Speaker 1: I went down on teta faster that to buy me
a dunk alcohol.
Speaker 2: I went down on tafastry, buy me a dunk alcohol.
Speaker 3: Told the man to put it on wall.
Speaker 1: Buddy wouldn't put it on drop at all. Man, I'm
dragging my straight Alcole.
Speaker 3: Went robbing on down.
Speaker 1: Thinking about dagging my fad alcohol. But wow, no guy,
it's JB.
Speaker 3: Huddle.
Speaker 1: He used to dance up on tables. He'd stand up
on fucking tabletops wearing a fucking turquoise fez. I don't
know it was turquoise. It was shimmery. It was a
sequin fez. He dump. He jump up on fucking tabletops
on the south side and he'd play his fucking he'd
be stringing a guitar with a play it with that
steel thing. Rested Peace buried in Beautiful Alsip, Illinois, at
Restville Cemetery. Born in nineteen twenty six at Blackville, Blackville,
South Carolina, Barnwell County, South Carolina. David, you ain't no good.
That's a nice song. Fucking eighty three. That guy died.
That was that was that. Those were the years for
electric blues in Chicago, like late sixties seventies, it was Uh.
I always had an aversion to electric blues because I
always picture growing up in Chicago, especially post Blues Brothers.
I was so used to seeing Caucasian dads trying to
trying to emulate it, and it was painful to watch.
It was really, you know, just no awareness, just you know,
unable to read the room man. And so I didn't
like the sound. But then I started listening to like,
you know what it was. I shoplifted a fucking three
CD set from a chain bookstore that has since gone
out of business. Maybe my shoplifting from it drove it
out of business. I don't know. Anyway, I was fucking young,
I was like nineteenth and it was called Chicago the
Blues Today, and it had all this good shit, all
these electric blues artists, and it had this beat up
picture of the L tracks, like the elevated subway tracks
in the snow, and it was such a heartwarming photo.
I mean, it was a fucking depressing photo because I
know what those winters used to feel like, with the gray,
overcast skies and the brown slush stained with diesel exhaust
and the L tracks all covered in snow. But it
was a the shit I found on that record was God,
it was so good. Fuck it was good. JB. Huddle
was on there anyway, walk up to another episode of
The Crime Pays About and he does a podcast. I am,
I'm so tired of hearing the whining. I don't mean
that I show up. Let me put this a different way.
I see, the world is dark, it's terrible. There's a
death cult that I mean, a bunch of people just
lost their jobs. I don't need to explain to you.
If you live in the United States especially, you see it.
And then there's the whole mass extinction, and you know,
people talk about climate collapse all the time and all
this shit, but people almost never mentioned habitat loss. I mean,
it's the amount of land that's just getting cleared for,
whether it's agriculture or just you know, dumb shit like
we do here in the United States Texas especially, like
you know, cul the sack homes that blow over in
a windstorm before anybody's actually living in them, thank God,
and that well, I'm sure there's a couple of people
that wouldn't hurt to get, you know, sandwiched in a
house that blew over. I'm just saying that's you know,
especially in a state like Texas, there's some fucking meatheads here.
There's a lot of wonderful people, but people are very polite,
but there's a lot of fucking meatheads here. I'm sure
some of those people are beyond redemption. Like, you're not
gonna be able to dose all of them, right, They're
not going to have like a fucking moment of MDMA
therapy where they're like, oh shit, I've been an asshole.
Not everyone's gonna do that, you know, and then change
their behavior. Some people deserve to probably get sandwiched in
a in a house that's you know, built by underpaid
labor with cheap lumber that was shipped up from a
pine plantation in Chile, and uh, you know, is in
a depressing, fucking neighborhood that paved over a beautiful limestone
prairie to begin with with, with absolutely no respect for
any of the things that live there, and no attempt
to save any to save any. So I don't I
shouldn't say, I shouldn't say think totally thank god, you know,
maybe thank god if some people there were some individuals,
specific individuals who did get sandwiched in a house that
blue But as it stands, the houses that blew over
in the windstorm up in Fort Worth, Dallas, that whole cluster.
Fuck that cement turred in North Texas. No offense to
anybody who lives there. You know, you gotta be honest.
Why where you live. I'm not attacking you, just saying
the infrastructure plan of your area is fucked. But anyway,
the point is a bunch of houses blew over and
nobody was injured. But I forget how we got that. Anyway,
the the fucking point was. The point was it's dark times,
you know, and politically it's just a fucking mess here.
The left lost it's mine the last five or six years.
They're still in denial about it. I mean, it sucks.
It sucks. It's hard hard to see because they still
don't get it and they just think that, you know,
they made it easy for the right to capture the
population of gullible Americans because it's faced, you know, forty
years of defunding education in this country. Most your average
citizen is not too smart, and so they will be
very easy to go into voting for people that are
going to fuck them, which is what happened it's what happened.
I know a couple good people who voted Trump. I
don't understand why. I don't get it. It's fucking it's
mind blowing to me. How you could. I mean, it's
so obvious what they want to do. It's a con
man sleep. It's like it's like if you get a
call from someone telling you to put money in a bag,
you know, pretending to be Like if you're old and
you get a call from someone pretending to be your
granddaughter saying, I need you to put this money in
a bag at the bus stop because I'm my car
broke down in Southwest Arizona, and this is the only way,
you know, I met these nice men. They're gonna get
this money and then wire it to me, and you say, okay,
I'll do that. It's kind of like that, like you know,
you know what this guy was gonna do. You know,
it's you know, these motherfuckers have been wanting to defund
the government since Reagan. This has been an economic policy
since the eighties. The government can't do anything right. Okay, Well,
so you're gonna involve this parasite, this sleazy middleman that's
gonna fucking extract. Like as he's taking money from point
A the public to give it to point B to
provide an essential service, he's gonna skim off the top
like it's a you didn't like. How is privatizing things
as opposed to something being run by the government where
it's strictly regulated. There's still a lot of bullshit that
goes on. There's a lot of fraud and fucking. You know,
everyone's trying to skim off that money no matter what,
because a lot of people that's all they know. They
just worship money. But I mean, how is a private
I don't know, the whole public private thing you want
to putting down? This is like a thing Reagan started
defund the government so you can give the contracts to
your private company friends, your corporations that your buddies with
that have been lobbying for you. That's the other thing.
Our whole government's bought and paid for by lobbyists, incorporation.
So everything's just everything's dark, right, I don't need to
get into it. You know, I've only had half a
cup of coffees. Still I'm not very lucid. I'm winding
my way through this fucking the beginning moments of this podcast.
But the point is, it's dark out there, you know,
it's it's dark out there for your for your average guy,
your average gale, your average they them your average uh,
you know, whatever the fuck you identify as. Anyway, I
think that was the whole big thing the fucking left
fuck up to the fike, the fixation on identity. You
just it's fine if you want to do it, but
not everyone's gonna understand it, and you're gonna lose a
large segment of the working class because you're gonna look
like elitist academics who are talking about all this fucking intersectional,
settler colonial. The fuck. No, no one's gonna get that
on the fucking lower rung, and you can't expect them to.
You got to meet them where they're at. So focus
on the shit that affects them, right, I'm not giving
political advice. I hate this shit. I hate thinking about it.
That's why I focus on plants. But it's just so
clearly obvious to me what happened. The left loss it's mind.
They were just incompetent and they just focused on the
wrong shit. You know, you could you could have those
those values be a part of your belief system. You
don't have to make them the central part of fixation.
And also, I think I dentity is just kind of garbage.
It only goes so far. It's not the same as
having social context for history and oppression and stuff like that.
That's the same thing. They're not the same thing. But anyway,
what happened happened. You focused on this dumb shit. You
lost the largest segment of the popular, so who snatched
them up? The fucking corporate fascists on the other side
of the oligarchs, and so here we are. That's part
of what happened. A lot of other shit went down too.
And if you disagree with me, that's fine. We don't
have to agree. We could still just listen to the podcast.
I don't care. I'll still buy you a cup of coffee.
You don't like what I'm saying. Even if you're one
of these fucking you know academics that I blame for losing,
for the left losing the working class, or if you're
like a Trump persons, we can get along. I don't care.
That's the other thing. I don't give a fuck what
you believe. If we disagree, don't talk about it. Don't
fucking talk about it. It's really simple. Let's talk about
the shit we do agree on. There was a guy
who worked with He was a trumper. I loved working
with him. He was funny as fuck. The minute he
started talking of his political shit, his fucking talk shows
that he was getting brainwashed and doctor and with I
would just shut him down. Now, Chris, I don't want
to hear it. Man, stop fucking stop. Don't talk about
that shit at work. Let's go back to making fun
of the company and stealing overtime. Anyway, So there's dark
out there. I get it. I believe that, you know.
I I used to get bad anxiety before I found
a way to philosophically cope with horrible shit. And I
still don't have a perfect way. I still let it
fras on me. But uh, you know, you find what
you can. You find a philosophical way to deal with it.
And what helped me the most, besides a ride in
sense of humor, was was plants. Was was fucking I
hate this fucking word. I hate the word nature, but
that was part of what did it. I call it
the living world because nature sounds corny, and there's a
there's a corny connotation with the word nature. He pictured
some blond guy with a fucking acoustic guitar singing you
kumba ya songs and shit and getting back to nature.
All this corny shit. You know, it's like a meme.
It's like a fucking it's just a It's like this subconscious,
subliminal thing that Americans have in their mind. Maybe it's
another cultures too, I don't know. I just talk about America,
but it's it's that's unreal too. It's like the conception
the popular in the popular mind. In popular culture, the
idea of nature is fucking corny. It makes me want
to peel. It's stupid. It's not real. The living world
is what's real. Native plants are what's real. Why why native?
Because that's what evolved in the place where you live.
I've said this a million times. Native plants evolve and
why plants because they're at the base of everything. They
literally bridge energy from the sun to the rest of life.
So the fact that it's been turned into this corny meme,
even before the word meme existed, is tragic because it
you lose a lot of people. I feel like the
word nature's just corny as fuck. The point is when
when the world is dark and it's all the human world,
let's be honest with what this is. It's a human world.
This isn't something outside of humanity. This is the human world.
What's depressing is other people. It's shit that other people
have done. It's societies, it's value systems. It's a whole
death cult that's created by people. It's only human. There's
a whole other world outside of humans and nobody. So
few people pay attention to it unless they're studying it,
or unless they like to go burning. Do you like
to do you like to go burning? Got a lot
of flint today? I'm sorry, Or unless you're you know me,
some crazy fuck who's you know, very obviously looking for
an escape from things, from things, probably on a spectrum too,
or something little asspy, little ass burgers. No, most people
don't care, they don't think about it, They have no idea.
I didn't think this. I had no conception of any
of this stuff. I grew up in Chicago just outside
of it. There was nothing around me. My conception of
nature was fucking forest preserves invaded with an understory of
buckthorn invasive buckthorn Ramnus cathartica, terrible plant nitrogen fixing, so
it can it makes its own nitrogen. Well, the bacteria
make it for it, the ectenomicy bacteria in the roots.
But so it takes off, it invades the understories of
the forest preserve. That was my idea of nature, the
forest preserve where you'd see a creepy, overweight man in
a mini van, probably masturbating in his car in the
parking lot, and then you would and then it was
mode fields surrounded by forest with an understory of invasive
buckthorn that was impenetrable and way too many deer and
nothing to eat them. And all the deer had ticks,
so the tick population was huge. And you know, these
forests used to burn two to three years, and of
course that doesn't happen anymore since you know, the genocide
against the Native Americans. So so it's just a fucking
landscape of mismanagement. There was nothing left. Prairie, which used
to be what most of Illinois was, only existed in
a few pockets. I mean, it was like zero point
zero six percent of one percent of the native prairie
was left because when the death cal got there. That
soil was so rich from millions, well thousands of years
of plants growing and dying, growing and dying, and all
that herbaceous material building up that soil, because that's what
prairies are, they are herbaceous perennials. The roots stay alive,
the top dies every year. So you've got this dead
mass that just builds a wonderful soil, especially if it
doesn't burn, made a really nice, a really nice tillage.
And so they took everything and they turned it into
depressing corn plantations, most of which is now by large corporations,
and and and you've got that, and then you've got
the you know, the big box stores and tracked housing
and everything is disconnected from reality. This is entirely make
believe world. It's all bullshit. It didn't exist one hundred
years ago. Most of it didn't even exist forty years ago.
It's all fake. And that's the world we grow up.
And so it's no wonder that so many people looked
at things like video games and porn. Well, not knock
anybody looking at porn, but you know what I mean,
there's a limit, there's like a healthy limit. Drugs was
a big one too, Probably not so much. Well, it depends.
I don't know our people still do it. You see,
I grew up in it. You know, in the Chicago
suburbs in a nineties, a lot of people were doing acid.
I think it probably did n'im good. I don't know,
is there's still acid out there? Is that still big
among the suburban youths. I know they could certainly use
some acid down here in Texas once a while, once
in a while. You know, you do acid once every
three or four years. Hey, you're good, You're fine. And
then some people, well probably just shouldn't do it at
all because they're a little prone to, you know, fits
of psychosis. But that that aside, I had no idea
I was growing up in Chicago. I had no idea
what was native there, or what a native plant was.
There was no connection, there was no baseline, and so
I was just I was pissed off. I was angry.
I was getting into trouble all the time. I was
looking for you know, I liked making art, I liked graffiti,
I liked all this shit. I liked the adventure. But
I had no context for anything in nature. Yes, I
thought of nature as the corny, fucking blonde guy with
the acoustic guitar and just corny sentiments, soft spoken in
fucking vanilla and boring and not just nothing I could
relate to. I was angry, Man, what the fuck am
I gonna do with this? What am I gonna do
with this guy? This emblem that I'm creating is a
figment of my imagination, you know, to represent nature in
the popular consciousness of a matrior. In the nineties and
early two thousands, it was nothing. So anyway. Then I
end up in California. I learn about native plants. There's
still a lot of public land accessible there. There's a
lot of wild habitat there. Unlike Illinois, I can go
look at these things. I think they're fucking incredible. It
feels good being out there. Initially, it just feels good
being out there. I don't know what anything is around me.
