Speaker 1: Okay, welcome to the crime Page. A binding does a podcast.
I'm here with Allan Rockefeller, my friend Allan Rockefeller, the mycologist,
and we're in Ecuador at an elevation of thirty seven
hundred feet in the Upper Amazon. And am I leaving
out any other pertinent information? Allen?
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're in the in the Puyoh area, so pu Yo. Yeah,
so a little little town called mara Uh.
Speaker 1: And I was excited when you invited me to come
down here. I was like, Fuck, I don't know if
I can do it. I'm getting back from Chile, got
a lot of work to do. But then I'm really
glad that I said yes because it turned out to
be pretty incredible and I've learned so much. I've never
really been into tropical botany before, but because I had
no experience with it, but now it's it's a whole
other world. And on the mushroom side of things, well,
tell me, tell me what's going on here mycologically.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a lot of really cool mushrooms here in
this area. There's not a lot of ect microouzal hosts,
so it's mostly sapatrophs. So you see a whole lot
of Mycena marasmius, just all sorts of things that decay
the leaf litter. But rarely you'll see just like a
Russola or a Romeria something mic urhyzol just way out
in the middle of the rainforest and there's so many
trees around you can't really tell what tree they're associated with. Yeah,
I don't think we saw any micrhyzol stuff for the
whole ten days we've been here.
Speaker 1: No, but there is a lot of am fungy the
glomero miceats, and with those you get a lot of
those cool micoheterotrophs like the Voi rhea and the gymnociphon
which gymnosiphons bermanniac voirieas gets a gent and ac. But
so it's mostly probably am micro or postcular mic rhyzol fungi.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. So with the am fungi, you never see
anything directly, but they help out the plants. And yeah,
we have been seeing some micro heterotrophs. I got really
cool focus stacked photos of the gymno siphon yesterday.
Speaker 1: Fuck I'm jealous. I didn't go with you, guys.
Speaker 3: I saw my I saw Voi voi Ria though, so
that was Yeah. Those are really cool too. Those are
really pretty. And we also saw about an hour from
here the tiputinia. It was Tiputinia foatita, So that one
was described from Ecuador.
Speaker 1: What is that? What do you know what family that's in?
Speaker 2: Oh, we'd have to look it out.
Speaker 1: You guys saw that yesterday?
Speaker 2: No, no, it was last year. But it's really crazy.
It smells like rotting flesh and it's like a little
brown flower that just comes right out of the ground,
no leaves or anything, and looks like completely unlike anything
I've ever seen before. But if you just if you
look it up on an I naturalist, you can you
can see the pictures. There's not very many observations of it.
But it's a really crazy looking thing. I p U
T I N I A.
Speaker 1: P u. Oh yeah, oh feeted it? Oh shit?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so this thing and you know it attracts flies
with its odor, so fly pollinated.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think most of these little mico heterotrusts are
probably pollinated by little fungus gnats or smaller flies. I mean,
like the voiriea that I saw was two inches tall.
If that so? Oh Jesus, Oh yeah, there's only four observations. Yeah,
that thing's wild.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's very rare, and it's also really hard
to spot, so you know, you're walking by at full speed,
it's almost impossible to see. It's not as tiny as
gymnaside things.
Speaker 1: Me Acy, it looks like me ac Herbermanniac. Now yeah, okay,
Jesus God, that's a it's a tropical tropical parasite the
family Jesus christ Man.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So it's got the brown petals and the orange center.
Speaker 1: Wow, that's wild. Tip U tinia t I p u
t i n i A. Check it out on ain
answer list if if you can't. That was a cruise found.
The crews saw this.
Speaker 2: I hag fur Hat spotted it first.
Speaker 1: God the damn Yeah. Okay, Well, botanically, it's been really
it's really disorient thing because you'll see something and you'll
see I've been taking pictures of leaves, which I don't
normally do because they're not the best identifying factors, so
you really have to focus on like extremely subtle stuff
like pettiole length, presence of hairs, opposite of alternate leaves,
of course, which is like the first thing, leaf shape,
texture all that kind of shit, and then you'll see
something flowering and then it kind of gives you a
better idea. But but everything is yeah, mostly way up
in the canopy, like what's that that that tree member
of polygate Ac that we saw, species name is Comingiana,
but that was you know, that was I could and
get photos of it. And then I found the flowers
all over the ground on a really rainy and they're
really rainy day when I was cursing a lot tripleeris Comingiana, yeah,
and then I saw the flowers and figured out it
was dioecious that the trees or their male or female.
But but botanically, it's really interesting because these these are
mostly plants that I only saw prior to this in
like horticulture, you know, like in a conservatory where God forbid,
like a fucking you know office like mall indoor, you know,
plant type situation, but to see where they grow and
like the incredible humidity and and it's not it's surprisingly
it's not that hot here. Like the climate's much different
from what I thought it would be. I thought it
would be hotter.
Speaker 2: Well, the course still Ecuador is really hot and muggy,
but you know, up here at a thousand meters, it's
really comfortable almost all the time. But yeah, sometimes you're
walking along the forest and you just see, like the
ground littered with flowers, and you can't see where they're
coming from. They're coming from some epiphyte way up in
the tree. But you know, occasionally a branch will fall
and you'll see it, and most of the stuff, you know,
it's pretty confusing. I'll usually only photograph something if it
has flowers, unless it's got some crazy corrugated leaves or
something like that, they would make it distinctive. But you know,
sometimes you'll see these beautiful variegated leaves and you'll take
good pictures of it and put it all over the
plant identification forums and igh naturalists and people will just
be like, no, there's no idea to identify that without flowers.
But those are a few things that I keep seeing
over and over that I really like. Like that Pallacoria tomentosa.
That thing is super distinct.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it used to be psychoatry, I guess, but.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think four years back then put it into palakoria.
But that thing is really distinctive, and I looked it
up it turns on it. I saw it in Wahaka,
just a little bit north of Wahaca City, which is
the very north end of its range.
Speaker 1: Oh, the same species relative.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the same thing, the Pellachoria tomentosa. It actually looked
kind of different than the Palachoria tomentosa. We get around
here and then it kind of goes down in through
middle Brazil. But that that's probably the easiest plant to
identify around here because it's so bright and distinctive and
you just can't mistake it for anything.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's super common too. Yeah, with those red bracts.
It's I don't know what's going on. If it's like
because the flowers are yellowish or white and then the
two red bracts are really conspicuous. I don't know. If
it's like trying to make hummingbird pollination with fly pollination too.
I don't know, but a lot of hummingbird pollinated stuff here,
like a lot like that. All its nereads, the tons
of rubac, tons of the the larient. They see the
tropical missletoes, which is another thing that you'll only see
the flowers on the ground because the comparasites, like you know,
fifty feet up in the the trees, the giant bamboo.
I wasn't expect thing that, Go ahead, do it. And gustafolia.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that bamboo is kind of an interesting thing because
there's this fungus that grows on the scale insects of
the bamboo, and so it's called called asco polipperis, and
asco polipperis, you know, starts out this like a little
white ball on the bamboo and then it turns like
bright orange and I threw it in my tackle box
next morning. There was like this big white spore print
where I put it. But it's just like this round
thing and you cut it open. It's all gelatinous in
the inside. But it's in the Corticipitacea, so related to cortuceps,
and you know, like the other things in the Corticipitacea,
it grows on insects, so scale insects in this case,
but you only see it in bamboo, and those bamboos
we kind of watch out for them because they're covered
in you know, really long thorns.
Speaker 1: The lateral branches have these yeah dines on them really.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're like two three inches long sometimes and if
you get stuck with them, usually you get, you know,
pretty any bad infections because they're just like you. They're
the opposite of sterile being.
Speaker 1: Because it's humid as a nutsack down here too, and
what is the rain Like five to seven meters, so
that's like fifteen to twenty one feet depending on where
you are. The interesting thing about the bambooo is like
it's so fucking big. It's it's literally eighty feet tall.
This is literally like a nearly thirty meter tall bamboo.
I mean you can't really see the top in some places,
and it forms these massive colonies and then you'll just
see this like six foot tall new shoot popping out
of the ground. And then the the leg ules and
the protective bracts are covered in these tiny kind of
like burgundy colored hairs that feel like a shark skin
or like a cat tongue or something. It's the most
bizarre thing. Yeah, I had no idea that was here.
I thought that was like invasive when I first saw.
Speaker 2: Yeah, see how it belongs here?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that was crazy stuff. So, but corticipitasy and
then there's Ophio cordyceps.
Speaker 3: Those are related, well, they're both in the hypocialities order,
but they're not closely related, they're kind of kind of
distantly related families.
Speaker 1: Is this probably independent evolution of insect Yeah.
Speaker 2: The insects have a lot of you know, nutrition and
you know, things that fungi elect to metabolize, so they're
they're really good substrate for fungi. So you know, the
actually entomopathogens have evolved like six or seven times, and
they are really widely dispersed. If you look at the
phylogenetic tree, there's some that are kind of over by
penicillium and other branches of fungi. The pine never heard
of because they don't really make anything resembling a mushroom,
but they are very widely distributed. So yeah, that's that's
evolved a lot of sense.
Speaker 1: So this is I mean, because there's so many insects here.
Once you if you're a fungus and you evolve the
capability to digest insects and infect them, and you know,
affect infect them efficiently by spore production, I mean, you've
you've captured a whole niche.
Speaker 2: So that's yeah, And a lot of these entimapathogens are
very very picky about which insects, like the Corterceps. They'll
only grow on one species of insect, and so like
a lot of the ones we've been seeing, there's a
few common ones. We've been seeing a lot of opiod
Corterceps crook courially on them, and that one grows on weavils.
