Speaker 1: Okay, we're gonna give it a little We're gonna give
it some time for the ads, for the shitty ads
to stop, so you could actually hear this song, because
this is a banger. It should be what is it
fifteen seconds? You got fingers that you can fast forward
through the ads?
Speaker 2: There stand, Wow, Wow? Us down.
Speaker 1: Stands located cry Why don't you right? Job located looking girl?
Speaker 2: Stand?
Speaker 1: Why don't us down? No?
Speaker 2: Don't stand? Sir, sir, sir Sarah. Excuse me, sir, Sir, Sir,
Sir Sarah, excuse me, sir, sir.
Speaker 1: All right, this enough of it?
Speaker 2: Sarah. Excuse me, sir sir.
Speaker 1: That's what they they're kicking us out. That's what they
say when you're about to get kicked out, Sir Sarah.
Speaker 2: Excuse me.
Speaker 1: God, it was like a fucking nails on a chalkboard
to me whenever I hear that, sir, God, I can't
stand being called sir. In Texas, everybody calls you, so
you just get used to it. I still don't like it,
but it's you know, and even I'll do it sometimes
it's a nice way. It's like a polite thing. Right.
I don't know what that there's because everyone's packing heat here.
Everyone's got to maintain this. Oh, it's like the old wist,
maintain the surface layer of politeness even though you're I'm
just kidding. People are People are generally nice here, if
not somewhat insane, and uh, you know, the education system sucks.
But okay, let's not tell me. Listen, I had to
go to the bank today, which I would rather I
would I would probably rather have to eat ass for
like twenty minutes, like I don't and I'm not one
who enjoys eating ass, so it would be like, I
don't know, you know, it'd be like if I was
eating Mitch mcconnald's ass for twenty Like that's like similar
to going having to go to the bank, getting a
call being like you have to you have to come
in sir to uh to put your phone number because
we ever we got the wrong addressers, you know, I
think that's what it was. It was a wrong address.
I don't know. I had to go in there. I
try to turn myself, you know, off from reality. When
I'm in there. You know, it'll be five minutes. I
was in like forty five minutes. It was just fucking
it's torture, the suits, the landscaping, the parking anytime. I mean,
existing in modern American consumer society is painful enough for me.
It's hell that is that alone is like eating Mitch
McConnell's ass anytime I'm driving up the I thirty five
corridor between San Antonio and also one of the most
hideous stretches. Well, there's a lot of those, especially at
the in the southeast, the lower latitude quarters. You know,
I don't want to beat too hyperbolic, but you know,
it's like eating Mitch McConnell's ass. So any and we've
started the podcast off talking about eating the acid and
aging Republican oligarch reporting supporting Senator. I guess we can
get to the rest of the podcast if I've did.
You know, it helps filter out the proofs, helps filter
out the squares. Anyway, I just got back from god
damn from Costa Rica. I just got back from Costa Rica.
How many white girls in dreadlocks have you heard say it?
I just got back from Costa Rica. I was the
most amazing thing I had it. I went to an
Iahuasca ceremony and it you know, because that's what I
thought that Costa Rica was all about and I'll be honest,
when I landed an airport, I kind of thought that too,
because it was all Anglos. It was like all Americans.
I said, this is just it's like a fucking United States.