It just feels good being out there. And then I
start looking around and I see some pretty cool shit.
When I stop to look, I see things and I wonder,
what the fuck is that? What is this red lily
like flower? It's the juicy flower. It's got it's fleshy,
it's fucking big and it's growing out of a fucking rock.
What the fuck is this? What is this thing? This
is weird? Wait, it doesn't look like it should grow here.
It's growing out of a growing out of a rock.
What are these weird What are these weird trees? They
smell incredible, these weird coniferous trees. They're growing out of
an old what I can tell is an old lava flow.
Looks insane. It's giant black boulders that have just you know, uh,
just piled up. Looks like a rubble pile on the
side of this mountain. This stuff is weird. I want
to know more about this. This is some weird stuff.
I can't stop thinking about it when I come home,
and it just feels good to be out there. And
every time every time I'm in in a city or
around other people, or in you know, the driving to
these spots, through all the billboards and the fucking retail
outlets on the highway. Every time I'm driving through that shit,
I want to puke and die. It makes me feel terrible.
It's so ugly, it's gross. I could tell these people
worship money. I like money being coveredable. I don't worship it.
I think it's fucking boring. I don't want a shiny car.
I don't care about this shit. It's fucking stupid and
it feels terrible. I look at the billboard. There's some asshole,
you know who probably gets cosmetic dentistry, probably smells like
cologne and farts, and there's a he's got a shittying
grin on his face, and it's an ad for something.
It has no relevance to my life at all, but
he's trying to convince me that it does have relevance
to my life because he wants to sell it to me.
Fuck you, get away from me. You're a disease. You're
all diseased. That's what I felt most of my early
years getting into bodany. Before I really got into botany,
I was very misanthropic. I hated everything, and I think
that was a normal, healthy response to something that was sick.
Understand why I'm telling you this, because this is what
this is where we're at now, it's only gotten worse.
The world still makes me want to puke when I
look at the human world, but now I know there's
a whole other world out there that makes me want
to live and feel good. Why don't you get into that.
I try to tell people this. I try to tell
you know, you gotta look at this stuff. You gotta
look closer. If you go out in these places, you're
not feeling good, you're not spending enough time out there,
or you need to get hit on the head or something,
or maybe you just need to get those I don't
know where find it. Find someplace. Maybe it's just maybe
it's a fucking state park. Maybe maybe it's a national park.
I don't even like going to national parksing where there's
too many people, there's a fee. You're always getting fucked
with by uh, you know, by the smoke you send there.
Especially if you go to Big Ben. God, the fucking
the cops they are horrible, you know, horrible. They're just
there's they're mole security man. Well actually know Trump probably
cut their jobs now, so maybe they're not running anyway.
The point is you go to these places, you know what,
Go to a fucking irrigation ditch near your house, go
to a power lineasement. If you live in one of
these bleak suburbs like around Fort Worth, God, I'd be
so mad if I lived there, if I had to
grow up as a teenager at places like that, I'd
be vandalizing everything. I would have gotten into graffiti a
like age nine. You know, graffiti's fun because you're combining
vandalism with with a creative verge to express. Now, I
will say, a lot of graffiti looks terrible. I'm not
I don't want it on my house, you know. But
as a child, it's it's fun. It's a fun outlet.
You're not just I mean because I liked vandalism when
I was like ten two. We used to go, remember
my friend Chris Jacobs. We went and one time we
stole a super soaker and then we stole lighter fluid
like charcoal fluid, and we filled you know what happened.
You know where this is going, right, And we went
and then we just went lighting people's garbage cans. And
I think we actually, I don't think we lit the
garbage cans. I think we mostly just lit the lawn
bags on fire. They had these like three foot tall
bags of brush and leaves, so it was a natural fire.
It was organic fire. But we were just you know,
we went around lighting shit on fire with the facto flamethrower.
We were like ten years old.
Speaker 3: It was.
Speaker 1: I mean, listen, I'm not saying this was the right
thing to do. I'm just saying it was fun. Chris,
all of a sudden, you know, I all of a sudden,
I hear him say, die you alien bastards. Well it
was more like die you alien bastards. Because he was
ten and I see this huge ten foot flame shoot
up into the air from from behind this person's garage.
He didn't, you know. We were careful not to burn
down any structures. But but that's where we're at. We
were really mad. I was mad as a kid, you know.
I just I knew that there was I didn't. I
knew things were fucked. I just had a feeling. I
couldn't articulate anything I was. I was an idiot, of course,
but still I knew things were fucked. So anyway, I'm
not saying you should go do vandalism. Well, if you
live in a cul de Sac suburb of Fort Worth,
maybe you should. Maybe that's a constructive outlet, but you
should also be learning and reading and teaching yourself something.
Don't be a jackasses. They have fucking video games. So anyway, uh,
you know, you gotta keep your mind exercise. That's all
I'm saying. In video games, don't do it. Go do
you know, go do whatever once in a while. It's fine,
but you got to read up on something, find something
you're passionate about. Fine would drives anyway. So the point is,
just go outside and start paying attention to what you see.
Go outside to areas that don't get mode, where there's
not a lot of people. If it's just a power
line thesemen, or a drainage dish again, fucking side of
the railroad tracks wherever. If you live in Texas, you're
kind of fuck because there's no public land whatever. I mean.
Go to state parks if you need to whatever. Just
go out there so you can get away from people
and clear your head. That's all I was doing at first.
I used to I would just I was just hiking around.
I didn't even like the word hiking at the time
because it made me think of ARII honkys, you know
what I mean, hiking. I'm gonna go hiking. I didn't lie.
I was gonna go take a walk in a nice spot,
a nice spot, it's nice, it's nice. I was just
gonna go take a walk. And I started doing that more,
and it felt good. And I started doing it more
and it felt good. And then I started looking for
very specific things. I'm gonna go look for this certain
tree that I heard is supposed to be here. That's
kind of cool, very specific things. Then I started paying
attention to more stuff when things slowed down. When I
slowed down, my mind slowed down, I could start looking
at other things in these nice places. The place just
felt really good. I wanted to learn more about it
felt really good to be out there. Really kept really
kept the puke down from when I was driving by
the retail outlets, or the billboards, or the culdest acts
or or endless traffic jams of cars on I eighty.
But the more that I was able to slow down
and take a closer look, and then especially take pictures
of it. You got you got all got these fucking
cameras in our pocket. Take a picture of it. Take
a picture of what you see. It's interesting. Take a
picture of you don't know what it is, Take a
picture of it. Take a couple of pictures of it.
Pay attention to what it's. What's it doing?
Speaker 3: He is?
Speaker 1: What's it is?
Speaker 3: It? Just? Is it? Flower?
Speaker 1: What is this what is this part of the plant?
What is this thing? What does this do? Just start
thinking about it. You just start thinking about what you're
looking at. Just start observing. And the more I started
doing that, the more I started to learn. And then
everything I would learn. Every time I would learn so thing,
I'd have ten more questions, and it just became it
just started to become so interesting. It was like one
of those fucking trick photos that you know that you'll
see on social media sometimes, like a bullshit clickbait site,
where it's like a bunch of dots and you look
at it doesn't look like anything, but the caption says,
stare at this for thirty seconds, and then you know,
close your eyes or something, and then there's some you know,
some visual effect or whatever the fuck or you or
suddenly like you can see a photo within this image
that just that first looks like a bunch of blurry dots.
That's the same thing that started to happen to me.
I started to see more stuff that I didn't see
at first. Then it became fascinating, and then I became
addicted to it, and I started going, Okay, I'm starting
to get what this is about. Now, and I learned
that in California, and then I came back to Chicago
one time, thinking, well, I learned what the idea of
a native plant is. I wonder what native plant it's
We're in Chicago, Chicago area must have had its own
native plants, right, This is like twenty fifteen, maybe fourteen.
And then I looked it, looked it up on the
interweb and there was a side I think it was
like Illinois wildflowers. I hate that term two wild flowers.
It's a wild flower. It doesn't mean anything. It's a wildflower.
You get wildflower seed packets that have a bunch of
invasive European garbage in it. Again, it's this idea of
just planting for beauty. It's it's attractive, it's an attractive
Fuck that, fuck all of that. It's beautiful. What does
that mean? Doesn't mean anything? What does that mean? It's
Pretty's shut up. That's not the point. It's not the
point that it's pretty. It's it's what's its role in
its living machine? All this shit's connected? How did this evolve?
What else is it related to? What does it have
relationships with that live here, whether it's insects or or
fungi or bird whatever, like, there's certain species fungi that
specialized on a certain type of species of trees. Duff. Like,
that's a fascinating thing, right, that fungi had to evolve
a certain enzyme to break down the volatile oils that
are otherwise fungi resistant in this certain conifers foliage. Perfect example.
There's a million cases like that, and they're probably right
underneath your feet, they're right under your nose, they're all
around you in what little bits of habitat are left.
So I came back to Chicago. I was looking for
native plants, and then I learned about the prairies and
it fucking blew my mind. And I just realized how
much diversity there used to be and how cool it was.
And there were, you know, the prairies were these dense
thickets of fifty different species, well maybe thirty or forty,
I don't know. Not that man. It wasn't hyperdent hyper diverse,
but it was hyperdense. And then there were all these
special list insects and different bees and moths and shit
that only ate a certain type of plant, and then
those in turn fed, you know, right up the food
chain a bunch of different birds, and the prairie is
also cooling the land. I could feel how much cooler
it felt on a summer night, and you know how
pleasant it smelled, and how wonderful it sounded with all
the singing insects at dusk. And then I realized that
so much had been destroyed, and I was pissed. I was,
you know, this got destroyed to put up this shit,
the retail outlets and the billboard with the smiling prick
on it, really fucking morons. Who would do that? So
then I was like, I got to start putting more
of this out there. I gotta start planting more of
And that's what you should do too. Learn about this stuff.
The best way to show respect for something is to
learn about it. And I tell people to, I say,
go out and look at these things. Nature is the answer.
I fucking hate the word nature, but I got to
say it so other people aren't going to know what
I mean when I say the living world, the non
human world, the non bullshit world. The human world's fake.
It's bullshit, it's all bullshit. It didn't exist. This world
that we've created right now, this specific world, this didn't
this didn't exist five hundred There were fucking personal injury
attorneys five hundred years ago, or plastic surgeons or car salesman,
any of the shit. No, it's all fake. And I say,
look at the living world. I don't know what they
think I mean, and they think I mean I learn
about it, Learn about it, study it, ask questions, look hard.
If it's confusing to you, figure out what you're confused about,
and then try to answer that question. Fucking write me
an email. I don't care. I'll answer if I got time.
I'll keep it short. I'll probably use voice to text.
It'll be filled with you know, uh, grammatical errors, and
might get a wrong word in there too, because you know,
the voice detect technology is not what it should be,
especially when I'm screaming at it. But write me an email.
What do you think? What do you think it means?
Go out and commune with nature. Go forest bathe go
you think I mean go forest, But don't go fuck that.
Don't go forest? What is forest bathing? It's a corny
asque word. Go out there and observe it, directly, observe it,
pay attention to it. Ask questions, what the fuck is
this take a take pictures of it and and focus
on that, and it'll take your mind off all the negative,
dark shit that the other bipedal primates around you are
putting out into the world. When nature attacks you, when nature,
when nature kills you, it's nothing personal, and it's it's
it's you know, it's not the same as when a
person does it. It's not the same. There's no there's
not as much darkness attached to it. I mean, I
can think of some terrible ways to go out without
the aid of human hands. But but still it's I'm
just saying it's it's a much different flavor. And when
you start looking at the world outside of people, you
realize how much bigger it is. And you also realize
how much you can actually do to change the world
around you, just by by planting things, by spending time
around these things, by gassing them up, by hyping them,
by letting other people know that they're there. We evolved
with these things, with these living things. We evolved interacting
with them. This isn't This isn't a recent This isn't
fucking environmentalism, this is these aren't corny sentiments, This isn't
the blonde guy and with the acoustic guitar, singing soft
folk tunes, afraid to show anger or fucking you know,
throw shit. That's saying you should throwshit. But you know
what I mean, This isn't this isn't that. This is
what we evolved with. This is what for two hundred
thousand years? How what's the age of the human species
as we exist now? Probably two hundred thousand years, maybe
a little bit longer. I always thought it was two
million years, but I looked the new reason, I think
as like two hundred thousand. But again, what are the
metrics that they're basing that on, and what's considered a
human human Homo sapien. I don't know, maybe two hundred
thousan years. It's very short amount of time actually, But
for most of that time, we were directly interacting with plants,
and we all we grew up knowing the names of
them and using them. We can get back to that.
We let you know, technology made us a little arrogant.
There was also you know, separating people from their land,
which occurred both in Europe and here. You know, the
feudal system, hierarchy, some prick at the top enslaves everybody
forces them off their land, takes all their shit, turns
them into peasants and surfs. They're the whole thing too.
That was I mean, that was I think key in
kind of severing us from the living world. But technology
certainly further kind of enables it. But it doesn't need
to anyway. The point is, it's only recently that we've
become so estranged from these things, and now we just
ignore them and we disregard them, and we directly disrespect them,
and we wipe them away with the brush of a
hat or a bucket of a bulldozer, thinking it's nothing.
That is, who gives a shit? This isn't weird? What's
this stuff? What's this stuff? Is a bunch of brush.
It's a bunch of it's a bunch of bushes. It's
it's just brush. Fucking ignorant statements.
Speaker 3: Man.
Speaker 1: The roots are holding the land together, preventing erosion, sucking
up moisture, preventing flooding, preventing runoff, also cooling the land.
Plants our nature's swamp cooler. You got a apple, transpirational cooling.
Not to mention all the life that they support. I've
seen this with all the lawns I've killed. I've killed
probably thirty five lawns now. I mean, there was something
for that stupid TV show which they took down. They
took down off YouTube. Someone needs to go pirate it.
I don't think anybody from birth x is even listening
to my podcast, thank god, but if they were, I
guess I'm okay with saying go pirate it. Somebody else
pirate it and put it up on YouTube, and then
it got shut down. And I had like a two
minute segment that earth X said I could put up
on the Crime Pays YouTube and that got flagged with
copyright too. I could probably get it, okay, but I
don't even want to bother trying to write someone at
earth x, a small scale cable network that was really
a billionaire's pet project, and I think, is are they
still around her? They go under they don't know what
they're doing. They don't know what they're doing over there.