See I always see that weavil with a long snout
coming out of that. And they've got another one, Corterceps australis,
which you're on these really big they kind of look
like carpenter ants. And then there's the ophiod Cordyceps melolonthe,
which grows on the Melanthona beetles the larvae of that,
and that's probably the biggest quarterceps. And then you get
the bright red one Corterceps needest and that only grows
on trap door spiders. So you find that and you
excavate it and they'll be a spider do on that
and if you do it real carefully you can actually
get the trap door and everything.
Speaker 1: And that was the one that you saw in that cave.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that one we found growing in the cave. And
there's there's always a lot of court Sepitacea in the cave,
but we've never seen just a courterceps fruiting body like that.
Usually we just kind of find them growing out of
the sides of trails.
Speaker 1: I was so glad nobody came down with a zoonatic
disease in the cave yet, because the bats were everywhere.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, we go into the caves a lot, and
getting sick is really rare, but there's a ton of
bats in there, so we're always a little bit careful
with the mud.
Speaker 1: Everybody was wearing masks, except for you because he didn't
because he didn't have one, but you're.
Speaker 2: Okay, Yeah, No, somebody had a mask for me, and
I just couldn't find them when he went into the cave.
So I've been in those caves a ton of times
without masks and a couple of times with masks, and
it didn't didn't seem to really, it's not usually a problem.
There's some other caves that are deeper and have even
more bats, and we're a little bit more serious about
wearing masks and in those other caves. This cave was
pretty big, had a lot of ventilation, and so I
wasn't too worried about it, but I would have warned
it if I had it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean, god, there was so much cool
shit in there. It's it's its own ecosystem. There's these
crickets that I presume are eating baguano and then they
serve as the base of the ecosystem kind of. I mean,
there was the the whip scorpion, that massive whip scorpion
we saw on there, and then there's pseudoscorpions, what other
what else was it?
Speaker 2: There's also just a regular plane all scorpions. Yeah, we
didn't see them this year, but last year in the
same cave system, we got some pretty cool photos of
just scorpions. And there's fish in there that you know,
don't really have eyes. There's cave lizards, and then there's
all those fossils, you know, just embedded in the cave walls.
I saw a bunch of shells this year, you know,
just like ancient clams and stuff. But sometimes you also
see like cranoid stems. And in one of the caves
about a mile from there, there's there's a whole just
a big starfish, just like right there, embedded in the wall.
Speaker 1: Jesus, how big is it?
Speaker 2: Pretty big? Like five inches across? Oh yeah, it's on one.
Speaker 1: I wonder what the age of the limestone is, if
it's cretaceous or if it's earlier or what.
Speaker 2: I'm sure Alex knows. He studies those caves for a living.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that was I guess that Cave two was
used as munition storage during the war with Peru.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I think Peru and Ecuador have kind of
been battling over territory for a while, and so yeah,
they would the army used to be all over that
and then they settled out and they haven't been around
there for a while.
Speaker 1: But there was a there was a cool bogonia growing epiphetically.
I mean, there's so much shit here, it's nuts. There
was what was the zygo micey thing that was growing
on the cliff wall above the cave entrance. It just
looked like insulation.
Speaker 2: It looked like, yeah, I call them pin molds. But
you know, those things are pretty hard to identify. And
they're hard to because if you put it in a
tackle box that kind of gets banged around, it turns
into a pile of slimes. So you kind of have
to wrap it up in a leaf for something, and
then put it on the dehydrator. As soon as you
get back to get a good collection of that kind
of thing.
Speaker 1: I don't know anything about that group with a claye
of fungi.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was super diverse, very understudied. The most common
one that you see around is called Ficho Mice's Blake's
leanis and that's the one that you see on dog
shit and it's like I seen before, yeah a million times,
Like you know, just like every dog turd that's not
in the in the woods for a couple of weeks,
how's it growing on there? But that one it was
described like in the nineteen twenties, and it was named
after doctor Blakesley, And so the guy that described it
hated doctor Blakesley. Nobody can figure out why, and so
he named his dogshit fungus after him.
Speaker 1: It's it's so fucking petty man.
Speaker 2: Yeah, one of the few disparagingly named fungi.
Speaker 1: It's kind of funny. How did you end up coming
down here? Like, well, you came down here during COVID
or during twenty twenty or what.
Speaker 2: Yeah, first time I came was February twenty twenty. And
when I first came down, I was like, Ah, this
COVID thing is nothing. It's not going to be a
big deal. It's just the media being silly. And by
the time I left, I'm like, Okay, yeah, it seems
like it's actually a real thing. Turns out maybe the
former thing was a little bit more accurate, because you know,
now there's more COVID than there was at the height
of the pandemic and nobody cares.
Speaker 1: But I think it's probably become a little bit less
virulent too. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, trains, they're not so bad.
Speaker 1: It wiped a bunch of people out.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, a lot of people like Anne Shulgan is
one of them. Who is it the wife the chemist?
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh brutal, Yeah, Billy Turner, Texas Bonnas died of COVID,
I think. But yeah, it was mostly getting old people,
I guess. But but still, I don't know. Maybe we'll
have another pandemic now that Trump's in office again.
Speaker 2: So I'm sure there's more coming, just as more and
more travel and more people kind of like encroaching in
these areas and less public health. But yeah, one thing
about that pandemic is that it was like impossible to stop.
Remember they had all those mask laws, like you couldn't
go into a store without wearing a mask, right, and
that didn't even start to slow it down like that,
Like they took counties that had mask laws and the
adjacent county had no mask laws and just knowing wearing
masks in public places, and they had the same spread.
Like the masks weren't even sewing them down. So like
if there was a pandemic that actually did something really
bad like ebola, we'd basically be screwed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we'd be fucked. I was really into the masks
at first because I was like, yeah, this is fucking nasty.
I don't want to be breathing. You know, you're on
a plane or someone. I don't want to be breathing
these nasty motherfuckers viral particle was. But then I you know,
I got sick when I was I was in the
New York subway and I was still wearing a mask.
It was twenty two and I was like, because you're
packed asket neek in a subway and I still got COVID.
I mean it was just so such a dense.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean masks work a little bit, but not
like in real life just like yeah, you know, if
you're like a doctor or something, yeah, they definitely work.
But just like in real life, you know, just like
you never really breathe through it. And if you were
wearing one of those masks that actually filter is enough
to stop you from getting sick, then nobody can hear
what you're saying.
Speaker 1: Right exactly exactly. I think they probably stop like ten
or twenty percent maybe or help your chances that much
if it's but if you if you're in like a
packed subway car or some shit, it's not gonna yeah
do anything. And probably just the like if you're on
an airplane just having the fucking fans on, you know,
if that's filtered air and it's blowing at you, that's
gonna do more than a mask most likely.
Speaker 2: Probably.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, it's wow. I still see people wearing masks.
It's it became this crazy thing for some people. It's
nuts man like out outside and shit like people still
wearing masks.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the whole political things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it became really politically charged. But now I
just I don't know, I think it became this obsessive
thing for some people, like, oh, look, that person's mentally ill.
You know, that's normally where I go. There's always exceptions,
of course, but I'm anyway. So okay, So so you
sort of coming down here in twenty twenty, and then
were you coming down here every year since? I mean,
what was that? What was the main attractive for you
in terms of tropical mycology as opposed to temperate zone
mycology like you've been doing before.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, I'd always heard that there was really cool
mushrooms in Ecuador, but you know, I never knew exactly
where to go. But this guy, for hat, he built
an eco resort about an hour from here called think
of Himatlos I think a change in name now to
High Matt Loos Amazon launch. But he is somebody that
I've known on Facebook for a long time. He's one
of the sharpest mushroom identifiers on Facebook. He's in like
every group. And so I came down to visit him
in twenty twenty and it was really good.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: I was here for like two weeks and stayed at
his place, and there was just you know, things that
I had never seen, and you know, just every inch
of the forest is covered in cool stuff. I mean
you could stop and just like look at one square
meter of woods and like, you know, spend an hour
looking there and not even see all of it. And
so when you're walking at like a good speed, you're
missing like ninety nine point nine nine percent of the stuff.
But you know, no matter what speed you walk, you
see so much.
Speaker 1: So you came down here and you saw, you saw
that it was hyper diverse for funny.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I kind of started coming back every year
since then.
Speaker 1: I guess it makes sense. It's wet and there's a
shit ton of organic material and so everything is just
you need a lot of decomposers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like the forest here is just really full of life,
much more so than a temperate forest. Things grow really fast,
a huge amount of rain, and just like huge amount
of competition. So it was kind of like the evolue
that happens everywhere is happening in overdrive here.
Speaker 1: In tons of insect diversity too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so much. Yeah, Like it ferhats Eco Resort to
have a permanent moth light there, and it's just like
some really bright lights shining on a white board. And
if you zoom in to the ten feet around the
white board on I naturalist, there's like thirty five hundred
species in this ten foot area, like you know, a
couple of thousand of them are lepidopter of the different
moths and butterflies, all kinds of bugs and just everything else.
But yeah, if you pay close attention, it's just really
hyper diverse. And the closer you look, the more you see.
Speaker 1: There was a cool cicada on the moth light last night.
When I got back, I was I was stoked to
find it, to see it there because I've heard them,
but I love cicada diversity. You can hear them, but
I hadn't caught or been able to see me. And
then there was one right on the moth Like that
doesn't fuck if it's on all the time, it doesn't
fuck with the moths too much, right, You're not, like,
what is the downside?
Speaker 2: No, I don't know what the downside too mothlight is,
but I mean there's like street lights in every city,
and so if there's a downside, they're screwed. Yeah, and
I'm sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's like.
Speaker 2: Wasting light isn't going to do very much compared to
all the city.
Speaker 1: Well, just a twenty four to seven months light. But
that's also kind of cool. I suppose it, you know.
Speaker 2: I mean that's what street lights do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, you know, what I'm sure it becomes when
once the day comes and they fly off.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they fly off when it gets light again.