This is like, I mean, Mexico is so fucked up
these days, well for the last decade. I guess it
makes sense that, you know, the the gringos come down
to Costa Rica and it's it's it's the wealthiest country
in Latin America. I think, is that true? Most expensive
at least one of them. But uh, you know, but
I didn't know there was a diverse, such a diversity
of habitat any any time a country is associated with beaches,
I turned myself off to I just I just ignore
it because I don't I'm not a beach pro. I
think that shit is whack. I don't care about hanging
out in the beach. Fucking lame. I got shit to do,
you know, And there's hungry sharks in there, and I
can't blame them. Shout out to the shark that ate
that woman's leg in South Podtery Island last year. Uh
Rome free, little buddy. So uh anyway, but I made
the same mistake of perception with Dominican Republic. But holy shit,
Costa Rica was you know, it was incredible. A gentleman
invited me down there to go film some stuff and
it was incredibly worth it. And shout out to him,
thank you. And I'm the fucking dry force in the
northwest part of the country, the cloud forest, the oak species,
the fucking Jurassic Age conifers growing at nine thousand feet
in cloud forest. So I think me and Allen and
Mandy are gonna try to schedule some sort of like
group tours, something that I don't want to call it
a tour. It's not a fucking tour. You go out
there with a bunch of science and biology nerds and
you post up at a spot and it's all organized,
which is way more than I can ever say for
myself because I just get a shitty rental car and
you know, gelevant all over the country going. I don't
make a fucking itinerary, and I don't know what I'm
gonna do it. I'm maybe I don't want to do
that that day. Why would I lock myself into something,
You know, I have no organization whatsoever when I do
this stuff, and that's what makes it so fun. On
a rewarding I was, you know, looking for corcasolioid. He's
a dry tropical oak at ten o'clock at night near
beehehe in uh Guanacaste, Costa Rica and the dry forest
two hundred foot elevation. I didn't know I was going
to be there. Had I stuck to a plan, I
wouldn't have been able to see it. And I was
just driving around looking for it, looking for oaks. It
was fucking driving me nuts, man, I drove so much.
But what an incredible oak and oak that grows in
dry tropical forest at two hundred feet elevation and uh,
just the habitat you never expect to see oaks in.
But we might schedule we might try to schedule some
group tour there in early July, which would be cool.
It'll be lots of microscopy, d NA secret saying, we'll
be giving presentations. It'll just be a clusterfuck of NonStop
botanizing and my cologizing. Is that a word. That's the mushroom,
that's the mushroom. Season is like May, it's the rainy
season May through September and so in July. That's uh,
that should be there should be plenty of mushrooms there.
But it's just it's an if it comes to fruition,
I'll let I'll be posting shit about it in a week,
you know. But also the economy shit. So you know
these things would cost like two grand or twenty five hundred.
And before you freak out, that's all this shit is included.
It's all paid for. And like you know, the one
that Alan did a net quarter, they didn't make any
money of it. They barely made They made like a
couple grand. It was just how much it costs to
run all that shit, all right. But uh, you know,
since Trump's destroying the economy, since the game show host
that his president is destroying the economy, people might be
a little more and just fired, you know, two hundred
thousand federal employees, people might be a little hesitant to
spend money. So I totally understand that, But god, have
you ever been to a fucking dry We're not going
to be in the dry tropical force that we plan.
This trip will be in the force like nine thousand
feet elevation climbate of Humboldt County, California, but it's different though,
because the air is so thin it holds, you get
you know, greater temperature swings between day and night. So
it's not really analogous to like lowland northern California because
the air is so thin. So oh, and there's paramo
up there too. I saw Puya desk larioides and this
fucking blackn them black that it's a it's a fern.
It's like a coalescent blacknum. You get these in South America,
in high elevation South America or low elevation, higher latitude
South America. These these black thems. They just look fucking
I saw what was it? Lamerio psychus? Was it what
I saw in Chile? What a we? It's psychis to
you think it would be a psycha, but it's a
it's a black them. Just incredible diversity. I was in
like four or five completely different habitats when I was there,
mid elevation, tropical forests, lowland, dry forest cloud for paramo,
the paromo is fucking incredible. God damn it. Man. It's
just you know, you get all these species in genera
that you normally find at higher latitudes, like you'd expect
to see in like the Rocky Mountains, or like far
South Chile. There was Gunnera up there, and oh it's
gonna I got a shit ton of videos to edit.
I've got videos from Ecuador, Chile and fucking Costa Rican
out I gotta edit. But I don't know what I'm
gonna do it, but uh, we'll get a round to it.