They were gonna stream, and then they decided to sell
their content to a cable network because they wanted to
make sure nobody could watch it, and of course that
didn't work out for them because nobody had access to
their content and could see what they were doing so
they got you know, they got a quick buck in
the in the form of that sale to cable channel
two sixty seven. Help, I'll remember the channel to sixties.
I'll be sure to tune in versus if you could
just go to a website and stream it. Fucking idiotic move.
But uh, anyway, but kill your Lawn was on YouTube,
but it's not. I don't think it is anymore. But
someone needs to pirate it. Maybe you could do a
torrent of it. Anyway, I've killed a bunch of lawns,
and I've done a bunch of just friends lawns. You know.
I had like a friend who like to a friend
that was a couple. They got four kids. One works
in a coffee shop, the other's a school teacher. They
don't have money for this shit. Said, fuck it, I
want I just want to. I walk by your house.
You've watched my dogs when I go out of town
sometimes and i'm and my kid plays with your kid.
I'm just gonna kill your fucking lawn. Just rent, just
rent the sod cutter and I'll do the rest. I'll
get all the plants whatever. And so I did. I
killed that lawn. I've killing another lawn on the other
side of town. I've done that. I've done that alone
probably a dozen and a half times, which I really
shouldn't be. I don't have time for this shit, but
I like doing it. You could do that too, if
you get time. Even just planting like a little patch
it like a six x eight patch of native plants,
like native herbaceous perennials, shrubby shit, or you know, stuff
where the roots stay alive in the tops eyes though
that's an actual herbasious perennial. The tops die every year.
Do that in your yard or someone else's. If you
don't have a yard, just be collecting seeds and sprinkling
them along fence lines, go out and start planting shit.
Then you know, if you just what I was doing
last week, I was taking a gave pups and just
planting them along fence lines near my house, taking advantage
of a light rain that we had to get these
things established. And that'll work. A gaves are succulent that
can sit tight while it's dry and then grow. And
then my benefit is a year or two from now,
I get to see these massive things, you know, taking
up the fence. I get more plants around, I directly
get to enjoy shit that I planted. It's not my property.
It might get fucked, it might get ripped up by
some you know, moron, or just by some landscaper. It
doesn't know any bed in that landscaper. But like land maintenance,
a land maintenance technician who doesn't know any better, you
could do this too. This isn't hard. I know, it's
much easier to just sulk and say everything's fucked and wine.
I'm not going to disagree with you. Everything is fucked.
I mean, you learn about geologic timeskill, you realize that
it's not as fucked as it was sixty six million
years ago. That was That was That was an unpleasant day,
you know, when that six kilometer wide comet came down
and hit the You contain the you contain. But you
could do this? Why not? What else you doing? You
work in It's fine. Steal time from your employer. Learn
about this stuff. Steal time and just peruse I naturalist
and look for look for what plants grow around you,
learn about them and learn about taxonomy. You got a family,
you got a genus? Why is that cool? Co Because
everything's related in a family and they display similar characteristics,
like flower shape. You learn to identify what flower, what
the what the prototype flower is for a certain family,
and every family has one. Then you can learn to
identify the plants. You could see a new plant and
see the flower, see the flower structure, and say, I
know this is a mustard, I know this is brassic casey,
or I know this is astoracy. Why is that helpful?
Because then when you want to learn what the fuck
you're looking at, you can go on a naturalists and
just type in my area, my county, whatever, and look
up astracy and get a list of everything that grows
in that family. It's been documented there. Learn about the
things around you. This isn't hard. I did it. I'm
a jackass. I did it. I didn't go to school
for this stuff. Anybody could do this. Learn about it.
I don't go forrest baite. What does that mean? Just
go take a walk somewhere nice, and once shit cools
down and you feel a little bit better, start paying
attention to where you are. That's all it takes. Okay,
Now you just got to go out there and do
it anyway. It turns out shooting pigs is a lot
harder than you might think getting these things. This guy
came out to thorn scrubb yesterday. He had a thermal drone,
which was a real eye opener for me. I said, wow,
you know, especially at night, once the sun goes down,
the land cools off. Anything that's alive, any like any
vertebrate is comes up as bright white on an otherwise
dark gray background. Like we were like looking at rabbits.
You could see bunnies from three hundred feet above them,
and they appear as like this bright white speck. It's
crazy the thermal imaging. It's like a six thousand dollars
droney head. But we were looking for pigs. We wanted
to see where they're hiding because they've been destroying so much.
This is really a huge problem down here in South
Texas because you can it's easy to see how quickly
they can denude an area of the species of plants
that they're uprooting, like in our case, this really rare
plant called Mammillaria spherica, which doesn't have it's got big
juicy roots, almost peyote like roots, but the top of
the plant is covered in spines. You can't touch it.
But what they do is they uproot it and then
they chew on, They chew on the roots, eat the roots,
and then just leave the thing to die. And you
could see how I mean these things. You know, people
hunt them and stuff, but there's so many of them.
They breathe like rats. So you'll shoot one and then
the twelve that are with it get away and don't
come back to your property, to your land for another month.
And meanwhile they're just out there destroying everything. The only
shit that's safe is anything that's got a tall fence.
So now we're raising money for a tall fence, but
thorn scrub is like got a three mile circumference. It's
gonna cost twenty five grand to totally fence. You don't
need a tall fence, but four foot tall, you know,
not just barbed wire four foot tall. So the deer
can still jump in, but the pigs can't get through.
And uh, you know, you sink it like you don't
gotta go super deep, and they can still dig if
they want to, Like, if they're gonna they're gonna have
to put some work into it. But but then you
just you're monitoring the thing. You can see where they're
digging and then just repair it and also set up
a trail cam. There, we got it. We got a
trail cam, We got a pig brig. We raised money
to get a pig brig. This this certain type of trap.
I tried to write pig Brig and asked them if
they would be down to do like a sponsorship if
I did a video and they took one look at
the channel and they were like, no, no, we're wait wait,
that's not very that's not our flavor. You know, they're
they're gentle, they're from the South. They're gentle, they're from
the South. They're genteels, gentilly, they're from you know, they're
they're they're not They don't want any association with crime PAGs,
which I can understand sometimes I don't want any association
with myself either. But they didn't want They were not
into a sponsorship. So we had we had the they
wouldn't they They didn't even give us a discount. And
the lady wouldn't even write me back either, like Ambusher
with a phone call on her office just to be
not I was very polite, but I was, Oh, I
just wanted to know were you uh, you know, because
when I first spoke to her. She sounded so enthusiastic,
this is great, and then she took and look at
the channel, and the enthusiasm just it just went down
like uh, you know, like water flushed out of a toilet,
out of a vault toilet. Anyway, we got the we
got the pig brig out there, we got we shot
one of them, but it ran off. I think it
ran off to die somewhere. I hope it's dead. I
don't know. I really hate these things. They've destroyed so
much habitat. And you know, we'll we walk into the land.
We find plants, mostly this mammalaria sphere good has been uprooted.
And then you realize this has been going on for
a decade, and you realize how much more there probably was,
and it's all gone, and no one's keeping tabs on
these things, and there's like, you know, the rednecks down
here shoot the mountain lions too, so the only predator
they would offer any hope of killing these things besides people,
uh is is rare down here as well. So there's
no checks on these things. There's no checks except them
getting shot once in a while by a hunter. But
you know, so it's it's a fuck situation. So we
had this aerial drone. We were trying to see where
they go during the day, because they come out at night.
They come out at like two in the morning, and
then during the day they're probably hiding by a water
source or in thick brush. But it's been so drought
stricken down here that they like, like I said, like
I showed them a video I put up on a
on a YouTube a few months ago, they're even going
for peyote. They don't. They'll take a bite out of
it and uproot it and destroy it huge clumps, but
then and then just leave it to die. Uh but
you know, it's it's very bitter, so they don't. They don't.
They just destroy it basically don't even really eat it.
Whereas the Mammalaria spherica has those big juicy roots, but
it doesn't have those those alkaloids in it, those bitter alkaloids,
because all alkaloids are bitter, and so they'll they'll just
with the With the mam spherica, they can actually eat
the roots, and that's been a hot item. So the
only ones that are left are those that are surrounded
by like a cage of blackbrush stems, you know, because
black brush for Chelli rigidula gets it's like a multi
stemmed leg humanous shrub. It's all blooming right now too.
It's most really good. It's all blooming despite the drought.
It's so fucking dry. It's brutal like everything. Some stuff,
some of the shrubs we're seeing, like snake eyes Texas
snake eyes follow famous some of those. I saw some
snake eyes yesterday. It didn't even look drought dormant, because
a lot of this stuff just goes drought dormant. It
just looked dead like it just looked like it died.
Like we need like a good soaking rain. And there's
fog out there every morning because it's so humid. It's
South Texas. Member it's not really desert, it's it's thorn
thorn scrub. But uh god, I just hope we get rain.
It was so lush there the first time I saw
this land was so lush, and the cicadas were out
and sounded like psychedelic, and the miskeait was all green.
It was such a beautiful piece of property. And then
six months of a rough summer and drought and pig
damage just really fucked it. So hopefully we can get
it back up and running. But we're getting a shade
structure built, which is exciting. We'll actually have a place
to hide from the brutal sun which is coming. Man,
it's coming like April. It's gonna be out there, and
it's just fucking miserable every day. I mean, it's really
nice in the mornings, it's like eighty degrees at six am,
but then by one pm it's one hundred and five
and you can't be outside without just like sweating and
melting and it feels very uncomfortable. So anyway, but were
trying to find these pigs, and I think again, at
some point, we're just gonna fence the whole thing, which
is again gonna be probably twenty five, which sucks. It's
just this is an expensive project, but uh, you know
that's why we got the the nonprofit status. So uh,
hopefully we can get grants or something. I don't have
time to write grants. I don't know shit about this.
How do you write a grant? How do you do this?
I don't want to do that. Stuff that doesn't sound
but you go beg beg organizations for money. Yeah, I'm
sure in an age when the federal government is firing everybody,
because that's been their plan all along, Fire it and
give it, give it aver to the private sector. And
if you fire people, then that means you can there's
less money that you have to spend, which means you
can give more tax cuts to the rich pricks who
helped get you elected too. So that's another benefit of
cutting all these federal jobs. I mean, sure, you might
be making your pop your population dumber, and make sure
they have less access access to science and to national
parks and nature and all the nice things that some
people and other world countries have. We can't have those
in America because we have these rich pricks that own
everything and run everything. And also because the left fumbled,
the left fumbled so bad, got away from working class
issues and just focused on all this identity bullshit. I'm
so mad at that, man. I mean, and you know, whatever,
say whatever you will, it's not even about the issue itself,
the identity stuff. It's not even like whether I agree disagree.
It was just so fucking dumb. It was so tone deaf,
and it is It's like you have to live in
a bubble to think that shit is gonna fly with
working class people. And I'm not talking about just standing
up for people's rights. I'm talking about pushing it so hard.
I'm talking about making it central to everything I'm talking about,
you know, expecting, you know, some working class schmuck to
know what words like intersectional mean, intersectional, non binary, pan sexual, disabled,
chronically ill. I mean, people know what chronically disabled means.
But you you know what I mean, the whole shit
that there's just this fucking focus on settler colonialism, you know,
the you know, I mean, who the fuck talks like this,
Like Jesus Christ man, I just and I would hear it,
and it was so obvious when you'd see these stupid
posts on social media using all these words, going back
and forth, and it was just it was I felt
like I was watching the effect of people farting into
a wineglass and sniffing it like the same thing.
Speaker 2: Like we're part of this club. We know what all
these words mean. We've been educated in the social sciences
and humanities, and God, just shut up, man, Just focus
on getting people health care and education and preventing them
from getting fucked by the oligarchs.
Speaker 1: Just focus on those all this other shit. I'm not
saying you don't have to focus on it, but just
let it go into the background. It could still it
could still be like a static volume in the background,
but don't make it central to your platform. And they didn't,
of course, I mean the fucking elites on the left.
The Democrats killed Bernie, killed Bernie's chances of getting elected.
And then I feel like everyone else, like the younger
the younger folk, were just on social media talking all
this like academic buzzword bullshit and repeating each other's ideas
and just you know, but there was hope. Luigi gave
us hope. Anyway, I talk about this all the time.
You're probably tired. I don't care. That's fine. You don't
need to agree with me again. You just listen to
tuning for the Plants. But I lived in ground zero
of all this academic, the academic American leftism shit, and
saw how fucking retarded it. God, I'm sorry it was.
It was so just borderline insane and just like tone
deaf and just obnoxious. Again, not even the ideas, just
the talk, the like the fucking vernacular, the attitude like
you're gonna like lecturing people and privilege, like, yeah, that's great,
that's a great way to you know, you could it's
like getting again, it's like getting a dog to take
a pill. You slip that in after, you know, don't
be a dick, be nice, give them the hot dog first.
It's got the smoky flavor to it. I'm not even
saying you need to like not talk about that stuff.
That's real. Privilege is real. There is a you know
in most cases. But like that's just you sound like
a dick. You sound like a cunt. I'm sorry. Just
slip it in after. It's the pill in the hot dog,
and just be nice. Don't be a dick. What do
you think, Like, you know, the sixties were successful because
people weren't doing this shit to this extent. The shaming
and the shit talking and the it was just scot
It was so obnoxious to watch. And of course now
look what we got. You turned off such a segment,
such a huge segment of voters with your crazy bullshit
that they voted for fascists. Oh god, and they're still
in denial, Like, there's still so many people that are
in denial. It's just like, you know, I was, I
was part of the working class. I had a fucking
blue collar job. I saw the way people talk. They
weren't bad people. A lot of people got easily duped.