Speaker 1: You know it's it's still they'll be fine. But is
it a UV light he's got going on there?
Speaker 2: No, there's regular white lights. They like UV too. They
like three ninety five better than three sixty five nanometer,
but you actually get different things with different spectra. When
I'm out camping, I just use the headlights from my
car and just shine my head headlights on bright, just
pointed at like a white sheet or just anything, and
they all come and land on my car. And that
works really well for attracting all sorts of insects.
Speaker 1: The three sixty five that's what you use mostly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So for ultraviolet lights, I use three sixty five
nanometer because your eyes can see from four hundred to
eight hundred, you know, four hundred being purple, eight hundred
being red. So three ninety five is the black lights
that most people are familiar with. That's those the party
lights that look kind of purplish. But three sixty five
just a little bit farther outside of what you can see.
So when you use a three sixty five nanometer flashlight,
all you're seeing is the fluorescence. You're not seeing any
of the actual lights. So stuff lights up really well.
And what's happening is you shine some of this ultraviolet
light and a lot of materials they will kind of
trap the photon for a second and then re emit
it at a longer wavelength, so you see just basically
every color of the spectrum can be emitted. And what
it is, it's like a chemical sensor, so you can
sense a lot of chemicals. Just like all the substances
in nature have different colors, they also have different fluorescences.
And you know, sometimes it's really good for taxonomy. Like
you shine an ultraviolet light at a log and what
looks like one species of lichen. You shine the black
light on there, and all of a sudden, you notice
there's fifteen different species of lichens because they're all different chemically.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a really good use of it. It's a
lot you said, A lot of stuff is fluorestas under
UV here, much more so than especially in a place
like a desert.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. So if you shine a black light around
in the desert, you don't see much other than minerals
because all of the plants are getting full sun, they
have to have a lot of protection from ultraviolet, so
they have that thick cuticle. And part of what those
chemicals and the cuticle do is they stop the ultra
violet light because the ultra violet will just dnature the DNA.
Speaker 1: They're UV blockers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but then when you're in a deep rainforest, then
very little UV reaches the ground, so plants don't need
any like UV protections. So that may that everything is
really fluorescent. And you know, the chlorophyll fluoresces this deep
blood red. It's a super beautiful shade of red. And
then you know a lot of the insects, especially like
orb weavers and crab spiders, they fluoresce really bright. And
then about ten percent of mushrooms are super fluorescent as well.
So a lot of times we'll run a black light
over the table at a fungus fair and the rusolla
table always lights up like crazy. Uh, they just have
some kind of chemicals in them. Any anything that's a
purple rusola will look electric blue black light, and then
hyphalomas light up like crazy. And then some stuff doesn't
light out very much, but the light you do get
looks really cool, like silosity only the gill edges light
up and a little bit of the stem, and that's
probably the beta carbulines in them. But carbilines, beta carbulines
are molecules. A lot of them are m a O inhibitors.
So you have an enzyme in your body, it's called
m a O and if you inhibit the m a
O and then a lot of chemicals don't break down.
So the m O inhibitor is what's in the ayahuasca
vine that makes the d M t orally active. But
you know, these chemicals are pretty common in nature, Like
that's the chemicals that make a scorpion light up and
ultra violet light. Beta beta carbal carbilins. Yeah, and so what's.
Speaker 1: The connection between beta carbalings any m a O so.
Speaker 2: Beta carbalines, If you eat them, they inhibit m a
O for a f they are MAO inhibitors, So you
have m a O in your body. And that's just
something that breaks down. You know a lot of things,
you know, including psychoactive substances. So if you eat pure
d MT, nothing will happen unless you take an ma
AO inhibitor and then and then you get the psychedelic effent.
Speaker 1: So the is beta carbaling. Is that probably what's in
the paganem harmala.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they have harmine, those are a few other So
it's a.
Speaker 1: Class of compounds basically.
Speaker 2: And then those things are super fluorescent. Like if you
take an ayahuasca vine and cut into it and just
find the black lane on it, you can see the
beta carbilines in there. And if you have like extracted
crystals from the penguam harmala, they're super super fluorescent and
they look really beautiful.
Speaker 1: So the Banistereopsis has a lot of big beta carblines exactly.
And then the DMT is in the Pellicorea or the.
Speaker 2: Psychotria psychotria or around here they use diplopteris more than psychotria.
Speaker 1: What is diplopterus another rubiac thing?
Speaker 2: Yeah, well no, Diplopterus lung giolata is in the malpiggy Aca.
Oh it's got those really cool flowers.
Speaker 1: I have not seen flowers on any of the banistereopses
that I saw.
Speaker 2: Or yeah they're not. You don't really see the flowers
very often because they're usually way up in the canopy.
But I got some really cool photos of the flowers
when I was visiting a farm in Hawaii, somebody was
growing a whole bunch of the Diplopteris. And when I
was in Colombia a few months back, we got some
really cool malpiggy aca flowers. But yeah, they those things
they got like five petals and they're just beautiful, distinctive
flowers they've got.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all the malepigs have those prominent I think they're
oil glands at the base of the flower. They look
like little teeth.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, they looks like nothing else. But if you
look up my photos on I Naturalist, I got really
nice focused decked photos on a black background. And then
there's some definitely some toxinomic confusion about these ayahuasca plants
because you know, most people they call it diplopteris. What's
the common name.
Speaker 1: They've got samorrow like fruits. They look like maple fruits. Jesus,
let me see if I can find your observation of filters,
Alan Rockefeller. We should talk about that new species. What
is a possibly new species of silasso be that you
found up in the Permo too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean this area is really diverse for silasib
We got we saw a beautiful cluster of Silasi B
young Genzis the other day. So that's one that was
described from the youngest region of Bolivia, and it's the
main one that grows directly from wood out here. And
then we've been seeing a bunch of Silasi by hoogchigini
i the sharpest nipple, the one with a really sharp
nipple and kind of a stem that's really dark in
color and slowly expands towards the base. Donalin turns out
to be really closely related to silasap mexicana, so it
has a really strong cucumber oder. And then we typically
see a lot of silasib moserai, which is a lower
elevation Zapata chorum relative. I don't think we've seen any
of this trip, but where we're going next week it's
it's super common over there. And then we saw some
silasab Zappa de korum in a few places, which is
the most potent wild silasity that's known. Another landslide mushroom
that has the really thick stem and can get really big.
They can be like a foot tall sometimes, but you
usually see them like near landslides or creeks.
Speaker 1: They need that landfall to basically create a fresh open
substrate for them to fruit in.
Speaker 2: They don't need it, but they do much better when
they have it. So I think it just kind of
changes how how the different You know, when you have
a landslide, you know, it turns a whole bunch of
organic material in and it changes, you know, the dynamics
and the competition, and all of a sudden, the species
like silosity several lessons and zapat decorum can really easily
outcompete all the other fungi when you have disturbed grounds.
Several lessons is another one that we've we've been seeing
around over by the caves. That's a larger one, right,
like the ones that we saw this trimp were kind
of small, but they can get really big. They can
be like five inches across that can grow in clusters
of one hundred if they have a lot of substrate.
But that's another one that's kind of related to Mexicana
and has the really strong cucumber roder and then the
Zappa tachorum ones. You know, they kind of smell a
cucumber and radish at the same time. But then a
couple of days ago we went up to thirty five
hundred meters elevation, so up you know, above eleven thousand feet,
and the plants up there were completely different than the
fungi were completely.
Speaker 1: Dire were I noticed many more affinities with temperate zone
plants up there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it gets cold up there. It never snows, but
it's gets kind of close sometimes.
Speaker 1: So twelve thousand foot elevation at zero degrees latitude, they
were roughly zero degrees latitude. Maybe it was like zero
point five south.
Speaker 2: Hey, we might be about one and a half degrees
around here. But yeah, it's uh, super unique habitat. And
one of the most common things we solved there was
silasab and so these things they looked a lot like
Silasi be zepticorum, but in this they grew more like
in the habitat of Silasi by molecula. So Silosa by
maleucula described from Mexico at really high elevation, and so
it's a landslide mushroom that really likes these high elevation
volcanic soils.
Speaker 1: Do you think it was molecula.
Speaker 2: No, because the stem texture was different. So silosavy millercola
has the same stem texture as several lessons, where the
bottom half has these kind of rough band squamulose bands
of mycillium, and then the top half is prurunos with
the callosastidia, and so the silasav mallercola has that same
stem texture. What are colossdia our cells that are bottle
shaped and they're on the stem.
Speaker 1: What is there? No one? What is the function?
Speaker 2: I don't think anybody knows the function.
Speaker 1: But they're not reproductive.
Speaker 2: No, the only reproductive cells are the basidia. That's what
makes the spores and the gills. But mushrooms, not all
of them, but many mushrooms are covered in substidia, and
they're kind of sometimes they're shaped like bottles, like a
coke bottle, or sometimes they're like larger or more inflated,
or shaped like real sharp like a harpoon. But these
cells are just all over the gills sometimes the top
of the.
Speaker 4: Cat, so kilosastidia the gill edge, callosastidia on the stem,
frosastidia on the gill faces, pylosistidia on the top of
the top of the cat.
Speaker 1: But the carlosstidia. All these cells could be diagnostic.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're all really diagnostic. If you're trying to figure
out what you have because you know a lot of
little brown mushrooms. They look pretty much pretty similar, and
once you get really familiar with them, you can tell
them apart without a microscope. Until you really know them well,
you need a microscope to tell a lot of these things.
Speaker 1: And if people might have bioways, say this silosophy species,
this new one, was there any effect that you heard
people talking about or what?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so silosity sections Zapaticorum is a pretty diverse section,
and all the species in that section tend to be
pretty potent, so they're all quite a bit more potent
than kubensus.
Speaker 1: What were the comments, what were the what was the
commentary like that people described?