But that if you've never been to tropical dry forest,
it's pretty incredible. It's it's I was like getting pissed
on by He didn't piss on me, but he tried
to piss on me from up on a tree. He
was in a in a Cassia grandis tree for basi,
and he tried to piss it. A little bastard tried
to piss on me, which I can't blame him. I
would probably do the same if I was a monkey,
I'd be peeing on people from different trees and elevations.
Just a natural response, especially humans to humanity, is that
you want to you know, at least he wasn't throwing
shit these little guys though. That was it was Jeffrey's
spider monkey. I don't know who the fuck Jeffrey was.
Some biologists one hundred years ago, some dead hawk I
don't know anyway, but uh, and they were really like,
not aggressive, but they weren't afraid. They came up and
ran up at the Capuchins, the white faced Capuchins, those
cute little bastards with their little vampire teeth, were afraid
of me. I tried to give them a banana, which
I know you're not supposed to do, but I couldn't resist.
They weren't a fucking mango tree. Mangoes aren't even native
to the Americas, so give me a break. Okay, what's
the banana gonna do? All Right? They had and these
animals had the run of the park too, because all
the staff was gone. It was first, it was the
week the weekday. Second, it was like the tail end
of the dry season, so everything, all the plants, all
the leaves were on the ground. It was felt, you know, crunch, crunch,
crunch everywhere you walk there. It was high as balls.
It was probably ninety five degrees that day, which now
I'm used to after living in South Texas for how
long I've been here four years. I didn't mean to
live down here. It was an excellent you know, I
just came down here for other reasons, for family obligations,
and now you know, now I'm stuck. But we started
a fucking you know, nonprofit conservation project, so you know whatever.
And it's been good for fueling my hate of consumer
society too, because that shit is everywhere. You know. It's
a defficult done here. So there were three monkey species
I encountered. God, the howler monkeys too. They're terrifying. Fuck me,
I was in a I almost got a little buggered out,
you know, I was filming Marshallow series. She's this beautiful
columnar cac guy that branches, but the branches that it
gets stayed close to the stem, so it's got this
kind of parallel tuning for look to It was really
cool parallel stem tuning fork look. And it's got this
beautiful epicuticular wax where the growth stops and you can
probably use that, you know, and then it'll get a
green segment when it would burst of new growth like
six inches, so you got towards the top of its stem,
you got like six to eight inches of green interspersed
with the probably like half a inch or an inch
of white like this white wax. And that's where you know,
it's got this pattern, this zigzag pattern on the ribs
because that's where all the you know what, that was
the end of the plant. That was the end of
the stem where it's growth ceased for the dry season,
and then when the rainy seasons start up again, then
you get a burst of new growth. So it's kind
of analogous to tree rings on cacti. And I've seen
it on another columnar cactus species, like in western Chiapas, Mexico,
et cetera. And so these marshallow series I was in
dry tropical force put up towards the top. The kars
was exposed and there was thin soil, so it was
dominated by burs Simaruba, which you get in South Florida.
To the tourist tree is the common name Frankinson's family,
Elephant tree family. You really shouldn't use common names. So
I'm just telling you just learned a fucking genus name.
I gotta say that, sorry, got it, hey, coming name?
Some of ours are so stupid, so uh, you show
some respect for the plant, all right, learn the fucking
genus name. It's not that Hardimaruba and uh and Marshall
is series dominated. And I was checking this out, and
then you know the there's leaves all over the ground too,
and there's a couple of venomous snake species. There's a
venomous crotalus, and they're all vipers. Of course, I guess
there's a couple of coral snakes. You don't got to
worry about those, they're small and you know, cryptic. Uh.
And then the fertile lance. Fucked the fertile lance. That's
the only viper I would possibly if it was on
my property, I would probably kill it because they they're
so aggressive and territorial, and they're not like rattlesnakes. They're
not kind enough to let you know when they're you know,
when you're nearby, and they reproduce like fucking rants too.