I don't know. Sorry, I know, I keep going back
to this, but I'm just blown away and it's gonna
get so bad here. But all he's saying is just
go out and look at flowers. It's all he's saying,
just go out and look at flowers. And it's a
bunch of bullshit. There was a post there was I
remember I did some post with Means TV, who I'm
not I don't really care for too much anymore. But
they had something they had to kill your Lawn. They
were really supportive of kill your lawn initially, and they
put this post up on kill your lawn and in
all these just like career political analysts in the fucking comments,
all lefties were like, oh, yeah, what a liberal thing
to says this is you just got to guard Yeah,
change the world. They're gardening. He's like, God, you're fucking idiots.
You don't even get it. You're so disconnected, you fucking clueless,
you don't even get it gardening. Shut up, you go
fucking go outside. What do you. What do you do?
You just like what you just on fucking line all
day like you just again just like sniffing farts, using
big words, reading social theory with no understanding of like
natural sciences or biology or evolution, like you've just you know,
you gotta get off that stuff, man, you really do.
It's not good for you.
Speaker 3: It's bad.
Speaker 1: It's bad stuff. It's like that high fruit thus corn syrup.
Speaker 3: Shit.
Speaker 1: Okay, we're gonna take a little break. Call my friend
Peter Burner, doctor Peter Bernher, who studied uh he originally
he's a Mobot. He's got a little cubicle at Mobot.
They put him up there on the third floor. I
don't know what he's doing up there. He's studying floristics,
so he's writing a book. He studied orchids in Australia.
We're gonna call him. He's a dear friend of mine.
I love the ship out him. Here we go, We're
gonna give him a little call. He's not picking up
picking up there he is picked up. There you go.
You're I wasn't sure if you put your phone down
I call you. You know I was calling you. I just
talked to you and I eat a sandwich.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, okay.
Speaker 1: We're on a hot you're on a hot mic right now. Okay,
we're talking. How's it going.
Speaker 3: Uh, I'm a little cold, but it's warming up here.
Speaker 1: Why are you cold?
Speaker 3: Uh? Say? My wife prefers the temperature of a house
to be at a certain level, but I'm I I
prefer it to be a bit more tropical.
Speaker 1: It's chilly up there. Yeah, well, you know, I I uh,
I'm gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you
because where I live, it's it's gonna be like fucking
ninety three today. Oh my god, it already sucks. Yeah,
it's not nice. So I'm like blast and ac I
gotta be like seventy four. I gotta get air circulation on.
I got a dehumidified, this little cheap d humidifier because
it gets so muggy inside, you know, and then the
dogs are oh yeah, it's already hot. I was out
at our conservation property yesterday, conservation property, and it was
already hot. We were like putting up the remainder of
this fence, and.
Speaker 3: How was the property doing.
Speaker 1: Uh, We've got to shoot a bunch of pigs. There's
pigs that run. You know, we're next to a few
other properties and so these pigs just we need to
raise We need to raise money to put you know,
pig fencing around the whole thing. But they've destroyed there's
a number of rare plants that were plants that are
now rare, like Mammalaria spherica and Mammalaria hydrae. They uproot them,
eat the roots and then leave them to die. And
they've got big juicy roots too.
Speaker 3: So okay, it sounds like I better write another check.
It sucks.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, thank you by the way for that man, seriously, thank.
Speaker 3: You for That's fine, that's fine.
Speaker 1: But we had this guy out there with with a
thermal imaging drone. We were out there after sunset. God,
it's so beautiful though. The Parakis are you know what
parakis are? These birds they're like they're in the night
jar family and they have this they have this really
beautiful call. They come out at night. Yeah, and they'll
like hang out in the middle of a dirt road
and uh and then when you approach, they like fly away. Yeah,
they're really nice bird. But they're out already. It's hot
as fucking yeah. It was it was warm, but we
couldn't We couldn't see the pigs. So like they you know,
they're probably a few properties over, they've got probably long ranges,
but they can't. They show up at like three in
the morning and then during the day they're hiding somewhere.
So we're trying to find where they're hiding. So we could,
you know, figure out if we could get over there
and shoot them. But they're horrible. They just you figure
the amount of damage I've seen them do in six months,
and you figure that over ten years they could easily
completely extirpate a species from a given area. It sucks,
it's brutal.
Speaker 3: Geez wow.
Speaker 1: But uh, anyway, I got your paper. You sent me
the pollination and Andrew Ford structure of some Amazonian licythidacy.
So let's talk what's going on here with these flowers, Peter,
with this family licithidacy order Eric Cayley's I've still never
seen any of these, but I read that they've got
a very complex flower structure. Actually, first off, we're we
uting this how they tell everybody why you got into
studying flowers, right, because I think there's this this and
you've written a few books too. There's this this unfortunate
image of flowers being associated with Hallmark greeting cards in
Valentine's Day, and just the image in the popular consciousness,
which I don't like, that turned me off from them.
But then when you realize the structural morphology of these
things effectively makes them, you know, puzzles. There's strategies here
that enable the plants to produce, them to reproduce, and
they become a lot more interesting. How did you get
into looking at the flowers and stuff? It's stuff.
Speaker 3: It's based on indecision. It's based on when I was
an undergraduate at the State University of New York at Oswego,
and I was thinking about graduate school, but I couldn't
decide what I wanted to do. Did I want to
be a botanist like my major advisor, doctor James Sego,
who is recognized as a famous root morphologist, or did
I want to be a zoologist? So when I went
on to graduate school, I met a person who was
temporarily my advisor, doctor Jean Bobear, and she said, well,
maybe what you need is pollination biology, because you're studying
interactions between animals and flowers and I went, oh, yeah
about that. So that's sort of where it began. And
I think I made the right choice considering my interests.
Speaker 1: I think you did too. But it you know, to
a lot of people, not you know, not anybody I
would associate with, but to a lot of people, that
sounds like it might be a boring field of study.
How did you get interested me? Well hold on me,
let me finish.
Speaker 3: To deal with But it's fifty years.
Speaker 1: Well hold on, hold on, it's not though. It's not
a boring it's it's fascinating as hell. And you were
one of the people who helped me see that how
cool this stuff can be when you look closer, you know,
when you realize that, you know, orchids are producing sex
pheromones to dupe insects, or Aristolochia flowers are trapping flies
and resembling rotting organic matter to do it, and then
trapping them with these little tricombs, you know, for like
a day or two to get them to pollinate. I mean,
there's a lot of cool stuff there. And I think
a lot of the initial averse to looking at plants
this way and being so almost willfully ignorant of it
comes from the way that popular culture has portrayed flowers
and flower structures over the last hundred two hundred years.
I think it's quite unfortunate. Actually we might disagree here,
but I think it's quite unfortunate.
Speaker 3: You know, No, I agree with you. And you know
one thing about what I've been doing, it gets better
all the time because the technology gets better. For example,
I learned over a week ago that there are there
is new equipment to suck the odor out of flowers
and get it identified. The technology for those continues to improve.
There is a woman who you need to talk to,
Monica Carlsenberg at the Missouri Botanical guard who's who's doing
a project in which she removes the scent from the
flowers and the climate fron And also this is a
tie in with Thomas Krowitz and thorium collection.
Speaker 1: So the protogenists, the proto gess aeroids, aeroids have a
fucking weird florobiology too, beatles mostly.
Speaker 3: But I haven't really worked on them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, you know, maybe you need to buddy. And
I'm kidding. I'm sorry, I'm just joking. What you're doing
is fine. You're studying Australian orchids especially, But I don't know.
My hope is that this is you know, that more
people start coming around and seeing this, and I just, yeah,
I don't know.
Speaker 3: I think it's getting better.
Speaker 1: It has been ruined, though. It has been ruined because
the associations, the cultural associations with the zeitgeist, at least
in America, you know, connects it to is other things beauty,
which is so stupid. It's the lowest common denominator. It's
it's that doesn't mean anything, you know. I see a
painting of a Chase bank on fire. That's a thing of.
Speaker 3: Beauty to me.
Speaker 1: Well, a flower is like so much more complex than that.
There's so much more going on with the reproductive morphology.
You could figure out what it's related to. Uh, you know,
we group plants, we group families by floral structure. There's
all these snapomorphis that make these things. They're just so
fucking fascinating when you look close at some of these
some of the things that exist. I mean, there's a
flower in Cuba that what is it, mark Gravia vigna
that produces radar dishes for the bats that pollinate it.
The leaves literally turn into like a little kite dish.
Speaker 3: Yeah, oh, you're putting it in your book. Yeah, Now,
let me explain about that. I have a book that
will be out by February next year. The working title
is Unloved Pollinators and Their Flowers, and I'll be looking
with each chapter at flowers that people have tended to ignore,
and they have a number of pollinators that people don't
like very much.
Speaker 1: Can I can I recommend the name? Let's let's put
the name. You could put that that title in there,
but I'll put study Unloved Flowers.
Speaker 3: Uh no, no, no, no, Unloved Pollinators and their flowers.
Speaker 1: Okay, study Unloved Pollinators and their Flowers, or I'll club
you with something rusty. How's that for a title?
Speaker 3: Good? Good, good. I approve with that.
Speaker 1: That would be my I'm going to write this the
second part to that book. It'll be about Okay, sorry,
go on, I'm just kidding.
Speaker 3: Well, that's okay, mcgravia. That I well, the last chapter
is the bat pollinated chapter, and so we will be
uh it looks at bat pollination in the tropical Americas,
but also in Fiji, where there's a little bit of
a problem there because they're one of the trees seems
to be losing its pollinators because the locals are eating
the bats.
Speaker 1: Jesus. Okay, so these are flying foxes probably.
Speaker 3: Right, Remember with that you deal with once you get
into the old world, most of the pollinators tend to beteropids.
Those are the flying foxes. That's right.
Speaker 1: Is that a family or what is it?
Speaker 3: It's a family?
Speaker 1: Okay? And so what went? Go ahead? Go ahead, I'll say, well,
I was going to ask you what I'm curious about
the chapters? Then like what what what pollinators are you
focusing on? Then?
Speaker 3: Okay, So the the the chapters in this will go
the pollinators of flowers will will go into flies, then
into wasps, then into very dingy night moths, and then
finally into into bats. That that tends to encompass the
animals a lot of people really dislike. But I make
a point that we do tend to benefit from this.
Speaker 1: No beatles beetles.
Speaker 3: Oh sorry, bega, oh thank you. Yes, yes we do beatles,
but we do them from the standpoint of some of
my past research with Peter Goldblatt on the flower beetles
of South Africa, which I know you've seen.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, Oh, that's great. You got mega Palpis caapentus
in there in the fly section.
Speaker 3: No, no, not this time. We I wanted to refer
to Leonard Tine, who we lost a couple of years ago.
Professor Leonardtine. He was the one who had a very
close look at mosquito pollination of the of one of
the Canadian American orchids. This is this is an old
story and I like to do that because it gives
us a chance to see what a torch race research is.
This all goes back to a woman named Ada Deets
in the early part of the twentieth century. Who she was.
She was looking at the plants in a particular area
and she noticed that that the mosquitoes were wearing little
yellow dots on her on their heads, and she reported
this to an entomologist. And so this is going on
like every twenty or thirty years, somebody has more to
say about the Uh it is a it is a platanthra.
It is you know, yeah, yes, uh up to sata
I believe is the species. Unfortunately you're interviewing me at
home and at the age of seventy two, I tend
I tend to forget some of the species.
Speaker 1: That's okay, man, I forget the fall the time. But
people could just I mean, it's fine, they could. I'm
sure they could look it up. It's still an interesting
I think getting it down to genius is good enough.
Speaker 3: Yeah. But and well, I just want to say I'm
from there. We go into some of the research. I
did it Australia with Wendy Grimm and song sing Rim Wren,
and we look at the midge orchids of the Australia
suburb and how they are pollinated by I flies and
Fritz flies. These are insects. People really don't like. What
the no, what does the name I flies suggest Jesus
Christ that.
Speaker 1: I didn't catch That's terrible. Are you know the flies
like the ones that.
Speaker 3: No, no, no, no, no, they're They're not the TC flies.
These these are tiny. These are only about on a
good day, a fat floor open fly is about uh
two millimeters in length, maybe three. And it's an interesting
story because and you can see this on YouTube. Uh
Doctor Songs and Wren. Uh. You can tell readers to
go to YouTube and look up Peruna stylus. These are
orchids in which the lip pebal has a joint and
they flipped up and down as the breeze goes by.
We've been wondering about that.
Speaker 1: Karunas stylus is an Australian name for the sharp and
midge or so these. But the point is, and this
is something that I think a lot of people, just
your average citizen has no idea about, is that it's
not just bees that do pollination. There's I mean, people
are so ignorant of the living world. I don't fault
them for it. You know, they've although the habitat's been
destroyed and they've been disconnected and severed from it. They're
kept from it in many places, but they don't even
know that flies. I mean, I had a there's a
really cool Texas native Senegaliara Mariana flowers smell fucking incredible.
It's got those little catcloth thorns on it. It gets
they can get like twenty feet, but the one in
my yard is like ten feet. The whole thing last
year when it was blooming, which smelled really nice to
walk by, it was covered in flies, but not just
like the shit flies. All different kinds of Diptero.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: Diptera is the order of flies, right, Yeah, and it
was really uh it was. It was exciting for me
to see because I was you know, I don't know,
I just I assumed it would be bees. I also
like seeing the native bees that come by. I've gained
kind of a contempt for European honeybees. They kind of
bumm me out. Castilla erecta simaru Basi was blooming yesterday
at our conservation property and there were a lot of
honey bees on it, which means they're Africanized. They're the
aggressive ones if you get near their nest. But the
sweat bees I love where I figure when the last
time I saw a sweat bee was speaking of insects
that come and land on you, like the like the
eye flies. The sweat bees are kind of cute. I
don't mind them so much. They come and they just
they literally just lick your sweat. They got kind of
a nice color to them. Anyway, did you finish this
book already?
Speaker 3: Yes?
Speaker 1: God, damn, I didn't know you were even working on it.
I mean, I knew you were working on it, but
when did you start?
Speaker 3: Well, actually I started it. It's now close to three years.
It's a COVID book. You know what I mean.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it made me feel bad about myself. My
book is not neither one is done yet.
Speaker 3: All right, well it was done. I basically wrote it
over a over a suburb. But then there was a
problem getting getting a publisher. I never had that kind
of trouble before. But boy, look, the publishing industry isn't
a mess for a number of reasons. You don't want
to go into that. It's not that kind of if.