Speaker 2: I didn't really ask for a lot of details, but
I know, I know a few people definitely tried them
and they said they they said that they definitely felt
something and they didn't you know, they said that it
worked and they didn't have to eat a whole lot
of them. So yeah, they're definitely pretty strong.
Speaker 1: But either way, these things are up there decomposing and
just growing in this describe what the habitat was like.
It was it was dominated by this tree Esclonium or tilioides.
You and then there was a little shrub that I
thought was more tasty before I could before I should
have known from the spines that had that it was
rose family rose asy, but it was Hesperomile's and two sofolia,
and those were like the two dominant woody plants there.
Speaker 2: Don one was so cool. I love the flowers of that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they were fucking wild man.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like nothing I ever seen before.
Speaker 1: Multiple stamens, little nectar disk style in the center of
five distinct petals. But the weirdest is up where this
pilosophy was growing was.
Speaker 2: Like a habitat because they were just under the Peramo.
So we wanted to go visit the Paramo, but we
couldn't drive all the way up there because the road
stopped before we got to the paramouth. So we you know,
parked and walked a couple of miles up the hill
to get to the paramot. And on the way there
is where we saw the most fungal diversity. And so
there were kind of like these little patches of forest,
and being so high elevation, it wasn't very tall trees.
They were like a little bigger than shrubs, but you know,
maybe twenty feet tall. Most of them, but you can
still get under there and have a lot of leaf litter.
Speaker 1: And there was a groundcover though too. There was that
there was a rose family member which was let me
see if I can pull it up really quick, I forget.
It looked like a little almost like in Aquina with
these kind of peltate leaves, but it was acting like
a groundcover al camia or bagiolata or al camilla or baguolata.
There was so much good shit, I mean it was.
Speaker 2: It took us.
Speaker 1: It took me six hours to go two miles out
and two miles.
Speaker 2: Back, and that was going fast.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was like not taking as much time as
I would have liked to look at everything and observe
and take notes and observe it, and shit, what the
fuck else, let's see what else did we see? That
whole habitat was nuts. There was so much air casey, Yeah,
tons of air casey. There was a siretto stemma. There
was diister rig or dice, yeah, dister rig what is it?
Let me get somebody. I'm gonna fuck these up. I'm
like trying to hold too much.
Speaker 3: In Iceterigma as one of the most beautiful flowers that
we see down at low elevations and.
Speaker 1: Pet yeah, and most of them are epiphytes. We saw
those Dieisterigma near the river here. That was I mean
it was like a ten foot long pendant.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, just like hanging down with tiny white berries.
Speaker 1: The notable thing about it is unlike most air casey flowers,
that's only had four corolla lobes, not five. There was
Gultheria mrsinoides up there, Gultheria erect the vaccinium I think
it was Flora bundum. There was a really cool epify.
Half the ship is epiphytic, if not more, even in
the parama. All the all the airicacious stuff, all the
air casey down here is epiphytic. Up there, there were
a couple of shrubs and then a few epiphytes. But
some of these epiphytes had big woody, uh tuberous roots
even though they were epiphytes still, which was crazy. You
just see like this will looked like a big base
ball sized gull hanging off of this vining thing that
was not even a vine. It was like it's like
literally like a shrub that's growing on another tree, but
it's growing kind of leggy uh spherro sperm and bucks
of folium with the bright purple little blueberry fruits was
growing down below. But most of this stuff is adapted
to hummingbird pollination. I was not expecting so many members
of Eric Casey up here. It was fucking nuts. There
was that azarella to pedunculata that was abundant as a
groundcover that was growing with the silossope. Let's see what
the hell else? I mean, it's overwhelming. That's why I
like when when you're doing these trips, I feel like
you because you want to use every day to go out,
but you need. For me, I need like a day
off every five days to process stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, to get to do a good job with my photos,
I need as much time as I spend out in
the field in front of the computer just to process
all the photos, get everything up identified and uploaded. And
you never really have that much time because we're usually
out for six to eight hours every day and you
don't have six to eight hours on the computer in
the evening, so it all piles up. But that's okay.
What I do now is every time I see something interesting,
I'll always take a quick cell phone photo and then
I'll make the igh naturalist observation right there, right right
while I'm standing there. You don't forget, Yeah, that way,
I don't forget. And then you have that notes field,
so I can add a whole bunch of notes. And
you know, if you just take pictures of something, you're
gonna forget what it tasted like, what it smelled like,
the nearby trees, the textures, all anything that doesn't come
through in the photo. You're gonna forget all that stuff.
But if I make the observation right there, then you know,
you put all that in the notes. And then if
I never get back to my pictures to process the
photos off my camera, I still have like a cell
phone quality, you know image. And it's also really nice
because you don't have to spend any time at the
end of the day. Just as soon as you get
back to cell phone service, it all just uploads out.
Speaker 1: Do you ever what if in crashes or something while
you're uploading, like you had one hundred things in the
queue to upload, and they don't get it. They don't get.
Speaker 2: That has not happened to me since that day that
we went out and saw that and Celia Revenge, I
was with you. Yeah, I had like that was one
of my most prolific days. I think I had one
hundred and forty I actually observations, and it kept going
slower and slower and slower, and I lost all them.
I still have all of the photos and my Google
Google Photos, but they don't have GPS tags on them,
I don't think. So it's just like I don't think
I'll ever go back and up.
Speaker 1: Do you use Google Photos but then you also use
something else I've used to because.
Speaker 2: I used to have a Pixel but now I switched
to Samsung. But I do, and I think I'm full
on my Google storage space. And they want like a
lot of money for them, uh you know, like like
more more than one hundred bucks a year for the
next next tier up. I think I give them like
twenty bucks a year now, which is reasonable. But I
think all to do is going and delete on my
videos a lout of my Google Photos and then I
can use it again. But I really like Google Photos
because you can search it really well, Like you can
search for certain places. You can search for dates. Oh,
it's amazing people and the places.
Speaker 1: So the places thing is so because I'll never remember
dates but I'll remember a place and then I can
just zoom maps. Yeah, phenomenal, but yeah, it's a lot
of money and I don't use all the ship all
the space that I have either.
Speaker 2: Worth it though, But if I used to delete all
my videos because I don't I don't really need my
videos on my Google Photo. But if I delete that,
I'll have a ton of room and then I can
just have all my.
Speaker 1: Back Blaze was the other thing you recommend it though.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the black Blaze is really cool. I did a
lot of research on backup solutions, but you know, unless
you back up your data regularly, you don't really own
your data, you know, one dropped hard drive or fire
or away from losing all your data. So back Blaze
it's really cool. Zipping incident exactly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, live in a Bay area or LA, and it's
a big thing about back Blaze.
Speaker 2: You know, costs seven dollars a month. And then this
program just runs in the background on your computer and
whenever you have Internet, it's just uploading anything that's changed
in the background. So you know, if you have to
make a presentation you don't save, it doesn't matter. It's
automatically uploaded there and like this time I went over.
We went to that remote research station. You know, it's
kind of way out in the jungle, that place.
Speaker 3: Because you can't even drive up to it and park there,
like you drive you drive up and you still got
a hike like fifteen to twenty minutes, and there were jungle.
Speaker 1: Were to get Sarawia species there, which is the Kiwi
family act in eighty Ac were so cool, fucking delicious fruits.
Speaker 2: Yeah. But when we were at Sumac, you know, I
wanted to give a presentation, but I didn't bring my
laptop with me, so I was able just to log
into my back Blaze account and download any file that
was on my laptop. So I was able to download
my Mushroom photography presentation and I was able to give
the photography talk, you know, at that remote research station.
Speaker 1: So when you're basically when we're going out and doing
all this field work, we're just collecting massive amounts of
data and then but it still has to be processed,
turned into barium labels or photos or uploaded that even
like just putting dumb shit on social media so people
can see it and get excited about it. That's still
important at the end. Of the day do you how
much time do you save? Like basically, you go out
on these trips, which is I'm sure is the same
for me, collect a shit ton of data, and then
when you get back, you're processing it for the next
few months, like just going.
Speaker 2: Well more often I just going on another trip and
it never gets processed. But you know, a lot of times,
what I'll do is if it turns out to be
something really cool, either an expert comes along and recognize
it and it was like, wow, this is these are
like the only photos of this organism, then I'll go
back and be like, oh, I do have pictures from
that time, because I take all my photos and just
put them in the lightroom, and that way I can
search by date and in final name and all this
differ stuff. So I can just be like, oh, okay,
I have a few hundred photos of this and process
my images and then you know, I've been using that
label making program and I just printed about three hundred
labels for all the fungry that we collected on here.
Speaker 1: We've got to tell people about that too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so that you know, it's a Python program that
I wrote almost a year ago now, and I keep
like refining it and making it better. But what I
did just now.
Speaker 1: Oh, I tell everybody what it is. It's images that
mushroom observer dot org forward slash labels.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so images dot mushroom observer dot org slash labels is.
The is called a flask front end. And so the
program I wrote is really a Python program that you
call from the command line.
Speaker 1: What is Python?
Speaker 2: Python's a programming language. But in this case, I made
this little front end for it so it can be
on the web server. So you don't need to know
the command line. You don't have to know any programming
or anything. You just go to this web page and
you type in the I Naturalist number and as soon
as you type it in, then it comes up on
your screen and it shows you what kind of organism,
whether it's a plant or you know, the name of
the organism and the person who observed it. So if
you mistype one of the numbers, you'll notice right away
because you won't recognize the name the user name on there.
But you can just type in, you know, up to
like one hundred different I Naturalist numbers on there and
then hit print labels. And what it does is it
goes into the I Naturalist website using the API, and
it downloads all this information about it. So it downloads
the scientific name, the GPS coordinates, the GPS accuracy, who
observed it, all the observation notes, and then it encodes
the I Naturalist URL in theo QR code and makes
a really nice professional looking printed label.