There's so many of them. I met some lady whose
dog got bit. And they don't give you any warning again,
They'll just there. It's like stepping on a land mine,
you know, or stepping close to a landmine, because you
don't even have to really step on them. They'll just
bite you whatever. And it's fucking nasty venom too. It
just causes rotting flesh and just anyway, so I was stepping,
I was stepping around as Marshallow series filming it, and
I later realized I lost the video. The video It
was cool, It was only like two or three minutes.
And then I heard this like it sounded like this
guttural wine, and I thought, is that a fucking cat?
What the hell is that? Like? Is that a jaguars?
And then I heard another one from sixty feet away,
and uh, and I realized the other monkeys, they're like
up in the trees. And obviously it's not a cat
because cats are outry, but it was still totally terrifying
at first. And then I looked up and I saw
like this little spider monkey like the size of a cat,
maybe a little bit bigger, giant pair of nuts on
the sky too. I mean, I said, wow, like he
had a giant it looked like the truck nuts, like,
you know, because the truck no pair of human balls
ever looks like the nuts that these meatheads, these double
digit IQ dumb as a brick fucking retards hang on
their their trucks like in a in a you know,
the lower in the lower latitude US Arizona to Florida,
anywhere in between. But this monkey's balls looked just like that.
I was amazed. I said, that's amazing, you know, to
get to when he was like crawling headfirst, upside down, swinging,
you know, going to different trees. Yeah, it was. I
saw Kawai too, giant paar of nuts on him. I said, wow,
just I've just like OBJECTI fight these animals. So but anyway,
so this is towards the top of this cart and
the cars. If you've never been on dog Tooth Krst,
it's really it's bizarre rocks. It dissolves really easily in
the high rainfall areas because these are dry forces. They'll
be dry for six months. By five to six months
no rain, you're still low latitude, so it's hot as shit.
So all the plants just drop their leaves. They just
go drought deciduous. I didn't even know what it was
a thing until I saw it in David Attenborough movie
a decade ago, you know, talking about drought deciduousness, Like
so many people have no clue. This is like a
dominant forest type around the world at the same given latitudes,
the tropical latitudes. You know, it doesn't happen at the
equator really, but it happens in between twenty one degrees north,
and I mean even kind of in South Texas where
I am twenty six degrees north. Anywhere at the same
latitude India, you know, North hemisphere, Southern hemisphere, southern hemispheres
obviously reversed, the dry seasons reversed, and it's all just
because of those low pressure systems causing thunderstorms at a
certain time of year. And then as the Earth, you know,
it goes to the other side of its orbit, then
that low pressure system moves to the other side of
the equator, causes the dry or causes the dry season
where it just was six months previous, et cetera. But
I was the karst is wild because it's it's literally
like a dog dog's tooth. It's you can't walk on
a barefoot. It would fucking cause you to bleed, so
you need really thick soled boots. Would probably tear up
tennis shoes really quickly. But that's in those thin soiled
areas where you get to the top of it and
there's no soil, then you get a different plant community,
you know, your typical rocky arid microsite in a otherwise
dense forest type thing. And that was really cool to
see because there was a Gave Workley eye up there,
which is the syndemic A Gave. I mean, the plant
community just totally changed you for me. A schlechtin Dally eye.
I've seen that name before. I don't know who Shlecton
Doll was. I should probably look him up, but god,
it's just stupid. You know. It's bad enough to know
I always say that sorry obligatory rant that I was gone.
It's bad enough to name plants after people, but it's
when you've got that ridiculous ass European sounding name. I
don't you know, and no offense to you know, I
don't know what is it? Scandon Navy, no, Norwegia. What
is he German? What is the Schlechtindhal? What is it German?
I think it's German. When you got a name like
it just sounds goofy as fuck when you try to
latinize it, Why would you do that? Put his name
in there? Maybe his name was Ernie. You know, you
for be an Ernie. I you know, shout out to Ernie.
How many Ernies do you know in your life? You know? No,
there's no no one's name in their kids Ernie anymore.
