuric soil, like really acidic volcanic soil.
And it was the only plant growing in extremely close
proximity to these fumaroles and hot springs in this geothermal
area at the Losa Zoofras and beautiful Michia Khan And
of course, I mean it wasn't the season, it was summer.
But we saw a couple species of Citeria fungus too,
that that edible, apricot looking fungus that creates little knots,
little swellings, little gulls on the Notatho vegas trees. Cytheria
is a fungus Cytheria excuse me c y t ta
Ria that I also encountered in uh Tasmania and New
Zealand because Noto Vegas is there as well. So Siitaria
has been associated with not the vegas since the breakup
of Gondwana. Quite likely, and there was probably tons of
Cytaria fungus whose only known host plant is not the
fagus species and the genus not the Vegas on Antarctica
as well, and it's it looks like a little orange
ball that's got these holes in it. There's these these
these uh kind of kind of like like a round
piece of Swiss cheese. Really interesting though. I found an
old one. It was Citeria harry odii.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, there's a multiple different species of Cytaria as well,
but yeah, they create these these knots, these galls in
the wood, and you could the mushrooms weren't out, but
we kept seeing the Citaria galls in the wood. Of
all the Noto Vegas species that we encounter, which was
probably six or seven. Anyway, I got got so much
more to talk about, but I'm gonna cut it close,
and just was second part where I'll cover some of
the closer foothill forests near Santiago. Indian foothill forests near Santiago,
like where you see Gevwena avilana, which is prote ace.
It's also called what is it Chilean hazel nut or
Chilean something nut, I don't know it's edible. It's in
the Macadamia tribe of prote ace. We'll get into the
Alercee forests, including this really cool tarantula that grows down there,
the Osla tarantula, which grows this is like fucking forty
two degrees latitude south and these these somewhat chilly and
very wet forests and these bogs. This this rare and
endangered orange tarantula lives fucking wild. And then we'll get
into some of the Andean stuff, including including the rosolate
forum that so many different species converge upon, especially at
high elevations in the dry andes where this, you know,
like the rosolate violets like it's it's so wild to
see this same forum appearing as a result of convergent
evolution of selection by the environment in these habitats, by
unrelated plant families. I mean, there's a member of solin
Ac in the genus Comberra that does it too wild shit,
such a wild form. You know, basically, take an elongated stem,
put it an avice, squish it down to two inches tall,
make the inner nodes between the nodes very very short
to non existent, and you just give it this short
squat rosolate form with these world leaves, because it grows
in very cold, dry, windy places. Well, actually not, it
gets hot there in the summer. It's fucking hot. They're
growing on pumice, but they're probably buried under snow for
length of the year as well. We'll talk about that,
and it probably, I don't know, hopefully be two hours,
three hours. I can't imagine it'll be any shorter. There's
tons of shit to talk about, tons of plant diversity
to cover in, a ton of cool ecological and evolution
very phenomenon to explain, ponder about, and get into. So
I'll cut it there for now, have a good rest
of your day, go fuck yourself. By next podcast, it
will be two hours and cover these three very distinct
and cool habitats and biomes and all the cool species within.
That's all I got