Speaker 1: So the label, the obarium label ends up having a
QR code on it.
Speaker 2: They all have QR codes. And recently I got a
QR code scanner and they're only like twenty bucks on Amazon,
and you just plug it into the USB port and
then you just point the skin. You know, it's the
same thing, same exact thing people use when they're checking
out at a store, and you pointed it to QR
code and it basically types in the number. The scanner
is basically just an extra USB keyboard and so it
types in the you know, the I natural STRL and
hits enter. So if you've got a whole bunch of
these labels and you want to make a spreadsheet with
everything you have, all you got to do is point
the scanner at every bag and press the trigger and
you can just make you know, really accurate spreadsheet you know,
in just minutes instead of having to type in all
those numbers.
Speaker 1: My question, so if you're's like a lot of bondists,
if you use it, So this is dependent on I'm
using I naturalis, which everybody should do in the first way.
Like all I'm friends with people that shit on it.
I don't know why. It's stupid.
Speaker 2: It's like it's they just don't understand.
Speaker 1: They just don't understand. Like I use it for myself.
I'm not posting for other people. I mean I'm posting
for other people so they can learn or so that
they can have a record or they can have a
photograph of flower morphology. I'll even you know, edit photos
with text showing what part, Like I did that with
that with that fragment Pedium puerci, Like what's the stigma,
what's the anther, what is the staminode, et cetera. In
case anyone's curious, like what the fuck am I looking
at in this complex flower? But uh, but I use
it for my I mean it's it's so useful. It's
such a fucking educational tool and you can map what
you've got. But a lot of people will obscure their coordinates,
like I do with everything because I'm in a lot
of places I don't want people whatever you know, and
then I'll let you or like mad or someone else
be able to look at my location data. If you're
doing that and creating an urbarium file, but your location
data is obscured, could you still create a file or
like a word document and then just go in there
and put the location data in for the herbarium label.
Speaker 2: Yeah. In fact, you can download your own data, and
so if you export ther naturalist data as a CSV,
then it just lows right into Excel and since you're
the user or that's downloading the data, then you can
see all your own obscured coordinates. So you can you
can do it that way.
Speaker 1: How do I translate and Excel file into like a DOCU?
Because I do I print on my REBARM labels on
Google Docs.
Speaker 2: So the way I do it is I just download
only the IGH Naturalist observation number and then I feed
that into my program that makes the labels, and that
that's a good way to do it. But you know
the other thing you can do is download. When you
download your data from IIG Naturalists, you can choose what
fields and so you can choose to have like coordinate
scientific name, common name if you're into those, all sorts
of different.
Speaker 1: Uh in notes too, Like if you get notes on
the observation, that's another good thing to do. If you
make in observations on our naturalists make notes what elevation?
What was the habitat? Like we were the sympatric plant species,
that kind of thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely so.
Speaker 1: But if I use your program and I download it,
then what can I what do I get? I get it?
Speaker 2: So all my program does. It takes only the observation number,
and so you just give it the observation number and
it makes the label based on that, and what it
gives you is an RTF file, which is called a
rich text file, and you load that into Microsoft Word
or Microsoft kind of sucks. So it's better to use
like Libre Office, the free open source version of it,
but either way they both work the same. And then
it loads up these nice labels and then you can
just edit that just like you're editing any any document.
Speaker 1: Well, I'll still get all the text that you have,
all the.
Speaker 2: Text you can, like you can change anything before you
hit print.
Speaker 1: Oh cool, okay, great, damn, that's wild. Like but if
you're obscuring location data, then I'll have to go in
and put the.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so if you're obscuring location data, then it goes
in and then it's whenever it prints out the latitude
longitude on your labels, it gives you a plus or
minus just the accuracy, and if you hit obscurer, then
that plus or minus is always twenty thousand meters. And
so you know, if you don't obscure it, it'll say
like plus or minus six meters or you know, whatever
the accuracy is on your GPS coordinates, but yeah, it'll
be twenty thousand meters. So if you obscure it, I
could probably change it so it uses an at API
key instead of going in there anonymously. And that way,
if you run it as a certain user, you could,
you know, have it grab there and you.
Speaker 1: Could give that user access to your location data. Is
that how it would work or how would it?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 2: I think so, I think like you can. I know,
if I go to one of your observations and you've
obscured it, I still see the exact coordinates because you've
put my username in there to trust me with the coordinates,
and so you know, right, now it's just grabbing the
data as an anonymous user, but I could have it
log in with like my uh, you know, my username,
and then it would probably would be able to grab
the exact coordinates, which is real nice because you you know,
when you have a something for herbarium, you want to
be able to see exactly.
Speaker 1: It's such a great tool though, because I mean, it
saved so much time for creating your barriers.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, Like I just made one hundred and seventeen
labels and just a couple of minutes. And what I
did is I just searched all of the fungi that
I found in Ecuador in the past two weeks, and
it just real quick gave me a list of one
hundred and seventeen I naturalist observation numbers, and I just
pasted that into the script and it made the labels,
and in just a couple of minutes, I had all
of the labels. And you know, that would have taken
me hours to handwrite it out, and I probably would
have made a couple of mistakes and numbers, and it
wouldn't have had all my notes and the locations. I mean,
that would take days if I had tried to write
all that out by hand.
Speaker 1: And all this stuff that we're collecting, this will all
go to Rosa at the herbarium in Keto.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so everything that we're collecting gets saved and goes
to the in a bio or barium in Quito, and
so yeah, I gets saved forever there. And we're going
to do some DNA bar coding on it too. So
we're going to a nanopore flow cell and a whole
bunch of PCR primers and you know, you can sequence
like nine hundred and sixty mushrooms with with one nanopore
flow cell. And actually got some primers in the mail
just a couple of weeks ago. It's a new one
called g I T S seven. So it's an i
TS primer, but the G means global and so it's
really good for fungi that are really hard to sequence,
but it's also really good for plants. So you can
see the I S. Yeah, you can see with the
I TS gene of plants really well with that primer.
And so you could do the same nanopore protocol that
we're doing for fungi and just you know, sequenced tons
of play.
Speaker 1: But you would just get that would just get the it.
Speaker 2: S only its that would be a separate PCR. Well
you can do is something called multiplex PCR. So instead
of just putting two primers in there, you can put
a whole pool of primers and then you're amplifying a
bunch of genes at once, and that that could work
to get you uh you know, because with fungi, you
sequence the its gene and just thought one gene can
identify more than ninety nine percent of fungi to species
and it does a really good job of separating the
species out. You know, one percent of the time you
won't really you know, you have like two fungi with
the same it won't won't be enough resolution. But it's
amazing how well it does work. But for plants it's
a lot more complicated. You kind of have to do
like four or five genes to get that kind of resolution.
With plants, gives ITS works. You know, it'll at least
gets you to species group one hundred percent of the time. Yeah,
but to really get species level of resolution, you got
to do matt K and TRN now and a couple
other ones. But you know, you can do this all
at home. You just need a PCR machines and primers
and pipets and a couple of chemicals.
Speaker 1: Nobody is doing what you're doing though with plants. Who's
not in academia? Like everyone who's sequencing plants isn't you know,
is an academia. No one's doing it from this. I
got to hate this fucking word citizens saience doing it
from like a citizen science background with plant material?
Speaker 2: Yeah, or these days we say can be any science
because we don't care if you're a citizen or not.
Speaker 1: Right, I mean I'm not even Yeah, I mean it's
just a stupid word.
Speaker 2: It's like I think of like I just call it science,
big citizen.
Speaker 1: It's like this night, I get this fucking imagery in
my head like some angry fucking boomer, you know, whining
about something inconsequential.
Speaker 2: No, I think I think the right word for it
is just regular science though, because I mean science. The
word science doesn't mean that you're getting paid to do
it or something, or that you have a piece of paper.
Speaker 1: You and I both have.
Speaker 2: No piece of a kind of degree science.
Speaker 1: You and I have no piece of paper. I never
even got a fucking any kind of college anything.
Speaker 2: No no, I didn't go to college either.
Speaker 1: Okay, well that brings me up. I mean, creating this program,
it's I want to talk about something else we do
really quick if we want to really quick ten minutes
when almost fucking again. But everyone's talking shit on AI,
and I get that there's it's going to be used
for terrible things. Partially, there's a lot of terrible things,
but there's also You're one of the few friends that
I have who's like, really sees a lot of potential
in it and is always talking about, you know, potential
uses that I never hear people other people, other friends
of mind talking about because I think they just don't know,
they don't see it. But you're very schooled in tech
and and all this shit, and you're kind of like,
who I go to for this kind of stuff? What
is your I guess talk about that. What's your opinion
on some of the benefits of AI that can that
people should be trying to use it for?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Well, you know, like anything AI is terrible and
awesome at the same time. You know, the terrible part
is like those stupid AI generated images that are flooding
social media.
Speaker 1: Or AI entire AI Instagram profiles where the whole profile
is fake.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not real. Yeah, that just kind of waste
people time and it's kind of annoying. And you know,
it used to be people would like, you know, write
web pages, and now they can just have AI do it,
So it fills the web with just this garbage that's
kind of regurgitated for a million other sources, so that stuff.
You know, it's kind of annoying, but it's also pretty
easy to avoid. You know, in the next few years,
a lot of people's jobs are going to be redundant
because of AI. And it's already happened to a lot
of jobs, but you know, in the next few years,
there'll probably be a lot of unemployed people out there.
So we're going to definitely need some sort of new
paradigm now that AI can do. You know, at least
half of people's jobs for us, How are people going
to make a living when they you know, when there's
so many unemployed people because AI has taken all their jobs.