And I think that's the real travesty you want to
talk about, you know, corporate fascism, moralagarch Yet it's sad,
But the real tragedy is no one's naming their kid
Ernie anymore. Ernest God schlechtin you forb be a schlechtind
you get the fuck out of here. Jesus just named
the fucking thing after or what it? You know, it's
got cherry, it's got bark that looks like a cherry tree,
like peeling, red, beautiful bark. Name it after that. But
you name it after this fucking dead guy. You know this?
How long is this plant in a species? For a
few million years? And your name Schlechton Dolly, Hushchlechton Doll.
I should Oh my god. It's a guy with a
hand in his uh, in his in his in his coat.
Remember when they used to do that in his stick
the hand half in your coat. Diedrich Franz Leonard, We
get the fuck out of here. He was a professor
of botany and director at the botanical gardens at a
Martin Luther University of hal Wittenberg. From why the fuck
that guy lived? How long did he live to be
sixty to fifty years. I don't know. Maybe he was
a nice guy, you know, Maybe he was a nice guy.
Maybe he was giving blowjobs at a truck stop. That's
not bad either. I don't know. I do know that
it doesn't make sense to name a plant after him, though,
that's anyway, schlechtin doll God, I fucking hate that. I hate,
I hate, I hate, hate hate such a cool plant
anyway for me shlectin Dhali, I is, I guess I
can get medium tree size. The one I saw was small.
It was growing on a carstick cliff, overlooking a beautiful vista,
a mirrored ore, with two black vultures eyeing me somewhat
skeptically from a completely leafless tree. Everything there was waiting
for the range. The range had start in May. But oh,
this is this thing going on? But anyway, and then
there was a guy where cosma tear. There was, which
is tarrat a c a fern. It was all shriveled
up and dry, but I could see the white farina
on the undersides of the leaflets of the fronz uh
and a gave werkley. Nowhere else did I see this
in this habitat except on these rocky outcroppings, so you
get it. It's you know, it's basically stuck. It's sydemic
to these micro sites that are otherwise because it needs
full sun, in full exposure, and it you know it can.
It's it's adapted to grow on thin to no soil.
And what a cool species it was. I saw it
on another site too, which I'll we'll get too later
in the podcast. I saw it much closer to San Jose,
the capital city of Costa Rica, growing on a sketchy
cliff composed of crumbly shale talus that was really hard
to get up and sketchy as fuck, but uh, definitely
worth it. Yeah, so guys, just getting up there, I
got the mosquitoes got really bad towards the top to
it because the monkeys were there and so they had
some defeast on or what, but they were horrible. I
wish I had one of those little electric tennis records.
Just swat the fuckers because they were making filming really hard.
They're making taking photographs really hard. That Euphorbia was completely
leaf list, but it was flowering and tiny scyathia everywhere.
That's how I realized it was a euphorbia because otherwise
doesn't really look like one. It's got papery, it's got
like bark that looks like peeling birch bark, but it's
like a deep blood red beautiful. And then there was yeah,
marshallow Sirius aragoni eye, that blue tuning fork cactus, candelabra
cactus and our gave Werkley eye and that cool, cool
ar gyracosma. Just it's such a wonderful habitat. And and
then coming down there was just so much animal life too.
Like the animal there's there was no staff there, so
the animals had the whole run of the park. I
saw a white tailed deer in this habitat, which is
wild to see him in a dry tropical forest. Yeah,
same species, you know, the Virginianus. But uh, but it was,
you know, it was a really rich site. And just
being in those in those kinds of forests. Man, there's
Leana's everywhere too, which that was what struck me. Maybe
it's just because it was the last day. It was
the last thing in the memory. But like everything I
encountered was new, every plant was new, every species was new.
I had no clue half the stuff I was looking at.
I mean, maybe I could get it down to family,
but it was just a wonderful experience.
Speaker 2: I love that.