This is not that kind of audio.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, let it beat his kind of audio. Because
they are there. It's like everything they're cutting jobs. One
of the publishers I'm working with has been great, she
gets back to me, and then the other one, literally,
this poor girl, she's like twenty six. They hired her,
they're underpaying. And then the guy who was supposed to
read the manuscript I submitted, which I ended up I'm
only going to use like twenty percent of it, not
even never fucking read it. And then she was pushed
It was pushed off on her, and I feel bad
for her, and I always have to tell her, like,
my problem is with the publisher, not with you. I'm
really you know, I have to make sure she understands like,
I've got no beef with her because I tend to
be kind of healthy and complain a lot. But yeah,
it's a mess, man. And this my book was supposed
to be done last year. I submitted. They didn't even
read it again, thank god, because whatever. And then the
guy that they got doing the layout, he makes the
fucking the pictures look like a health insurance brochure. It's not.
It's horrible, So I'm gonna have to do it. That's
what Michael Simpson, who wrote Plant Systematics, told me too.
He's like, if you don't want it to get fucked up,
you're gonna have to do the layout yourself. You can
have to teach yourself in design and do the layout yourself,
which means I'm doing it for free because they're not
going to pay me anything else. So anyway, it's a mess.
But you've written what were the three other books you've
You've written two books in one, you've edited one. Let's
go through there for everybody listening.
Speaker 3: The first book, which is still in press, that came
out in nineteen eighty nine, that was Wildly Violence and
Underground Orchids.
Speaker 1: What's the underground orchid species? What tell everybody, because this.
Speaker 3: Is from Raisin Fella Riisin Fella. And in fact I
wrote that chapter before I had actually seen the orchid.
I did not get to see that orchid until nineteen
ninety when I temporarily joined the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney,
and I was asked to write a part of a
small part of volume four of the Floor of New
South Wales. This is.
Speaker 1: Right, sorry, so get it out. That's good, get it out.
Speaker 3: It's just sinuses this time of the year. But there
is a genus of orchid in Australia called Riisin Fella
riisin fella meaning root flower it and it does not
produce chlorophyll. It has a very complex relationship with melt
with the with a fungus that is an endosyndiant or
is it an ecdo cyndia. I never remember of broom honey,
myrtle mel luca. So the orchid is benefiting off of
the symbiotic relationship. It's it's basically a parasite of the fungus,
whereas the fungus is looking for bush.
Speaker 1: It's a Michael heterrotroph But tell everybody what pollinates this
this weird ass plant. Tell everybody what pollinates what ponies?
Speaker 3: Uh? It appears to be leansy forid flaw. Uh. Gee,
that's a new one on me. No, I don't think
I believe it's it's it's fought. We will have to
look in look into that. What happens is that the
the orchid lives underground all its life, but when it
decides to have sex, it produces a flowering cup at
its top, which just casually pushes up the humus and
detritus on the forest floor, leaving little cracks for the
flies to enter.
Speaker 1: But it flowers like basically underground.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's basically the fly has to go down
into this chamber that's made by the circle of bracks.
It's a little bit like your It's almost as if
an orchid decided to act like one of your one
of your beloved members of the astor racing. The orchid
fire forms a capitulum, and.
Speaker 1: There's tiny flowers. Oh my god, this thing is weird.
Speaker 3: Now there is.
Speaker 1: I didn't realize it. Oh my god, there's tiny flowers
on the inside of this. What a fucking bizarre organism.
How how old is this? I wanted the evolutionary age
and how did the fuck did this thing evolve under?
What selection pressures? Like, how does that happen?
Speaker 3: I will I really don't know, but in this but
but let's let's let's look at it this way. This
is Australia. There has been a great deal of diversity
over time over the the family Orchidoity and.
Speaker 1: The subfamily Orchidoity.
Speaker 3: The subfamily Orchidolity, And uh, when do you think about it? Uh,
when you were dealing with a with a part of
the world that becomes seasonally dry, perhaps remaining underground in
a relatively moist spot under a bush might be one
of the better ways to handle it. And as far
as exploiting little flies, well that's very, very common in Australia.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, okay, hold on, yeah, what is the host
plant for the fungus? This is a micoheterotrophic plant, so
it's a plant that basically steals from fungus. But I
don't even like anthropomorphizing that because maybe the fungus is
letting it hang on. I don't know, we don't really
understand this relationship. But either way, this thing is not photosynthesizing, right,
this plant is not photosynthetic, so it's taken from the fungus.
What is the host plant that this micorrhizal fungus. It's
a fungus that's symbiotic with most plants anyway, what is
the whole Is it a eucalypt or what?
Speaker 3: Uh, You've got the right family. It's mercasey and supposedly
it's one of the common melo lucas, which are they
often referred to as as broom honey myrtles.
Speaker 1: So these are really important trees, a lot of these
mertaceous things in Australia, because they are literally the scaffolding
for a highfel network, a highfhel network of cool micor
rhizol fungi. So there's another thing about uh, you know,
this is an aspect a lot of people don't realize
is for these roots of plants underground are acting as
a scaffolding for a plethora of different organisms, whether they're
insects or fungi or bacteria whatever.
Speaker 3: So and that's what they Wait, wait, wait, we can
take it one step further. This orchid is also produces tiny,
fleshy fruits, so there is a suggestion that these seeds
are are being dispersed by tiny marsupials.
Speaker 1: What do the fruits look like.
Speaker 3: I've never seen them. The I just they're just they're
just the small fleshy fruits. Remember, fleshy fleshy fruits are
uncommon in the orchids, but they do occur. It's just
that we we usually associate them with the subfamily Banaloidi.
Speaker 1: Right, most of the fruits in orchidace are dry capsules.
They're the hissing capsules with tiny seeds. But but yeah,
I remember seeing a vanilla species in the Dominican Republic
that had a really squishy ass red fruit, bright red,
obviously conspicuous for it needs some animal to disperse it.
But there was like a gooey substance. It was really cool. God,
there was a ton of cool vanilla out there. Fuck,
there was one. There was a vanilla that grew on
an arborescent cacti, on tree cacti, and it had like
just it was just brown stems with barely any leaves,
tiny leaves at the nodes. I forget the species almost. God,
that was an incredible I would love to grow that vanilla.
It grew in thorn forest. It was a vanilla that
grew in thorn forest and I didn't, Uh, I don't
think I got the yeah. And I never got any
photos of the flowers.
Speaker 3: What a yeah?
Speaker 1: Barbolata vanilla barbilatta or venilla barba YadA if you're you know,
if you speak Spanish. But anyway, I was in love
with that plant. Fuck. I should put that in my book.
I still got time. Anyway. I don't have photos of
the flowers though. Okay, So how'd you end up in Australia.
You grew up in Long Island. How'd you go down
to how'd you end up in Australia.
Speaker 3: I got down to Australia because I got down to
El Salvador in Central America. Now I'll explain. After I
did my master's degree, there's something I had always wanted
to do with my life. I wanted to be in
the East Corps, and I was. I applied, and they
usually don't give you a choice at the time. They
just say, well, if you want to do certain things,
this is where you're going to go.
Speaker 1: Way, Wait, what got you in the Peace Corps? Because
it's like a way to travel without having to worry
about getting shut.
Speaker 3: Yes, and it's also a way to to imitate Charles
Darwin and to go to the tropics. So I was
sent to the University of El Salvador to teach and
do research and help maintain the herbarium with a wonderful
woman eighty Montalvo to eighty Montevo right, and we This
included weekly field trips and expeditions. We always found something
new and dur But during that time, part of my
job was to translate certain things for the students. And
I was going through a copy of Science, and the
way I go through journals, I start at the back
and flipped and because I was looking for something, I
wasn't sure of the year, and in the back of Science,
of course that's where all the adverts are. And I
saw an ad for the University of Melbourne that they
were giving out fellowships. And at that point I said, well,
I'm going to finish up here in another year and
a half. I got to think of what's coming next,
and that means graduate school to do a PhD. So
I started a I started a correspondence with doctor Malcolm
Calder of the School of Botany at the University of Melbourne.
Speaker 1: Well dead Nowady is still alive.
Speaker 3: No, No, Malcolm is Malcolm is living in Victoria in
Yarra Glenn uh uh. He and his son manage a winery,
and I hope to get back there and say up,
well the po the uh the contents. Next year when
the book comes out, you're.
Speaker 1: Gonna go down, or you're gonna get You're gonna go down,
or you're gonna get hammered at this winery to celebrate it.
You're gonna be looking at You're gonna be looking at
ri How do I get out to see Risent Thella?
Any Australians out there who can get me down to
see Risent Theella? So I don't have to threaten anybody,
can you please? I will I will self immolate on
the steps at the Sydney Opera House if someone doesn't
take my ass out to see Risa.
Speaker 3: Well the best I can do for you, because this
is how I had to describe the genus the The
Sydney Botanic Garden has a wet collection of flowers and they.
Speaker 1: Had well yeah, boys, okay, go ahead, right.
Speaker 3: Well all of the well, but you can also call
it a spirit collection. These are flowers that the well,
no no, no, we don't want to use formaldehyde. That
that that makes the flowers very brittle athough that's the
way it was done in the old day, seventy percent
and all I think is the best. It also leaches
out the colors so you can see the veins inside
various structures, which I think is very important. Well, they
had a horizon fella was the the original genus was
called krypton themis hidden flowers. But they had it in
a bottle and I was able to describe it for
the that section of the book. Very vary. So if
you can't find it in the field, although I'll bet
with all of your listeners in Australia there's probably someone
who can take you to a population. I would suggest
that you go to the collection which is now in
Mount Addam and have a look at it first in
all of its glory, because there's no dirt on it
or anything. And by the way, just shout out to
the Botanic Garden in Mount added You need to see that.
In New South Wales, you need to see that because
that has one of the greatest collections living collections of
Australian play.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I'm going back. I need to go
back to Australia at some point and spend like a
month or two there because there's a lot of crime,
pays fans down there, and there's some good people, and
it always feels good. It always feels much better being
there than here. The culture's just not as rotten. You know,
they've got free health care and they've got or affordable
you know, it's just it's just not as much of
a poisonous Uh. It's got its flaws, but it's not
as poisonous. Do you think how much dumber do you
think the American public is going to be after after
the next four years that we're going through right now,
you know, defunding science, defunding, they want to privatize the
post Office? And answer, how much dumber do you think
the general American citizen? And no shame to them, bless
their hearts, how much dumber do you think they're gonna
be after four years of this shit?
Speaker 3: I don't think it's even a question of being dumber.
I think it's worse than this, Joey, I think it's
four years. How unprotected we're going.
Speaker 1: To be unprotected?
Speaker 3: Yes?
Speaker 1: Yeah, and broke more broke.
Speaker 3: That's that's what frightens be right now, The indiscriminate firing
of people who have been protecting us. And I don't
know if we should keep talking about this. Who knows
who's listening.
Speaker 1: Why what are you worried about?
Speaker 3: Well, you never.
Speaker 1: I've already run my mouth so much about it already,
I mean anything a lot of Well, you're worried about
the secret police, You're worried about the cheeseburger secret police.
Speaker 3: I suppose that's what it's.
Speaker 1: Gonna be like here, it's gonna be It's America is
going to put such a distinct flavor on dystopia. You know,
we'll have our own pianom and squares. It'll be Yeah,
it'll be amazing in terms of like a science fiction
bleak dystopia. Okay, let's let's go back to talking about flowers. Now,
let's go so you ended up, So you ended up
in Australia, and then when you got there, how do
you I mean, you were already interested in orchids when
you got to Australia, because the Australian orchids, these terrestrial
orchids are especially weird. And that's when you were.
Speaker 3: Hoping at what Okay, we we interrupted the narrative. So
I found that I began corresponding with with Malcolm Colder
and then I applied for the fellowship, but I did
not get it because of fellowship over there is really
for people who already have their PhDs. Malcolm wrote me
and said, well, you didn't get the fellowship, but you're
like a scholarship to do a PhD. And I said,
oh yes, poyase because I had spent several months applying
to American graduate schools and I was invited to interview one,
and I suddenly realized what a mean existence graduate students
seemed to seem to have. Melbourne promised me better. They
promised that, first of all, you're not going to have
to take any more of these silly courses. We're going
to get you right into research. You're going to You're
not going to have to be a teaching assistant because
you have a scholarship. We want you working on this
all the time. And after a couple of days, dude
was snowstar. But I was trapped there at the University
of Illinois or body Champagne. I was more than ready
to go to Australia. Uh you were.
Speaker 1: You were you were living in Wait? Where were you
you were living in Urbana.
Speaker 3: No I went for an interview. Her name was Mary Wilson.
She's gone now. She was she was very important in
the early nineteen eighties for having a new look at
the reproductive ecology of plants. With all respect to her,
but when I realized, you know, the graduate students were
renting an old house. They were living off of cheese
and broccoli soup. I said that in Urbana.
Speaker 1: I took Champagne, Illinois. That's rough, that's rough right.
Speaker 3: There, which they described as a corn pit, which it
was that you had. You had to for hours to
find any native vegetation.
Speaker 1: Definitely doing acid in Champa. There's definitely people doing acid
in Champagne. I would I don't. There's nothing else to do.
You've got to do. You've got to do psychedelic drugs.
It's the only thing there is.
Speaker 3: To do there. You gotta do what you gotta do.
So I went to Melbourne and I stayed at a
place called Graduate House, which was just for graduate students.
It still exists in a in some way, shape or form,
and it was great. I had my own room. It
was a non sweet facility I had. They did that.
They had a restaurant. You had breakfast and lunch. It
was it was all part. It was all part of
the bill, and I could and it was about a
two minute walk to the School of Botany. And now
you're talking about let's get back to the orchids. Well,
my research, my PhD study was on the pollination of
ani Ema missiletoes. These are loranzoids very and it was
my it was my first continuous study on bird pollination
because they're they're virtually all pollinated by members of the mellafogty.
Those are the honeyeaters.
Speaker 1: Okay, all right, So they got big red flowers.