So that's kind of interesting, and that's happening faster and faster,
and there's nothing anybody can do stop that. But I
think there's a lot of really cool things AI can
do as well. One thing that I really like is
if you like so you go on I Naturalists and
it gives you like a guess of three different species,
and you click on all three of them, and they
all look pretty similar, but you're like wondering, like, well,
what's the difference. You can go to like chu GPT
or perplexity or claud or any of these AI things
and say what are the physical differences between these different species,
and it'll spit out a list of all the differences
that you can use to tell the species apart.
Speaker 1: So what information is it referencing? A key?
Speaker 2: So these have indexed all of the publicly available information
on the Internet, so they basically just downloaded the whole Internet.
And actually recently Google got caught. They were they went
to lib gen and they downloaded all of lib gen.
So they basically pirated every book that's never been up
and used that to train the AI. And they tried
to keep it secret, but it came out because they
got subpoenaed and it came out in the depositions and
stuff that they did not And so.
Speaker 1: That would be a good I mean, that would be
cool if it wasn't Google. Like some kid did that, but.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, but they're selling it, so they're basically taking
all this information that people wrote and then they're stealing
it and selling it for profit. And that's uh, you know,
piracy on a large corporate scale like that death unethical.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's and it's not like they're making the
information free or they're doing you know, they're yeah, they're
they're selling it.
Speaker 2: They're kind of free, but they're off of this so
they're very much profiting off of it. So definitely kind
of unethical. But it also means that you can like
ask it all these questions and it will answer, you know,
it can tell you the difference between two different species
of some obscure genus you've never heard of before.
Speaker 1: So like chand GPT or deep seek or what would you.
Speaker 2: Mean all of those? Yeah, deep Seek is kind of cool.
That's that new Chinese one that everyone's freaking out about.
And the reason that it's cool is because it shows
you it's it's steps when it's thinking, so it tells
you what it's thinking about, and that's kind of cool
for because it's like, you know, it's tea makes a mistake,
which happens pretty often you'll you have no insight into
why it made that mistake. Both deep seek you can
read it look into its thinking process and you see, oh,
I see where it went wrong. And then you can
refine your question to like explain a little bit more
and you know, I kind of like put it back
on the right track. But you know, these all of
these chot bots are really good for programming stuff. Like
if you write a thousand lines of code and you
run it and it just errs out because there's some
some some curly bracket missing. You can spend ninety minutes
looking for that missing curly bracket, or you can just
paste that code into chat chpt and ask it where's
the mistake and it'll just tell you in a couple
of seconds, like where the mistake is. And it can
also just write programs some scratch truck. If you've got
a whole bunch of hig naturalist data, it can like
you can just say, like here, take this eg naturalist
data and put it into this form and you can
just like have a process set and just do all
sorts of stuff. So really powerful for doing stuff like that.
Speaker 1: What are some other because you would mentioned a few
other uses to what are some of the uses that
people like you.
Speaker 2: And one other thing that I really like this AI
stuff for is for recipes because it's index like every
cookbook and every recipe on the internet, and it knows
what flavors go together. So one thing I did is
I just went through my kitchen and I just went
through my cupboards and just in order read all of
my ingredients and my cupboard, my fridge and my freezer
and told CHPT to remember it. And then when I
want to cook something, I can say like, what's the
most delicious thing that I can make with the ingredients
of my cupboard, and it'll like suggest like three or
four like really awesome dishes. And then you know, I
can be like, oh, I just got this new ingredient.
You know what's a really delicious thing that I can
make from this ingredient? And it'll like kind of go,
you know, knows exactly what I have in my cupboards
and knows what spices I have, and it'll make a
recipe based on that. And then if I'm like, oh,
I'm out a flower, what kind of substitute, It'll be like, oh,
you can substitute these other things. And then if it's
like sometimes I'm like, Okay, make a recipe. It's so
delicious that it would win a world class cooking competition
for this dish, and it'll like spice it up with
all these other things, and I'll take like half these
congestions and I'll be like, damn, this is good. You know,
is exactly what.
Speaker 1: Recipe that's like A that's like a PG. I would
probably be a maybe I could probably think of some
heinous shit there. Oh yeah, be ridiculous shit. What about
like for educational purposes, because I mean the thing I'm like,
this is going to be used for terrible ship, no doubt.
Speaker 3: Just like like a lot of guardrails on it.
Speaker 2: Like if you ask it like you know, how to
make a bomb, or you know, ask it to say
something racist, it'll be like, no, I'm not doing in general.
With deep Seek, they didn't put those guardrails in. They
put different guardrails. So if you ask you Seek like
what happened in tannam and Square, it'd be like, I
don't think I want to discuss that today. But if
you ask it like how to make a bomb, it'll
tell you exactly, but exactly how to do that.
Speaker 1: But with Ai though, I mean the point is, though
it's gonna the corporate overlords will no doubt use it
for some terrible things. What are some but there's also
this benefit while the ship is thinking that it can
be used for autodidactic purposes and yeah, imation.
Speaker 2: And the one that I use most often is just Perplexity,
And that's another one of those free chot bots. But
it's really good. It's like really really relevant information. They're
like current stuff, so you can say, like how much
rain or like what part of what's the place within
fifty miles that got the most rain in the past week,
and then you know where to go to find the
most mushrooms because it knows current stuff. But it's really
good at just explaining stuff to you. So like, you know,
three years ago, if I ever had a question, like
I'm just you know, just walking around our one, some
thought pops into my head. I'm like, oh, I wonder
like this or that I would have googled and then
you go to a page and then try to find
your answer on that web page. But now I just
ask Perplexity my question and it answers it. But then
it's got all these little references, so you can see
where I got it. It'll show you links and then
you click on the original sur especially if it says
something you're like, I don't I don't believe that.
Speaker 3: You can click on the source and then and then
you're like, oh.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is some like woo woo web page written
by some fake doctor. This is ridiculous and that. But
or you can be like, oh damn, this is a
reputable source.
Speaker 1: So the but because Google will do that too. Now
sometimes if you ask it something, but it's using Gemini,
which is and it's not every time where you Google something,
it'll get you.
Speaker 2: Done so much of Google. But if you get tired
of that and you don't want Google to give you
that AI summary, all you have to do is put
a swear word into the question and then it doesn't
do any of the AI stuff and you get the
old school will starts yourself.
Speaker 1: Why does it only give you AI on some questions
and not on others?
Speaker 2: It just does it when it thinks it know it's
the answer.
Speaker 1: Mm hmmm. Yeah, it's weird. So what would you recommend
then for people if they want to use AI or
fuck around with it and see what the Some of the.
Speaker 2: Better it's kind of good to use all of them.
Speaker 1: Experiment with the deep seek or any of these.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like the other day I was I had this
like long eye Naturalist r L, and it was this
big long ur L to find all the psilocybin mushrooms.
So you have like two hundred species of psilocybin mushrooms
in the world. So I made this long r L
where I could just point it in any country or
any state, any like, you know, any given air if
part of the world, and it would show me all
the psilocybin mushrooms. But you know it's all in this
the you know, with species without species and to Dakota
all that. I wrote a Python script using AI just
to like, you know, write this real quick script for
me and something that would have taken me an hour
to code and debug. You know, it did it in seconds.
But I asked chut GPT and Perplexity and deep Seek
just to write the script to give them the same
prompt and chant GPT. It just did not work. In
Perplexity did not work, and with the deep seque it
just worked on the first try. But it was real
nice because it just takes apart the URL tells me
exactly what it's looking for and lets me edit it
really easy, And that would have taken me, you know
forever to try to like look all that stuff up.
And you know, I was basically making sure that all
of the psilocybin mushrooms, even the ones that were recently discovered,
were in my URL. And and yeah, so but in
any case, Yeah, the different ais will do different things,
and it's best to use all of them. Another one
that people don't really talk about very much is called Claude,
and that one is really good for coding, but it's
also really good for like just like therapist type stuff.
So if you just like have a problem with somebody
and you can be like am I the asshole or
are they the al solely ass claud and it'll give
you like a really well thought out, like nuanced response.
Fuck it, they must. I don't know how they did it.
They must have trained it on like all of this stuff,
but like.
Speaker 1: It'll give you some insight. Maybe it'll give.
Speaker 2: Really good insight. And just like if you would like
hired like a really expensive therapist to you know, go
over your problems with, it'll like give you an answer
like on power better than that and it'll explain like, well,
maybe you were kind of like in the wrong and
this power and you should probably like explain this a
little better and apologize for this. But on the other hand,
this this thing, you know, they were definitely and you
got to set your boundary there. But in any case,
it's it's really cool if you ever have a problem
with like another person, just it's just go into Claude
and explain what happened to Claude and it'll give you, like,
you know, like a lot of insight and it's like
it's uncannily good.
Speaker 1: What do you think? Okay, now now let's talk about
the dark shit, because this is all cool stuff. But
like the flip side of the coin would be not
just job orradication, Like what are some other things I
mean like that this could be used for. I mean,
it could be used to create new to devise new
ways to extract money from people, create more of a
capitalist consumer healthscape than we are.
Speaker 2: People are always doing that are always doing they've been
doing that ever since the money got invented. Is how
to get more of it? But yeah, I mean, it's
definitely taking a lot of people's jobs. And one thing
is like you know, usually you call up somebody on
the phone and you talk to a real person, but
now a lot of times you're talking to an AI
and they've just cloned the voice of a real person.
And now you can just clone anybody's voice, and you know,
you can kind of tell now because there's a little
bit too much of a pause in between, So.
Speaker 1: There will be AI where it's almost hard to tell
that it's there already.
Speaker 2: Is. Yeah, you can't can't really tell if you're talking
to a real person or not. And you know that's
not really that terrible because you call up a customer
service representative and you know, if it's AI, then they
know like every problem in their knowledge base, which most
of these customer service representatives don't really, but if you
can't talk to a real person, that could get pretty
annoying if it's not really in their knowledge base. So
you know, how it's could be deployed well, or it
could be deployed badly. It just really depends. But you know,
it's definitely going to take half of the people's jobs.