Speaker 1: I love being disoriented. There's so much excitement, curiosity, and
the habitat is so different because it'll get two meters
of rain during the rainy season. That's more rain than
most places in North America in the United States. But
then it's got this six month dry season where it's
hot as balls, you know, and then of course there's
not much of a change in daylight, very minuscule. You know,
it's generally around twelve hours twelve hours slightly because you're
not right at the equator, you're ten degrees left to
you get slightly longer days in summer, but not by much.
But god man, yeah, it was it. And the crunch
of the leaves too, like every the leaf litter is everywhere,
which you know, what fun guy are eating those when
it does rain, you know. And I love to be
there in the summer too, and just see the night
and day contrast because it's you know, most dry places
in North America or in the United States are most
most dry climates, you know, they're just dry all the
time you'll get rain a little bit, they'll be lush
for like a month, like Sonora doesn't. There'll be lush
for a month. Then it just it's but you could
still tell it's a doesn't. But this is like a forest.
It's an actual forest, and two meters is a fucking
lot of rain. It gets six feet of rain a
year during the wet season, but then it doesn't rain
for five or six months. And what that brings out
in plants, like the kinds of shit that they have
to do to deal with that is crazy to me.
Like it's just like so tolerating so much rain, bursts
of growth and then sitting tight for six months. I mean,
it's basically the same thing that plants do in a
temperate climate you know where used to before before climate change,
Like when it plays like Chicago still used to get
actual winters, but it's instead of it being the cold,
it's just a complete dry Like that's the only changing factor.
I just had to stop and give a online presentation,
So I'm back with you give an online presentation about
long killing. It's always fun, it's always so rejuvenating to
hear how many people are on board with that. And
how insane people think lawns are. It just doesn't make
any sense. Those roots don't go deep. You're not holding
water in in areas that are prone to flooding, and
you're requiring a lot of steroids pesticides, you know, steroids,
pesticides and herbicides to infund it's eyes, to keep the
thing alive. In dry areas, you're keeping up perpetually bonds.
I think, God, I fucking hate lunch. Okay, anyway back
to the what we were talking about. So these dry
forests were in but what was kind of disheartening was
that to get to them, I had to drive through
miles of agriculture that was previously dry forest. So so
much you know, it's like anywhere you go in the world,
I mean, there's the human impact is so intense, and
a lot of that agriculture is of course being used
to grow hay to feed cattle and livestock. Not the
most efficient system. Hopefully we'll figure that out in the
next century or two before we annihilate ourselves. Unlikely, but
you know that's what we So we got existentialist philosophy
for you know, and apocalyptic humorous nihilism. Oh God, anyway,
I'm sorry. Okay, So, but to get to these yeah,
to get to these forests, I had to go. Thank god,
Google Maps fucked me, as they usually do. They sent
me on this backwards ass loop. And this is the
thing I remember when I was traveling a lot right
in freight transitionship. There was no smartphones yet. Thank god,
it was such a wonderful, wonderful time. I'm like the
last generation that got to experience that. So to get around,
we didn't have navigation systems. We had maps. So you
would actually go to library, print out a map, or
maybe jack one. It's from a you know, change store
or they like Walgreens and all these dructures used to sell,
you know, these foldable maps. I don't think they'd do
that anymore, like these foldable laminated maps that would fold
into like little pamphlet size and so, and you actually
had to think about where you're going and navigate and
remember street names. Shit like that you have to do anymore.
So anyway, Google Maps fucked me. It took me through
this backwards ass way down what ended up being a
private road through agriculture. I had to turn around and
then one of them the irrigation canal had overflowed, the
had flooded the road, and I was driving this little
beat up, said Dan that it's like little Euroca, and
so blessed that thing. I took it some places that
it definitely should not have gone so anyway. But because
of that, I got to see some cool stuff. I
got to see cashew trees not really being invasive but volunteering.
And it's like, actually they suck the cashew fruit, which
I don't recommend doing because it's got you rushi all oil.
It's got allergenic oils as one third of the plants
and the family Antacardiaci do similar to you rushia, all
the same compound in poison oak, you know, Lithrea costica.