Speaker 3: That's right. They have big red scentless flowers and produce
a lot of nectar. And I worked on the breeding
systems of these, but I went when it was recommended
I do part of my study at cornerk. Now, for
some people, they'll know what I'm going to talk about.
Next to the outside bellbird. In a town called Heelsville,
there is the C. Colin Mackenzie Fauna Park. It's world famous.
This is the first zoo that bread platypus m hmm.
Speaker 1: Okay, So they're getting bang and they're doing they're doing okay,
So and.
Speaker 3: So that's right.
Speaker 1: Oh they got they got a nice flora there too.
Speaker 3: Apparently, yes they do. And because they had a program
on conservation of the native marsupials. These include small wallabies
as well as koalas, they maintained a a refuge in
the back of the zoo. In fact, it had originally
been a reservation for the remaining Victorian Aborigines. I don't
want to go into the Jesus.
Speaker 1: They had were not very nice to the indigenous people.
Speaker 3: They were, No, they were not. They still aren't, but
that's another story anyway. Because they had a field station
there of a nice field station run by a creek,
and that's where I studied. To wait, run what a
creep creek? Creek?
Speaker 1: Oh okay, you said, a creep like a midnight toucher.
Speaker 3: Okay, all right, this this, this is a creek uh
in which Platypus lived. As a matter of fact, Melbourne. Yeah,
I never had to worry about getting rid of the
garbage because the EMUs came and eat and ate them.
If you ever, if you want to see something amazing,
watch an EMUs swallow a lamb chop bone. Oh boy.
But while I was working on these two species, abe
a pendulum and abie a quandie, which by the way
to hybridize. I was the first one to describe the
hybrid between them. They had an area that they fenced
in to keep the marsupials out. It was a glade area,
and that's where I first found. I first saw in
great number a number of the Australian orchids which were
blooming because there was nothing was grazing on them. And
I became very interested, particularly in members of the genus Philomitra,
the sun orchids.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so let's talk about the plants now, because this
is what I want is really this is the meat,
This is really what I really want to get the
tigue on. So you saw Thelmitra, which doesn't have a
labellum like all the other orchids do. It doesn't have
a show well it's got a lebellum, but it doesn't
have a showy lebellum. It doesn't have a modified labellum.
Speaker 3: Ah, But there are two species that do, and their
Alpine they have a they have a scoop shaped labellum,
but they have a they have very reduced sculpturing on
their column hoods Now, let me explain about this. You're right,
most of the theelamitra orchids show typical radial symmetry of
their petals and sepals as you see in both flowers.
But what has happened This is something Darwin had a
look at in the nineteenth century thanks to his correspondent
are De Fitzgerald, who produced a fantastic Fitzgerald produced a
fantastic book on the Australian orchids. Is that they the
column the sexual orchid, sorry, the sexual organs in the
orchid that fused together to form a guynosthmium, which you've
a word that you've used on your everybody.
Speaker 1: What a ginos themium is.
Speaker 3: A ginosmium is where you have fusion between the male
and the female parts of a flower.
Speaker 1: Not to be confused with gnostigium, which you get in
milk weeds, right.
Speaker 3: Which is slightly different. It depends on who's who's fusing
with what. In orchids, the ginos themium is where the
style of the is, where the style is thick and fleshy,
and the stamen or stamens fuse to it along its
back well. In orchids, as Darwin pointed out, it looks
like in the ancestral orchid way back when we're not
sure there were three fertile stamens ah, But in most orchids,
what has happened is that two of those stamens have
become sterile. They are a wing like. They are referred
to as staminodia. In the sun orchids, what has happened
is that the two stabinold lobes, the two wings, have
had an increased fusion. They fuse to each other and
they form a bonnet over.
Speaker 1: They got a bonnet. So okay, so we got there's
three hundred and forty eight species of orchidoidy in Victoria, Australia. Okay,
so let's talk about some of these because these what
these are, what these are doing is pretty Do any
of them offer nectar? Do any of them do just
straight up quote regular pollination or are they all duping
insects and deceiving them?
Speaker 3: They sure do. There is one genus and this will
take us back to when we first discovered each other. Joey,
it's remember the genus present. I say, that's right, and
you gave a great and it was it was a
great video. When you were in Perth and.
Speaker 1: It was on a granite outcropping. It was on a
micro site. Yeah, it was like surrounded by woodland. But
then there's this big granite knob in the middle of
the forest and it was growing in a little crack
in the rock up there with some utricularya and other
interesting stuff.
Speaker 3: Right. Well, and you and you made a blooper. You
looked at the flower and you misidentified the parts because
there was one thing you you just didn't know.
Speaker 1: It would have to non recipate. It wasn't flipped over
it most orchids are.
Speaker 3: In most orchids, the labellum hangs downwards or from the side.
It looks like an apron or lip in pras of film.
The flower does not twist in the bud, so the
labellum stays upright and is like a little plume. That
is where the pollinator lads and it goes downward to
feed on the nectar at the base of the of
the labellum. And in fact, there is another genus which
is in my book which we've just mentioned, the genus
Coruna stylus, which is related to press of film. And
we found that yes, some of the species produce little drops.
We think our nectar at the base of the labellum.
My friend, the photographer Rudy Kueter k u I T
e Are, who does fantastic macro photography of pollinators. He
has a book called Orchid Pollinators of Victoria, which everybody
should own. He has found the droplets at the base.
But the ones that he works in Victoria, the ones
we've studied in New South Wales, that's me, Wren and Wendy,
that we that we've studied in New South Wales do
something very very strange. They produce their nectar drops on
the staminoes of the of the column. That's no one
else has really found that before. And that's what the
chloropids come. The eye flies, the frick flies come down
and drink.
Speaker 1: Wait, what is this that produces the nectar and the
staminos karuna styling. I'm looking, I'm looking at or dollinators
of Victoria. God, it's ninety ninety euros. I don't think
I'm going to be purchasing that one. I look for
the PF bdo.
Speaker 3: Oh, but I will give I will give you Rudi's
I will give you Rudy's email. There are there, there are,
there are cheaper roots. Weep them.
Speaker 1: But it's got a nice it's got a nice image
on the cover. At this this thinid, is that a
thinted wasp trying to hump the labellum, the callous, the
cali studdied lebellum.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 1: What's what, geniuses, I don't know what are the orchids
out there, but a lot of the labellum or labella,
a lot of the labella, and these orchids have like
these like these dark wordy spots on them, especially like
Caledonian stuff. That's because they're mimicking female wasps.
Speaker 3: That's right, and in fact, in a sister genus Kylo Glottis,
also known as the bird orchids, they are producing a
pseudo pheromone that the that gets the males very male, lost,
very very excited. Now Kingsley Dixon, who we both know
and are fond of, has done some further work and
he has found that there are some Caledinius the some
of these spider orchids, and that will also be in
my book, that also secrete nectar, and they secrete nectar
on the labellum, on the on the combs, on the
margins of the labellum. He took me into his the
living collection he had on going back over ten years now.
He took me into the living collection that he was maintaining,
and there they were these little droplets glistening on the
on the labellum, and I tasted them and they're sweet.
So it looks like, oh, let's go into this. What
happens in the pollination of these caledonias and these bird orchids.
Speaker 1: Well wait, wait, wait, wait, hold on hold, that's so,
there's a couple that's secreted nectar. But the vast majority
of the members of the orchidoidy subfamily are just deceiving
in Australia, are just deceiving pollinators. It's fake, it's bullshit.
They're just luring them in there and they don't have
to offer anything except produce this modified labellum that looks
kind of weird.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but we're But what we're finding now is and
this is not my work. This is the work of
people like Peter West and Who's Still Alive? Mind you,
I've gotta be careful about who who's alive and who's
not and Gigsley where they have been finding that within
some of these genera that we everyone thought, We're completely deceiving.
There are a couple of species that are still producing nectar,
such as the genus Diorus, which are are the donkey
or donkey orchids or the twin tails. The yellow ones
tend to be fake and they are pollinated they are
pretending to be pea blossoms, and they tend to be
pollinated by bees that are specialized to forage for pollen
and nectar on bees. But the white ones don't match
much of anything, and they make little bits of what
people call taste or nectar, just enough to bring the
bees to bring other bees in the more generalist foraging
bees to drink.
Speaker 1: Okay, so what are the main let's talk about just
really que weren't getting a nitty gritty, but what are
the main ways of orchidoid use? Suffer? The main methods
through which a lot of these deceptive pollination strategies work
mimicking female insects. Some of them are thought to mimic
unrelated plants that grow nearby, mimic the flowers of unrelated
plants that grow nearby in order that do offer nectar
in order to get insects in there. What else? What
else are they doing. They we've got some that that
uh not only mimic female wasps, but the the their
thig monastic the labellum moves and slams the coollinator. Why
did that evolve? Like, let's talk about those the hammer orchids.
Speaker 3: Okay, okay, let's just clarify things for the listeners. Yes,
there are sex mimics like the Caledonians and the drake
eas and Skyla glottis and well we're just going to
stay in the Australian realms of fla bel. But then
there are the food mimics, which are mimicing other flowers
that are that would normally produce pollen and edible pollen
and nectar, and those are as I said, the diuuris orchids,
and the theelamitras that I was studying, they all seem
to be food mimics. The theelamitras pretend to be the
sort of flowers that are normally buzz pollinated. They I
remember I talked about that inflated bonnet over the guynosthenium. Uh,
that usually comes with little brushes and little papilli. It
looks like an answer releasing its pollen, and that's what
the bees come and shake, but they don't get a
reward at all. They wind up carrying the pollinia off
on their button. Don't seem to know what's what's going on.
Speaker 1: Is there a genus nearby that these thelamitra? Is there
a sympatric genus at these the unrelated sympatric genius at the.
Speaker 3: Are lots of them? Well, Danella is one.
Speaker 1: Which is a sparagacy or a sparagaie.
Speaker 3: Yes, a lot of them are what we would call
pedaloid monocots. And what they all have in common is
that their bus buzz polony. There's also in the in
the udaetots there is Tetrathica. And then also there was
one of my favorite genera which I have studied. That's
that's the Bertia, the guinea flowers. Those are the ones
that produced little fascicles of stamens with little toys that
the tip and the bees come and shake them.
Speaker 1: Coming throughout Australasia, really arborescent one in New Caledonia, yes.
Speaker 3: Well, arborescent ones throughout Southeast Asia. And the genus Dialinia
and the uh and and it's an odd thing about
Australia itself. There are probably more different species of buzz
pollinated flowers there than anywhere else in the world. I
think I know why everyone says, oh, I see they're
buzz pollinated. They make no nectar and the bee has
to shake it out. That's because Australia is such a
dry country and the flowers are conserving their water. No,
I don't think that's the reason at all. I think
unlike other parts of the world with temperate subtropical climates
like here in the Northern Hemisphere, most of our woody plants,
most of our trees are wind pollinated. Not in Australia.
Most of the forest is made by nectar producing members
of the Vertesi and the proteac as you well know.
So in fact, the production of nectar by trees in
Australia lays the groundwork for buzz pollinated things. The bees
are going to the nectar producing trees for carbohydrate and
secondarily for pollen. But when they need lots of pollen,
they're going down closer to the ground and they're shaking
the tetrathecos and the danellas and the hyberthia.
Speaker 1: Okay, well, well, hold, but buzz pollination, which you know. Again,
is just the vibration of wings. And there's a species
of Crnodendron in Chile that's buzz pollinated by hummingbirds. Like
the vibrations of the hummingbird wings shake the anthers of
this crnodendron, which are poricidal, they've got a hole in them.
First off, you've got to tell everybody whenever you see
a hole at the end of an anther as opposed
to a longitudinal slit, that means it's probably buzz pollinated,
like tomato flowers, Like potato flowers, anything in the genus
so Lainum, you'll see it. You'll see a little hole.
You see. There's a members of eric Ac the blueberry
family that do that that are buzz pollinated. And this
is a way, I think to conserve pollen, so it
can't just all be given away at once by bees
that come in and they would just take everything. It's
a way to it's like a ceial dispenser. Again, I
tell people it's like the cereal dispenser at the motel,
you know, or you can. You got to pull it
each time to let you know, so eventually you're not
gonna get some you know, some fatty who's gonna go
in there and take like, you know, half a gallon
of honey a cheerios because he's he'll be there too long,
so because he can only get it out in little
whatever that you know is dispense when you pull that
lever on the and the dispenser thing, it's kind of
like that. So but why would more nectar production what
does that have to do with I'm not I'm not
seeing the selective force in the environment that's selecting for
buzz pollination.
Speaker 3: I suggest it has something to do with with plants
sharing a limited resource, and that limited resource is bees.
By my crude calculations, I suspense that at least ten
percent or more of the flowers in Australia, ten percent
of the flowering species in Australia make no flower nectar
at all. So what do you have. You have a
canopy that is made primarily of trees that are making nectar.
You have a shrub layer and a herbaceous layer in
which they in which probably about ten percent of the
species are making lots of pollen for buzz pollination, but
they don't make any nectar at all. It means that
that trees and herbs and trees and shrubs can share
the same pollinator, because I have been doing this for years.
You catch a bee on a buzz pollinated flour, what
do you find on the bee? On its hind legs?
You find the pollen of You find the pollen of
the buzz pollinated flower. But you also find the pollen
of a nectar pollinated flower.
Speaker 1: Okay, so, so bees they're eating nectar and pond. You
said the nectar is like the gas, and pollen is more.
What are they doing with the pond? Feeding it to
their young or what they need both those.
Speaker 3: Are They are either feeding it to their young or
if they're use social, they're feeding it to their sisters.
And then they're.
Speaker 1: The pollen is protein and the nectar is sugar.
Speaker 3: Yes, well, that's that's very simplistic nectar, as we now
understand thanks to the late Herbert and Irene Baker of Berkeley, California,
who first started looking at this. Yeah, it's sugar. Nectar
is sugar and water. But it also contains a certain
amount of the vitamins and some amino acids that helps
keep that helps nourish the adult and keeps it alive
maybe for a little bit longer. Pollen, on the other hand,
is depending on the grain, can be anywhere be the
cytoplasm can be anywhere between ten to maybe twenty percent
amino acids and lipids. And as I used to tell
the Australian students, if there's one thing you can't do,
you can't make a baby bee out of sugar and water.