And what happens if half of the people in the
world are unemployed, that's gonna.
Speaker 3: Really up not in a good way, because when you
have half of twice as many workers, then you you
don't have to pay anybody very much anymore.
Speaker 2: You got this so much surplus.
Speaker 1: Now you have this surplus populist and know you've got
to get rid of themselves. So you got to start
a war, you know, that's the potential.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, worlds these days don't don't usually kill
enough people to really make a dent in the population.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, maybe you got to invent some sort of
I don't know, there's all sorts of humans are so
good at thinking a terrible shit too. Yeah, we're so
lost as a civilization. I feel like we're just like
flailing with only you know, a handful of religions to
guide us and give us any direction, and even those
I mean obviously gets so thoroughly corrupted and off off
the rails. Okay, well, I guess I guess we can
move on from that topic. But regarding the silosophy, there's
new species that would have been development since philosophy. In
the genus, there's a couple of new species been described,
and then it was it turns out that cyan essens
and azorescans and all these species that were in the
Northwest down to like northern California, Like this cluster of
species is quite likely Australian.
Speaker 2: Yeah, these things all probably came from Australia in the
last years. You could probably you could go call them
all suburuginosa. But you know, if you for anybody that's
actually hunting Salasa bey in the Northwest, it's pretty easy
to tell apart the Lennii, the Azores sens, the cia sense.
So you know, I think probably they'll end up being
described at the variety level, it all be varieties suburugenosa,
but you know, it's all the same same mushrooms as
however you want to call them. As kind of a
matter of personal part.
Speaker 1: With these different varieties, you think they're just ecotypes that
have evolved in the last two centuries or what I
would do, it's.
Speaker 2: Really hard to tell how long they've actually how long
ago they've actually evolved. They're definitely I would say it
a little longer, because they're they're definitely different, very consistently different.
And I think mushrooms evolved pretty slowly, Like it takes
a few thousand years for mushroom to evolve, and so
you know, at the very minimum.
Speaker 1: For populations to change exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they don't. They don't change too rapidly. But there's
you know, there's there's more and more people are doing
more and more DNA bar coding. There's there's more and
more new species of every genus being discovered. Recently, when
turned up in southern California that people thought with silosabio
Vodio cystidiata, but it turns out that we're calling it
silosip species CO two now and it also turned up
in South Africa. So that's that's another one. It's going
to be published soon. There's there's a ton of new species.
There's bluing cornosibes or what they used to call it
blue or then more recently blueing filly of Tinas. They
got a new genus a few months back, so.
Speaker 1: Is that bluing psilocybin yah.
Speaker 2: So these are orange bort things and now they're called conasbula.
And there's a few species. I think the ones in
Europe are undescribed, but they call it kind of Sibulis cyanipus.
Speaker 1: But it did. But going back to this one in
South Africa and Southern California, a disjunction like that. It's
probably human transport obviously.
Speaker 2: Kari, but it's really hard to tell how things are transported.
And also like for wood lovers, one way that they
get transported a lot is just on driftwood. So you know,
a whole storm comes and washes a lot of wood
into the water in Australia, that'll wash up on beaches
all over the world and can move wood lovers like
sit like eight weeks or even longer of being inundated
withsault on. Yeah, it was in the middle of that
of the log. You know, it's pretty protected. So yeah,
driftwood is a really good way for fun dried across
the ocean.
Speaker 1: So many things have to happen though.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's got to wash up, probably on another storm
wash up and kind of like getting get a good
foothold and in the new place.
Speaker 1: Because but with plants, it's I mean the only big
I mean, I guess there's the two methods that dispersal
are birds or which you know normally you can tell
from flight paths, I mean, like migration patterns. Like that's
why there's so many you know, South American and North
American disjunctions. You look at the migration patterns or yeah,
or debris rafts, but you know, most of the lineages
and like whole clades of plants with it. You know,
there's exceptions of everything, but for the most part, they've
been restricted to certain continents.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but you know, a hurricane comes, how many pieces
of drift would go into the ocean, probably a million. Yeah,
and if there's like one in ten thousands of them
actually take hold, that's a lot of introduction, don't just
get But usually when things get introduced, they don't take off.
Like a lot of people will take silosophy spores of
rare species, drop them in mail, and then somebody else
on another continent will cultivate it like in their garden outdoors,
and millions of spores of flying to the environment. But
you mushroom hunters in these areas don't start seeing the species.
Usually occasionally they do. Like there was the Golden oyster
is oyster from China and it started getting cultivated the
United States, and all of a sudden, it's all over
the east coast eastern United States. And it's kind of
one of those things kind of like a raspberry where yeah,
it's invasive, but also it's delicious, So it's hard to
be too bad at it, and the jury is really
out as to whether it's bad or how bad it is.
I think it probably does choke out some native species,
but compared to like leveling a forest to make a
parking lot or a shopping mall, I don't think it's
very bad at all with that.
Speaker 1: But some invasives can certainly be the.
Speaker 2: Yeah no, I'm talking about like invasive mushrooms. Yeah, yeah,
you know, I don't think it's really that bad. But
also it's really hard to tell how bad the invasive
fungi plant pathogens. Of course, they can be terrible because
it's the sudden oak death, the water, which yeah, basically
a lot of those things. Mushrooms are pretty benign by comparison.
Speaker 1: Fabola, what is that really invasive one?
Speaker 2: Yeah, the Fava calosera. It's you know, described from Madagascar,
but they call it a ping pong bat and it
looks like a bright, fluorescent orange ping pong padal with
little holes on the other side, beautiful mushroom. It's it
was super common in New Zealand where it's invasive, but
it's kind of hard to be mad at it because
it's such a beautiful photographic subject. But then for the
first time it was found in California, and so this
lady found it posted it on Facebook, and I'm like, hey,
can you show me the spot? And she showed me
where it was. There was this little powerk in San Bruno,
just south of San Francisco, and I went out there
and there was this one coast live oklog that was
covered in absolutely stunningly beautiful favolaci at Calisera and so
I got really nice, focused tacked pictures of it, and
I think it's my top most favorited I naturalist observation
now really. But it's the only time that favalacci has
been found in California.
Speaker 1: It's about to be found a lot more.
Speaker 2: Probably, yeah, I think.
Speaker 3: And we took it and we put it on augur
and it does grow on auger and stuff like that.
You know, I'm not going to introduce it more just
because you know, if it happens, it's going to happen
without my help. But yeah, it probably will take over California.
Speaker 1: But it's not pathogenic.
Speaker 2: Just I don't think it's too Palpa Johnni. It's just
kind of breaking down wood, turning wood into high quality
soil and it'll probably choke out a few native sapatrophs.
But you know, nothing on the scale of what humanity
does when when they build a new city.
Speaker 1: No, totally, but this is humanity. I mean humanity is
the reason it got there too at the same time, so.
Speaker 2: It's maybe though nobody I don't think anybody is cultivating that,
so you never really know. It could have come through
a bird, it could have come on drift wood, it
could have come on the bottom of somebody's shoes. Yeah,
it's just different international flights here all.
Speaker 1: This stuff for people at the Nine Basin. Like with plants,
it's all the time like, oh well it's they compare
it to you know, it's not as bad as this.
It's like, well it doesn't. That's like an that's a
whole other thing. It's like it it's different with funny
and it's different with this fable lash year. It's probably
not going to be that bad. But I've just seen
so much wreckage, you know, Like what we end up
approaching is like a homogenization of Earth's life forms.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not good, but it's also really hard to measure,
Like how do you how can you measure how bad
this mushroom is. You know, if it's not killing anything directly,
but it's this mushroom.
Speaker 1: No, I'm talking about just invasive.
Speaker 2: Invasive plants are a whole different thing than fungi. Like
you know, as far as picking goes, if you pick
a rare plant, then it's gone. You pick a rare
mushroom and it just really helps us spread around it.
But yeah, like the invasive species, all the invasive grasses
of choking out so many native how native species, and
it's really obvious you go there and there's just invasive
as far as you can see in the native ones
is barely poking through.
Speaker 1: Struggling to survive. That's why they require active management, which
is another thing people are like, oh, well, it's you're
never going to get all of it, and it's well,
if the point isn't they get all of it. It's
like the preserve a little bit of this piece of
the living machine. So until something can adapt and evolve
to maybe exploit the abundance of this invasive which will
happen eventually. It might take five thousand years, it might
take five thousand who knows, But.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we have a little group in elsa rito a
groat a couple times a week and cut the Scotch
broom from the hillside natural area. Oh yeah, that's a
bad one. There's a lot of it out there and
we'll never get all of it. But that's okay. It's
more fun. It's kind of fun just to hang out
with a bunch of people who like nature and free
exercise and so.
Speaker 1: And also I compare it to like cancer, Like there's
some cancers you can get that you can live with
and that will be you know, that can you can
keep subdued by medication. Would you tell someone who got
like a leukemia that's managable by medication, You're never gonna
get all of it, don't even try. And I say, well, no,
I can just take this pill and live with it
for another thirty years. It'll be fine. It's yeah, yeah,
it's it's it's wild though, but it's it's crazy to
see where this stuff pops up and how much human transport.
It really does kind of place the burden of responsibility
on human shoulders now to maintain and really like steward
some of these rare places that you know, can't compete
with these rare ecoisms and rare habitats that can't compete
with the invasives too much. And I wish there was
more of a program to do that, but you know,
there was more in the popular culture, in the zeitgeist.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, if everyone who got a gym membership
instead just went out and pulled invasives and cut down
invasive stuff, you know, you get really good exercise, but
it could really make a dad.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, easily, man, or just learn to identify it.
Just like. That's one thing that you do that I
love so much, is like you're so in You're such
a teacher. You're so into educating people and just taking
the time to teach fucking anybody anything about mushrooms or
any other facet of the living world that you know,
you you're knowledgeable about. And you've I think you've inspired
a shit ton of people. I mean, I know you have,
so it's pretty cool. I think you'll probably be doing
this for the rest of your life.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't. I don't think i'll stop anytime soon.