In Chile, Lithrea costica produces a similar compound called litriol
that can cause an allergenic reaction. But I think it's
like poison ivy, like you have to get sensitized to
it first. I don't know, But the point is is
I wass going through these agricultural fields too. I saw
a lot of cool fucking birds. I saw a fasciated
tiger heron beautiful bird, a jabberou which is like this stork,
Like this big white stork with a black hood, looks
like some ount of like a Star Wars you know,
like it's like one of the creatures you see, you
know in the New re with the Congress, Like you
see the politicians in the robes in the Star Wars movies.
Sometimes they look like one of these storks. You know,
this real weird looking guy. Beautiful wasn't vibed out by
me either, uh, And I saw what I see a
Cordia species. Cordia is the genus of Texas olive. Cordia
bassierra is the Texas you see in San Antonio and
South Texas barage in ace. It's got those little hairs
in the leaves, scabbard leaves, sandpaper like leaves, big white
flowers and a two forked style and stigma in the center,
which was a giveaway later for or can be a
giveaway for family. And some of these you know baragi
and ace trees like Aredia or Cordia et cetera. You know,
the Boris family produces a lot of tree forms species
that have it that are trees and in lower latitude
tropical environments. Yeah, so that was fucking great.
Speaker 2: To see.
Speaker 1: I saw Cordia then and Cordya. I forget the other one,
but but lots of interesting stuff along the way. I mean,
it was so it's so exciting everyone because everything is new.
Everything I was passing by was worth stopping to take
photos of and and try to document so that I
could remember it. And that's all I'm doing in places
like this. I saw a really cool fucking corvid called
a white throated magpie. J looks like a blue jay
with this big, big ass, you know, plumage on top.
Fucking gorgeous bird. It was hanging out in Bursra. I
don't know if it was Bursra simaru, but I looked
like a different Bursra species. It didn't have the red
bark and had different leaves. But uh, it was eating
the Bursra berries or I guess they're droops. They've only
got one seed in them. Gorgeous birds though, And there
was a bunch and they were just fucking Corvids are
always so funny too. They're so loud and have so
much personality and are just like kind of a pain
in the ass, which is like a good quality. I
like person too. I hope on my tombstone. It says that,
you know, great guy, but he was kind of a
pain in the ascidt times. That's if I would, I'll
settle with that. You know. There was a really cool
palm I saw that was used just you know, on
marginal on the margins of agriculture, and that was cool
too us because a lot of the most of the
plants you saw on the sides of the agriculture were natives,
you know, as used to be the case before corporate monoculture.
Agriculture in the Midwest, you know, annihilated all these milkweed
strips and shit like this horrible fucking not even leaving crumbs,
like the strips of greenery along the farm fields, not
even leaving those for native plants anymore anyway. But they're
still doing it in northwest Costa Rica. But Bactris guianensis
was this spiny palm species and it's got these like cups,
these like eight to nine inch cups, like elongated oval cups.
It's like a bowl shape thing, and it's just it's
just this the like the little space that protects the inflorescences,
the flowers and then later the fruit. Okay, apparently I
naturalists is saying Backtrisky and ensiss is invasive in Coasta Rica.
I don't really buy that because it's native three hundred
miles away. You're telling me it never it never fucking
made it there prior to humans. I mean, I saw
it in the forest there. That's got to be a bullshit.
There's got to be a bullshit assessment with how plant
distributions shift and change over millennia and how climates change
over millennia, and it's crazy to think that that's right. Someone.
I heard someone calling Verbusina and Coelioides invasive in southern California,
and I was like, how the fuck is that in
its native like two hundred miles away. How the fuck
would it have never made it there? I don't I
think this. I think a lot of peoples and understandably,
so I understand why this is a lot of people's
understanding of invasive and native is flawed because they don't understand. Again,
it's zooming out, how did this thing get there? Right?