Speaker 1: It needs the pollen. Yes, So that's why there's so
that basically gets so since bees are collecting both, you've
got to offer. You can't just offer nectar. You've got
to be producing. So I assume these buzz pollinated flowers
are producing. They're producing more pollen than like a nectar
pollinated flour would be because some of that ponen is
gonna get eaten.
Speaker 3: Yeah, more pollen and probably more nutritious pollen. Remember the
levels of lipids, levels of fats and proteins in pollen
is going to vary according to plant species.
Speaker 1: So some of these plants, I mean not the anthropomorphise here,
but I'm gonna do it anyway. Some of these plants
know that their pollen they've evolved with with you know,
the with it being true that some of that pollen,
well a good half of that pond is probably not
going to serve the intended purpose of pollen, which is
to serve as the male gametophyte of the of the
plant and end up pollinating another, you know, for reproduction
like they've they've evolved with allowing for or I guess
the pollenais are selected for it. Flowers that produce more
pollen than you know, a more abundance of pollen that
is needed.
Speaker 3: Exactly, and uh, think about it, this is going to
creep out the audience. Think about it this way. Bees
are sperm eaters, you know it?
Speaker 1: I said, wow, do you Well, no, I guess they are,
but not really, because pollen is not analogous to sperm.
Pollend's analogous to like a nut, a scrotal sack of
rinse Well, Rin's previous, Just kidding, Rich's previous has nothing
to do with it. I just wanted to mention because
it's a disgusting.
Speaker 3: You want to if you want to get a little
crude or that.
Speaker 1: It's a disgusting thought thinking of Rhine's previous as scrown. Anyway, Okay,
you know, but you.
Speaker 3: Know allimation biologist, I love disgusting.
Speaker 1: But hold on, wait, so so bees are eating plant scrotums.
That's a good way you could say that. Well, all right,
is that true? That's correct?
Speaker 3: Right? Well, no, in my case, I think of the answer.
It is closer to a scrotum, and I would think
the pollen. I remember, I.
Speaker 1: Just wanted to get that on tape. That's all. We're done.
The podcast is over. Let's go. I just I just
that was the whole point of it. Now go on.
Speaker 3: Sorry, okay, Well think of what think of of a
pollen grain. What it is? Yes, it's a particle. It is,
it's it has a double wall. The outside is a
natural plastic. It's it's spore a pollen, and it's it's
polymerized vitamin A in the jestible.
Speaker 1: But the pollen produces sperm, though the pollen itself is
not analogous to sperm. There's actually plant.
Speaker 3: The pollen contains. The pollen grain contains sperm either one
or two. Uh, pollen either one or two sperm cells.
What's inside of a pollen grain is going to be
a number of things. Uh, there's there's cytoplasm. There are
going to be starch bodies which will be converted to
help make the pollen tube later on. And then there's
what we now call the male germline unit, which is
the vegetative cell, which is acting like a little donkey
and and and and is attached to the sperm cell.
So that is what is pushing down the tube and
getting down into the ovary and into the ovule itself.
Speaker 1: Right, But the pollen grain is like the nut st
it's not the sperm cell.
Speaker 3: Well, you're right, right, it's not the sperm cell. But
when bees or their larva eat a pollen grain, they
are not eating the shell of the nut. They can't
digest that. They're only eating the contents inside, and that
includes the sperm.
Speaker 1: But they eat the whole thing though, because they don't
digest the whole thing. You see where I'm going with this.
This is an enlightening conversation, by the way to it.
Hope somebody is listening to this on the speaker at work. Well,
the pollen is like the scrotle sec and the sperm
cell is in there, and we're not even talking about
how uh you know, the the endosperm is triploid. We're
not even talking about that. That's something I just wanted
to put that out there so people know, okay, but
the pollen grains haploid, the sperm cells haploid and h
But this is where it gets confusing though. So a
pollen grain is this little thing is covered with the colpy,
right or it's broken up.
Speaker 3: Okay, now we're now talking about we're we're getting very
uh we are, We're going up there, we're going out where,
we are getting micro we're getting microscopic. Now, the pollen
grain has an outer wall and an inner wall. And
but then you have to say, well, how does the
sperm get out? And the answer is the grade has
apertures that they will have anywhere from one to several exits.
These apertures are going to be important. Remember, the pollen
grain is released in a highly high hydrated form, and
if it's lucky enough to add to land on a stigma,
it must rehydrate and that needs fluids have to enter
through the aperture. So in some pollen grains they enter
through slits, whereas in others they enter through plores. Now
you mentioned slits. The slits are referred to as colpy,
and some pollen grades have both pores, and that pores
and colpy at the same.
Speaker 1: Copy are like where the seams come together kind of exactly,
and the pores are the actual dots like if you
look up a Google image Church. Okay, So a pollen
grain lands on a stigma and then it germinates, right,
it actually Germany. What happens when it germinates?
Speaker 3: Okay, let's go back a notch. It lands on the
stigma in a in a dehydrated state. The first thing
it has to do is take on fluid.
Speaker 1: Because pollen is dry. That's why you can freeze pollen.
Speaker 3: Right, and it has to take on fluids offered by
the stigma. Okay, it hydrates.
Speaker 1: That's why the stigma of plants, like if you look
at Hibiscus thigma, great example, because they're really juicy. That's
why this stigma it looks juicy. It looks in a
lot of cases depending on what species you're looking at.
You look at a stigma of a flower, it's kind
of wet and like you know, got a certain texture
to it in many cases.
Speaker 3: Right, So it's taken on fluids, it's taken on water,
it's taken on a certain amount of sugar, it's probably
taken on certain enzymes, and its next response is to
produce a pollen tube, which usually means breaking down the
starch granules inside the grain and that they are converted
into a structure into a tube that is made out
of sporal pollen. That's the that is that is the
primary component of of a pollen tube. Ah, now we've
got a tube. Now we have a way for the
male germline unit, the vegetative cell, and the one or
two sperm cells to escape. Some pollen grains only start
with one sperm cell, but by the time they get
into the tube, the sperm cell divides into two. The
pollen tube pushes its way into the stigma, into the style,
and makes its way down into the ovary, but it
doesn't usually grow as a continuous unit. It starts and stops.
It starts and stops.
Speaker 1: But it's only one cell. The pollen tube is still
only one cell.
Speaker 3: Right, The pollen tube is technically not a cell at all.
It has the cells of a male germaline unit inside.
The pollen tube is simply just the tube mate out
of spoora pollenin that was made by the interior of
the pollen grain.
Speaker 1: But the important part is it's sending down two sperms
for double fertilization. One that pollinates the avule, fertilize the ovule,
and the other what is the other one?
Speaker 3: No, no, no, no, joey, joey. One pollinates the egg cell.
Speaker 1: The egg cell, the other that's what I made, the
egg cell in the ovule. I'm sorry, you're right, right,
And the other does what what's the other one doing?
This is what I mentioned before. What's the other one doing?
Speaker 3: Its two polar cells that have fused together. It unites
with them. You get a triploid cell and this begins
to in most cases, not orchids. Doesn't happen in orchids. Uh.
These cells go through fast biosis and this because sorry,
not myosis. They go on, they go through fast mitosis.
And this is this is what induces the food story.
Speaker 1: Endosperm endo little lunch box that goes with the seed,
like in a bean you have, right.
Speaker 3: Well, no, actually, here's something. Do you realize beans do
not have an endosperm. Do you know what happens? The
endom is absorbed by the two condoleans.
Speaker 1: Right, that masses. So when you're eating a bean, you're
eating the catilets.
Speaker 3: Right exactly. Uh, it's just it's just different. In different seeds.
In some the the the In some the cadilebans are
thin and wing like, and they're just there for photosynthesis.
Shortly thereafter. In the case of peas and beans, though,
they absorb the nutrients that are produced by the endosperm,
and that is why they are so fleshy and why
they're so good for us.
Speaker 1: Wait wait, wait said it again? What is so? What's
why is it?
Speaker 3: Why?
Speaker 1: Why is it fleshing good for Because you're eating the cattleedens.
Speaker 3: You're eating the nutrients made by the endosperm that were
transferred to the contileedans. You have nice fat contileedans full
of amino acids and carbohydrates. And that's what we're eating.
When you eat a bean, when you have chile con carni,
the beans are, in fact, the cottonleedens are packed with
all of the nutrients that were made originally by the endosperm.
It's different when we get canola oil, on the other hand,
that is made of the oils that have been rendered
from the endosperm inside the seed.
Speaker 1: So okay, so, But the point is is that pollen
grain still leads to germinate when it gets una statement
heeds to German and that that pollen tube comes out
where where it comes out of.
Speaker 3: The poor or it comes out of one of the apictures.
It will either come out of a poor or it'll
come out of a slit that we call.
Speaker 1: A copus APUs copy.
Speaker 3: Yes, and the plural is copy.
Speaker 1: I don't know how we get I don't know how
we got it where we talked we oh, we forgot
to mention though too. The Australian Acacia trees, for example,
don't produce any nectar.
Speaker 3: Well, their flowers do not produce any nectar.
Speaker 1: Right, But they've they've got there's a lot of extra
floral nectaries. The flowers don't produce nectar, right.
Speaker 3: The Australian acasias are extremely interesting, and I've watched this
over a period of years. We've dissected the flowers of
hundreds of species. There is no nectar gland, which is
unlike the African accasions, which certainly do make nectar. The
floorrets of a of an Australian occasion therefore make no nectar,
but the plant itself does make nectar. They have extra
floral glands, either on their leaves or on their photosynthetic
branches you can known as pyloads, and this is what
attracts parasitic wasps and ants which do protect the plants
while they are in bloom or setting fruit from from
a chewing and sucking pests. I saw this years ago
in the Grampians. It was like something out of a
out of a movie. I was working on the pollination
of Acacia retinidies the wilda and one day I was
watching what was going on on the filloads itself and
there was a skipjack ant. Now we know about a
certain Australian ants. They're highly predatory. They will have the workers,
will have stingers. And it had found chewing away on
a filload was a little green inch worm, a little geometron,
and I watched that ant grab the caterpillar with its
pincers and then the ant sort of stood up on
its hind legs, took the stigure on its ad and
it rammed the body of the caterpillar, which went limp,
and it just picked it up and walked away with it.
Speaker 1: I wonder if it ate it or just dumped it
or what.
Speaker 3: Uh No, I'm sure it probably took it back to
the nest and they ate it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but the extra floral nectaries, I mean you can
see these on a lot of these, I mean on
a lot of the legooms like Caama Crysla produces extra
floral nectaries, which is a native North American genus, But
you could see them. It looks like a little oval,
you know, it stands out if you look closely at it.
But I didn't. I've seen it in a I forget
what species of acacia it was. I think it was
in Tasmania somewhere, but I saw it on uh, you know,
this is like a ruterol plant, Like what are the
pioneer species of acacias? The ones that just grow on
the roadside, And I remember seeing it. It wasn't on
the the philos though, it was on the just like
right on the stem.
Speaker 3: Right. There are some that have typical leg you b
b tennate leaves and you will find the gland on
the on the pedosal towards uh, towards its base.
Speaker 1: But the flowers, I mean, the flowers are just producing pollen.
So they're just producing extra amounts of pollen for pen
collecting bees. There's no nectar in the flowers.
Speaker 3: Bees also surface flies and certain flower beetles.
Speaker 1: Oh you know what, we forgot to mention what we're
talking about. Orchids too. Is another method they use to
do pollonaires is mimicking the prey of predatory things like
hoverflies or wasps. Like the epipactus. It does that. I
know that's not Australian, but still it's another method.
Speaker 3: Well, that's a very very interesting species complex. My co
worker in China, Zumzingren, has worked on this. Almost Daphni
in Israel, who is still with us, did some of
the initial work on this. And yes, the labellum looks
like a little produces little bumps. That the that the
pollinators normally wasps mistake for aphians or in fact, no
it's not wasps. The major pollinators are surfed flies. People
don't realize about surfed flies. They're so interesting because the
adults eat pollen and nectar.
Speaker 1: Wait, Peter, I don't think most people. I don't think
most people realize there's more than one kind of fly,
especially that in this cunt. I mean, we're such a it,
we're such a you know, paucity of science education in
this country. But but what are surfed flies? Tell people?
What they are? Surf a A S Y R P
H I D A E. Hoverflies. And then this is
why I would get into entomology. That is why I
got the entomology book, because it's got everything by so
surfeit is a family. I want to know all the
different families of flies, not just the ship flies.
Speaker 3: Okay, surfoed flies are often brightly colored. They off people
mistake them for bees because they have a maybe have
abandoned abdomen. But surfoed flies have predatory maggots. They eat
other insects, and their favorite food is aphids and mealy
bugs because they feel let's be honest, those insect those
aphids and melli bugs don't get around very much. They
can't run away. There.
Speaker 1: I want to mention this too, because this is what
this is another thing that pisses me off. When people
just have a hatred of plants and want to clear
everything and put up lawn is you've got. I mean,
here's a family of flies that literally eats the negative
insects that most people, you know, the pest insects that
really pet you know, really harm a lot of crop
plants or horticulture, but whatever, and most people don't even
know these things exist. And don't you know so when
they take a fucking insect fogger to their yard. I
can't believe you can even still buy those things that
like home despot and insect foger. You just wipe out everything.
These are some of the things you want around that
you're wiping out when you anyway, keep sorry, go on.
I just people don't even know what's out there. That's
what drives me nuts, man.
Speaker 3: Okay, go ahead, Well let's get back to epipak. This
also known as the helberine orchids. And yes, some of
not all. Some epipactus orchids just make nectar and they
have a normal lobellum and they don't have these little
dark bumps on them. Others have make nectar and they
they have these dark bumps. So they get the pregnant
surfing flies that come in mistake drink some nectar. But
then they mistake the bumps for the uh for the aphens,
and they will lay their eggs on them. The maggots
hatch out and since there isn't any prey food, they
starved to them. But in China, because Reren has worked
on this, there's an intermediate to this, the orchid once
again makes bumps, It makes nectar, but it is also
infested by aphids. Yes, aphids will suck anything after all,
Maybe I shouldn't have put it that way, but anyway,
what happens is the fly comes, drinks nectar, lays its
eggs on it. But when the maggot hatches out, it
doesn't starve to death. It simply eats the aphids that
are on the orchid.