Speaker 1: Well, there, I could keep talking to you for another few hours.
I don't know. Is there anything else we should cover
before we dip out here?
Speaker 2: Well, I guess one thing we didn't mention is that
I Naturalist Project for our fore So you know, we
just did this week long foray in Ecuador, and we
set up an I Naturalist Project, so everybody who found
anything on this fora goes into the project, and so
you know, we could kind of keeps track of everything,
and so we got let's see, it was three hundred
and twenty six species of plants that we saw, and
that's that's probably mostly Joey just you know, with all
of those, but it's you know, those twenty five people
all kind of combined effort on everything. And you know
this week we had Andy Better, like can identify insects.
Speaker 1: He's in a tomology guy. Yeah, for mushrooms. How many
species of funny.
Speaker 2: One hundred and seventy three named species of fungiant probably
as many that don't have names.
Speaker 1: But a ton that are just down to genus or
family or whatever. Yeah, So what where I guess to
explain what this was? The people who wanted, like you're
gonna because you're gonna be doing this a couple of
times a year. Probably.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So you know, I came to Ecuador first in
twenty twenty and it was so cool that I wanted
to kind of invite people and teach people and be
able to kind of have like a trip that can
bring people down and teach them, show them all about
diversity here, and also like pay for my costs so
I can actually afford to do it. So this is
the third or fourth that I've done in Ecuador. We
did one in Colombia a few months back that was
really cool, and done a few in Mexico. And so
basically we invite the whole internet and you know, people
come and they send us some money and that covers
food and transportation and lodging for a week or ten days,
and then we just plan a trip where we visit
is any cool habitats as possible. This is the first
time that we got so many different experts. So, you know,
we brought Joey down to help us with plants, and
Andy to help us with insects, and we had Alex
and Zane who were reptile and amphibian experts, and so
you know, basically anything that we saw out there in
the forest, we had somebody that was an expert on
those sort of organisms. And you know, it turned out
really cool. The people that come in these trips are
you know, not a random cross section of people, but
you know, the people that know me well enough to
decide that they want to, you know, spend a week
or ten days in some other country with me. And
you know, I knew it would be really cool, but
it ended up being a whole lot cooler than I
thought it would be, you know, partly because it's like
Alex planned it so well and took us to so
many places because you know, he lives down here and
so he's he's a biologist that's been working down here
for years, so he knows so many cool habitats and
he knows the best places. And then a lot of
the experts that we brought in are people that he
introduced me to, and so it's kind of like, you know,
a lot of the best people in the whole world
all together on one trip.
Speaker 1: So I learned a ship ton about so much. I mean,
I I that's kind of what I do on you anyway,
Like I go out someplace, I'm just going to take
it in, note things, you know, and then research later
that night, make notes, take just collect again, just collecting
ship tons of data. But to have people who know,
especially with the reptile stuff, like doing a venom extraction
and you know, learning about the different ecologies of all
the reptiles and amphibians.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I missed that. What kind of snake was the
extracting from boutry?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 1: Yeah, like the size, Yeah, that was.
Speaker 2: A viper that we found out there by the cave.
Speaker 1: But he's got like a ship ton of venom from
this tiny live Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And that's one of the things that Alex does
for a living is to milk the venom out of
these snakes and then he freeze dries it with a
kind of this like homemade freeze dryer, and then sends
it off for analysis. They do, you know, GCMs analysis
and time of flight analysis and just to figure out
exactly how the proteins work and all of these venoms.
But yeah, that that was that was really cool. I
saw him milk a coral snake last time I was here.
Speaker 1: God, that's gonna be wow that the teeth are probably tiny.
Speaker 2: Barely bite you. I mean, he's been doing it for
a living for a long time, so he's got it
figured out.
Speaker 1: Well, how can people learn about this? Did you go
to mycena?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 2: So the website is mycena dot llc. So we announced
trips on there and we have a mailing list, so,
you know, a real low traffic mailing list. You just
to get a couple of emails a year, but if
you sign up for that, then you'll hear about future
trips or if you follow me on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram,
blue sky, you know, any any of those things. I
post about these things a month or two in advance,
and that's that's probably the best way to kind of
keep in touch and know what we're doing next. I'd
really like to do something in Costa Rica. I know
a couple of good mycologists in Costa Rica that might
organize this with. And also Malaysia. I know some amazing
mushroom photographers and Malaysia that are interested in organizing a trip.
Speaker 3: So what interests you about Malaysia? Oh, the stuff there
is are so different. You know, one thing that is
tropical still right?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah.
Speaker 3: One thing I like about South America is it is
very different from North America, but it's still the same
land mosk. So it's not so different that it's like confusing.
It's like things are still you know, kind of like
a lot of the same families and lineages, whereas if
you go to Asia, you know, it's not connected at all,
and things are completely different.
Speaker 1: They've been separated a much longer period of time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, And like some of the fungi, they are
just absolutely stunning. You know, stuff that you would you
would never see here, and so I love to go
there and you know, start to figure out all of
that stuff.
Speaker 1: From a plant perspective. It's really interesting too, because I mean,
I'm sure you would see you see the same ecologies
and the same you see convergence in the same morphology,
you know, the way things look and also the ecologies,
but it's a completely different cast of species.
Speaker 3: And even exactly, yeah, you got the same ecological pressures,
so you still kind of have the same sort of
forces shaping the evolution, but completely different lineages. So you're
kind of starting with different, you know, very different starting material,
but getting to a similar place. And that's really interesting
how all those adaptations work.
Speaker 1: Okay, well, I guess, uh, I don't know until next
time when I have you on the podcast. Uh, you
go to my scene it at LLC if you want
to learn more about these forays and possibly hook up
for one, and and then what else? Working where else
can people read about your stuff? Just your social media?
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, if you if you just search for
a name on YouTube, a whole bunch of different videos
come up, and some of them are pretty good. But
you know, generally, I'll make a post and I'll just
put the same post on Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn
and blue Sky and all the other ones if I remember, So,
if you just follow me on one of those things,
you can kind of see where I'm at and what
I've been doing. You can even follow me on an
high Naturalist and then you get like a day by
day report from where I am and what I've been finding.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I Naturalist is really important.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I Naturalist is the most important thing.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: The whole point of I Naturalist is too, is to
bring people closer to nature. And it's really good at that.
Like anytime I see a plant or an insect or
like in that I don't know what it is, I
put it on an I Naturalist, and you know, people
you know will identify it for me. And sometimes it
takes a couple of years before some expert comes along
and they're like, oh, that's super rare or that's a
really odd form of something common. But you know, it's
just really cool to be able to see, you know,
to keep track of all that stuff. And so you know,
I do a lot of identifications on there too, Like, well,
I'm here in Ecuador. I've been identifying all of the
mushrooms that are found in this country and reported to
h naturalists. So you know, identify a couple hundred mushrooms.
Speaker 1: Any identifications do you have on your inad? How many
have you done? It looks like three hundred thousands.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's over three hundred thousand now, so I think, yeah.
Speaker 1: It's teaching right there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we definitely fifty a day.
Speaker 1: We need more experts to use in ashers. When I
was in Brazil, it was such a bummer because no,
none of the botanists especially you've got all that diverse,
those diverse members of asteraci down there, really wild shit,
and none of the people that study those use are
only a few that study those groups go on I
naturalists and see what people have been looking at and logging,
and so because of that, the AI identifications are poor,
and there's just the whole wealth of knowledge that's not you.
Speaker 2: Have really good experts identifying stuff on I Naturalists, and
the AI becomes very smart and it's able to like
really nails a lot of time.
Speaker 1: Fongy identifications around here were like spot on.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, in this part of Ecuador, there's a
lot of biologists because we're the most one of the
most biodiverse parts of Ecuador, and the people around here
that are the biologists around here really care about what
they're seeing, so they're using our naturalists a lot. They're
taking the time to identify everything really well. And you know,
there's a lot of other people really interested in this area,
like Damon Tie has been here and made a lot
of really good observations. And so you know, in this
part of the world, if you take a picture of
something in nature and put it on I Naturalists, it's
very likely that the computer vision is going to be
able to tell you exactly what spaces.
Speaker 1: And you're making it better by going if you're if
you're an expert, you're making it better by going on
there and identifying stuff, even if you can just get
it to genus or something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so it's a really good use of time.
Speaker 3: If you got like a free five minutes of time,
and you're pretty good at some sort of thing. You
can go on there and you know, some people will
identify all the aerroids or all the cactus or all
the bees, and so you know, I can flip through
the mushrooms and just you know, flip them real quick
and just like can you know, identify a whole lot
of them very rapidly and it only takes me a
couple of minutes. But it really helps out a lot
of people, and it makes the AI smarter.
Speaker 2: And it also is good for me because I get
to see what's out there and then that can be like,
oh wow, it's really it's really good over in this mountain.
I'm going to check that out.
Speaker 1: And it brings more attention. It brings more attention to
these organisms.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you people couragees more people to use our
naturalists when more people are identifying their stuff. And also,
you know, learning these organisms is really the same as
learning a foreign language. I think it uses the same
part of your brain. So if you're identifying stuff for
other people and just using the vocabulary more than it
just like is on the top of your mind, and
it makes it much easier when you see it in person.
Just to remember it because you've identified it, you know,
twenty times for people in the last year.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well man, all right, well we'll do this again
in the next few months. I'll probably just do it
over the phone or something. But unless we're out doing
this again. But thanks for being down to come on
and thanks for all that you do and everybody else
used to have a good risky day. You go. Fuck
you so back.
Speaker 2: I have been hustle playing. We have been that outside
looking at.
Speaker 1: Passed off that the mole super son outside fin