Speaker 1: Okay, but what happens if the pollinator doesn't show up,
then the aphids just murked the organ flower.
Speaker 3: Too bad for that for that year.
Speaker 1: So this, this orchid really needs the flowers or the
pollinators around, not just to pollinate it, but also to
prevent the aphids that it attracts from eating the whole flower.
Speaker 3: Right at least that seems to be the story at
this at this level, and more research has to be done. Now,
let's look at another case of what the orchid is providing.
Certain orchids are not making are are They're not sex mimics,
they're not food mimics. They are not making any reward.
They are not making any edible reward. This takes us
to the Helbert orchids in the genus coriubus. Once again,
we've done a little work on this. We've looked at
the Chinese species, and we've looked at and Rudy has
looked at the Australian species. Rudy thinks that the that
the helmet orcans are making subjector of their of their labellum.
Their primary pollinators are fungus mats. These orchids bloom at
a time of year in uh usually late winter in Australia,
in which fungal hiphie are very active and growing in
the in the to try this layer. In Australia, on
the other hand, sorry not not notssarily. In China, on
the other hand, we have a couple of coribus which
do not make nectar, but they are still being visited
by male and female fungus mats. We originally thought, as
everyone did, that the coribus, since they look a little
bit like a mushroom, they were mimicking mushrooms and producing
odors like mushrooms. Turns out the odor is not a
mushroom mimic. Our friend Robert Raguso in Cornell who is
still with us, do we know rob has studied mushroom
mimicry in South America with another group of orchids, and
he makes a point, you have to have certain types
of compounds made by the orchid that are also made
by the mushroom, the mushrooms around it. Uh. The conabus
in China don't seem to do this. What we seem
to have then is a temporary shack, a little motel
room for the for the fungusnts to stay in.
Speaker 1: So temporarily traps.
Speaker 3: No, there's no trap. It's it's just a little shelter.
The the fungusnts go in and stay there for a
while for for whatever reason that they don't lay eggs
in it. They don't mainten it. Uh, it's a bed,
but there's no breakfast. And eventually they emerge. Of course
when they exit they hit the orchids. Guy nos themium
and the Polindia drops on their back. That will be
in the book Caribus.
Speaker 1: I remember, Yeah, I've seen those in uh were this
all is a New Zealand tesman. What is the there's
another there's a what is the what is the genus
of It's a little orchid and it looks it smells
like hell. It's in South Africa. I have to pull
up the name, but it's it's a little it's it's
stinks like hell, and it's pollinated by flies.
Speaker 3: But could it be what could it be one of
the theesus they have, They have so many different colors
and shapes and and and no.
Speaker 1: It was uh no, I got home. Let me pull
up the name. God, it was hilarious. This is gonna.
I'm gonna definitely be putting us in a book just
because it's it was. I mean, the thing has a
it smells like a bathroom. It's yes, setrium pumilum, and
it's the flower looks like a little mouth too. It's hilarious.
Speaker 3: I don't know about one that sounds like that. Sounds
like something that Steve Johnson must have studied.
Speaker 1: The columnist man.
Speaker 3: He works on the orchards of South Africa and he's
still with us.
Speaker 1: So a lot a lot of these fly pollinated flowers too,
I want to talk about have this kind of modeling.
It's a convergent trait that a lot of fly pollinated
flowers converge on whether it's you know, members of the
sleepy ad you know in South Africa, like the hoodias
or or Stapelias and then aristolochia. You know, does a
lot of the aristolochia flowers have this speckling, this like
purple speckling and modeling, which I assume how is that
a visual attracted the flies? It just looks like rotting
fruit or rotting meat. I mean it's it's implying rot
the mahogany color and then the speckling.
Speaker 3: You've answered your own question. They it will look like
what the flies either tend to feed on or lay
their eggs. And of course the one everybody knows is
the starfish flour, the stapelia. A lot of people have it.
It smells awful like rotting flesh, and yet it's it's
a dozen of our own milk weeds. And it goes
further than that. This is something the bakers have to
have a look at. The The nectar that the Staphelia
is produced is extremely rich in amino acids as a
piece of a fresh dung wood. So in this case
it's giving the fly, the obopositing fly, some of the
nutrients that would normally get from freshly dropped done mm hmm.
Speaker 1: A lot of the amorpho fellas do that as well.
I mean they smell terrible. Some of the aeroids, you know,
the ammorphal feci.
Speaker 3: I don't think that. I don't think the abor for
Pholus produces vector.
Speaker 1: But I have doesn't. It just smells like absolute health.
It smells like a dead possum and it's.
Speaker 3: Got But it gets a lot of tourists to the
Missouri Botanical Garden when it flowers.
Speaker 1: Well, titanum does. But even there's little ones you could
just grow in the landscape, you know, like that will.
What about Arisima? What's what's hitting the arissima?
Speaker 3: Oh? Yeah, where we're talking about lords and the ladies.
I used that I tried to grow. I kept them
for a couple of seasons. The beautiful Japanese rice cake
flower that's arthmuscchi anam. I don't really know very much.
There is a botanist in Japan who get soup. People
need to look up his papers. He is a pistol.
He has been producing a lot of fine work lately,
and he tends to specialize in the little fly and
that pollinated species, aroids and orchids and other things that
are part of the shady woodland flora of Japan.
Speaker 1: Arisima triphylum also known as Jack in a pulpit in
the Midwest. I mean, this is a this is you know,
this is like in the forest preserves in Chicago where
they haven't been ruined by buckthorn is pollinated primarily by
fungus gnats, which makes sense. I mean, it's got that,
it's certainly got the coloration for it, but that's definitely
a trademark. You know, it's one of the things. You
can look at a flower that's got that speckled modeling
on it, and you know it's some kind of diptery,
it's some kind of fly that's hitten.
Speaker 3: As I understand, it is the only known plant on
the planet that kills its pollinators and it works like
Jack and the pulpit. So it's got a much nicer
name compared to what it does. As I understand that
it's dioecious. There are males and females, so it'll in
in the What happens here is that the fungus, the
fungus mats go to a male one, uh and they
are released the following day carrying the pollen. But when
they get to a female one, they enter and are
never allowed to leave.
Speaker 1: So okay, So there. I don't how are they never
allowed to leave? How does this tra how does it
trap them in there?
Speaker 3: It has something to do with the architecture of the
space and spadix. They are trapped inside once they go
in there. Now, once again, I'm not familiar with the paper.
Once again, you need to go to an arithmus specialist.
I know Susan Redder at the University of Missouri and
Saint Louis was interested in this at one point, and
of course Shugets who has found this in some of
the arismas in Japan.
Speaker 1: That's okay, So why would it Why would it kill
It can't be a constant thing. It can't. It's not
like it always kills him.
Speaker 3: It's probably joey in this case because the fungus that
is carrying the pollen of the male plant, it is
not selective for the female to allow its female plant
to allow it to leave. It's gotta stay there, bag around,
try to escape and hit the stake of it.
Speaker 1: Okay. So Arasima Arisima trophylum is dioecious. The plants are
their male or female, whereas in a lot of orchids
they'll be proto protogenists. They're like their bisexual inflorescent device,
but the female flowers go off first and then the Okay,
so okay, well shit, I didn't. That puts a whole
new spin on this. So this.
Speaker 3: It's relatively new. And yes it is a fly trap,
but nothing is eaten. It's uh, it's simply a case.
Then you've got the the the fly is carrying the
pollen that the plant needs. It is not selective for
the for the inflorescence to allow it to escape.
Speaker 1: Because if they I mean, why wouldn't it just temporarily
trap them like the mail plants.
Speaker 3: Do uh, to ensure deposition of pollen on the stigma.
Remember it's at random. The fungus that isn't looking for
a stigma. It's just an obstacle in its way. It's
trying to get out.
Speaker 1: You know this, this trapping your pollinators thing is what
families do this. We got the orchid ac does it?
The air roids do it? Air ac? I guess the
milk weeds technically trapped they can trap, uh. You know
pollinators like stigmatic Sarahpgia does two, Aristolochias do aristokiac reflec
does two? Doesn't it?
Speaker 3: Yep?
Speaker 1: And uh, some gasnriads as well.
Speaker 3: And something people should know about the the milk weeds,
the asclepias that they like, they name that a lot
number of the name they're they're they're pollinators. It's not deliberate.
But when Retha and I worked on asclepias needy eye
that needs milk.
Speaker 1: Weed, Yeah, the rare one, right, super rare.
Speaker 3: We found that at least ten percent of the honeybees,
which are not anywhere from ten to twenty percent of
the honey bees which are not the date of pollen
of course, would lose a leg when they were trapped
temporarily and trying to yank out the the pollen area.
Speaker 1: Right, it looks like that sexy leg lamp that the
dad brought home for the living room in a Christmas story.
You'll see like a little wasp blast wasp pre stuck
in It's pretty funny.
Speaker 3: I love that movie.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but like the wasp still makes it up, or
that the bee still makes it up, but then the
leg is stuck in there. But that's not how it's
that's not intended, that's not intentional.
Speaker 3: It's not intentional, but that's what happens. I presume when
when remember honey bees did not evolve with milk weeds.
Milk weeds are North American, honey bees are are Eurasian.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, serves them right coming over here. And I'm
just okay, I man. I when I was in Ecuador,
God damn, there were so many gazneriads. I did a
podcast with John Clark, who studies them fun guys too,
really really funny human being. But uh yeah, I didn't.
I had no context yet. I wish man, that's a
weird family. They're everywhere too, super abundant in the trans
I understand.
Speaker 3: There there is a tree Gasnaria. I don't remember the
name of the genus. It was named after a Greek queen.
Now I'd have to look it up in one of
my books. It's I know it's in my I've forgotten that.
That was in Gods and Goddesses in the Garden.
Speaker 1: How many have you? How many books you got? Four?
Three not including the one you just wrote.
Speaker 3: Well single author books, it's four and of course the
fifth one is out next year. But also remember I
did the biology of missiletoes with Falcon Colder. That was
back in the eighties. And of course Reathan I and
twenty something other authors. We did, and it's still available
from University of Chicka Iago Press. That's Darwin's Orchids.
Speaker 1: Okay, wait, hold on the hold on, because my attention
span will limit. How many is that total? Four?
Speaker 3: Uh? If it's four in which I'm a single author
and it's meant to be popular, bot me.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 3: But the more technical books which I co edited and
co wrote. There was the Biology of Missiletoes with Malcolm
Calder and with Retha edens Meyer. Uh we did as
co editors and co authors. That's Darwin's Orchids Then and Now,
and that's from University of Chicago Press.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, what are the two pop science books that
readers couldn't could enjoyed? It could find the Wiley Violence
Underground Orchids. And what's the other one?
Speaker 3: Well? There? Uh?
Speaker 1: Kiss is that it?
Speaker 3: Yeah? The roses kiss is basically my fake and my
a basic introduction to pollination biology. Uh.
Speaker 1: Here, the triegisniad species is Strepto Streptocarpus sexorum. And there's
another one called Colliria.
Speaker 3: There's another one. Yeah, yeah, but really, the differences in
sizes of the plants in the gasniods is really extraordinary.
You've got those little micro uh, you've got those those
little micro gasniods in which the the the flower is
in fact, when it does blue is bigger than the
entire plant. And then of course you got the the
tree gasniods. It's it's it's really amazing.
Speaker 1: Then they're all fucking Herey, there's a lot of epiphytes
abundant in the tropics, order Lamey a leaves, so they
got zygomorphic, bilaterally symmetrical, just the fancy way to say
biletter symmetrical flowers. Like a lot of like I think
like eighty or ninety percent of the members of of
Lamey Ailey's the orders.
Speaker 3: I remember, Yeah, I remember them from my Peace Corps
days at El Salvador. You found them. You found little
members of the genus Achimenes. Beautiful where you had a
natural seep going through some of the old lava boulders,
they would colonize that and you would they would make like,
oh these these they would grow in these little patterns
along the cracks and the seep.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I saw a bunch in Dominican Republic. I've seen
a few in uh southern Mexico in the wetter areas,
and then yet a ton of Ecuador. Of a god,
they're so weirdt lots of them are the one A
lot of ones I was seeing in Ecuador. Califfloris too,
so they just flower right out of the stem. I'm
still processing, Equador, I need ive, got videos to edit.
I'm trying to get this other book done. Well, I
think we I think we did it. That was good.
It's like two and two and a half hours, so
good Lord, Well, thank you well. I was ranting for
a while. I guess you and I are like an
hour and a half. But thanks for be willing to talk.
I wanted to call you up and have you on
here again, and I've been wanting to do it for
like a year. I just the timing isn't pretty, but.
Speaker 3: I'm still I'm still hoping you'll get through Saint Louis
again on either April or May, because I would really
really like you. But since you're so passionate about geology,
I would love to get you to the Shaw Nature Reserve,
which is owned by the Missouri Botantical Garden. I want
to introduce you to be what what must be one
of the biggest limestone glades in all of the all
of the Midwest, and you can see the flora growing on.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I'm gonna make it out there at some point.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: There were there were some mobile people at this conference
I was speaking at last weekend and they were mentioning Shah.
So yeah, I'll make it out there at some point.
But yeah, and I'll be I'll be stopping by to
see you as well. Anyway, So yeah, I think I
might have a bury Specimens to drop off their two again,
I don't know, but anyway, Pete, thanks a lot. Thanks,
I really appreciate this as always, my dear friend. And yeah,
I'm stoked to look at your books. So what's the
name of your book? The new one coming out again?
Speaker 3: Once again the it doesn't have a set name, It
only has a working title. The working title was are
still is Unloved Pollinators and their Flowers with a subtitle
more than the Birds and the Bees. But I think
my editor wants to make a change, and I'm he
knows the Australian audience better than I do, and I'm
not going to argue.
Speaker 1: So study study Unloved Pollinators or I'll club you with
something heavy and rusty. Okay, all right man, Well, thanks
a lot, and everybody else have a grocery to go
for examply