It's much harder to go across an ocean if you're
a seed or a little plantlet on a debris raft
or whatever. A three thousand mile ocean than it is
to go across a two hundred mile expanse of mostly
tropical forest. I guess there's a there's not even really
a mountain range in a way there. Yeah, it's native
three hundred miles away, and like northern Colombia. Hey, yeah,
I don't know. I don't think I buy that and
verbosena and see, I mean there's always cases. But I
was saying this before, Like the most generally speaking, and
take this with a grain of salt, the worst invasives
are always from other continents because those are what have
been separated the longest. There's a reason for it, right,
And this is what idiots who deny invasion biology who
shouldn't be taken seriously at all because they're generally not
botanists or collogists. They're either from the permaculture community, no
offense to them, or don't know plants at all. The
whole thing you're talking about with native and invasive is
was it adapted to this region? Did it evolve there?
There's a reason behind it. There's a method to the madness.
It's not just human purity. It's not just like the
how far back in time do you have to go
out well, it's not even about that. When you look
at all the things, all the other organisms this species
has relationships with it, starts to make sense. You realize that, okay,
this is connected to this, and you've got a specifict
pollinator here and a fungus here, beneficial fungus, and it's
evolved defenses against this certain insect because it's been in
an evolutionary arms race with it for you know, five
million years. For fuck's sake. I mean, this is not
that hard of a concept to think about. So someone
was busting my balls about that too. God, he was
fucking annoy He was on the Facebook. What would you know.
Shame on me for reading comments on a Facebook page.
But I do enjoy interacting with people some on there
sometimes cause it's you know, a lot of people are
cool and they're just curious and I get to answer
questions whatever. But some guy is some blowhard. You know,
he's responding like six paragraphs to every thing, either trying
to like it felt like showboating, or it's always men,
it's always fucking men to do this showboating, or you know,
oh yeah, but it's just shit like that. I ended
up just blocking them. Take a fucking hike. But talk
to your shrink, all right. I'm not your fucking therapist.
This isn't your space. Chill out, you're not being friendly,
being a dick, all right, Just fucking block and delete.
I mean, especially Facebook, it's so full of morons and
just bored, lonely people. And I have sympathy for them
to an extent, but just fucking go outside, Go do something.
Go teach yourself fucking piano or astronomy or Spanish, you're
fucking Czechoslovakia whatever, you know. God, it's just it's it's horrible.
It's it's like the what it does to the human mindset. One.
People are posers because they get you get to you know,
you get to decide what you look like to other people.
You get a filtered, choreographed and uh and tailored uh
wayed to you know, portray yourself. But also, you know,
you remove the face to face interaction. People has become
some people has become total cunts. And that's what this
guy was, he's becoming. He was just like a cunt.
So I said, just fucking you know, he was arguing
about something. He's like, well, not really, because how do
you explain and I was like, listen, man, I've been
all over the world. I've seen this. There's exceptions, take
with a grain of salt, but generally the continents, it's
the whole ecosystem. It's not just the plant species. When
you're thinking about invasive versus native and how something behaves,
it's all about checks and balances. It's invasive because there's
nothing that's evolved to take it down, like cacti in Australia.
Cact I never would have made it to Australia because
they were separated by a fucking ocean. Right one cack,
this species made it to Africa. Not surprisingly, it's a
bird dispersed species and only one in the last however,
many millions of years since cacti evolved. That tells you
it's you know that the chances are pretty rare that
these long distance dispersals happen, because not only does it
does it need to get dispersed it it's got to
be self fertile. If it's only one seed, it's got
to get established, it's got to land in the right spot,
et cetera. Versus what humans have done moving shit around
exponentially more. You know, thousands of times in the last
century or two all over the world anyway. Yeah, so
back Terris skiinensis it was everywhere. So it's got these
spines on it. I'm so interested in palms now because
they a lot of them have such defenses. You could
tell they were getting fucked with. They were like the
kid that got kept getting beat on, you know, it's
school and then learn jiu jitsu or fucking Muay Thai
or something, you know, because they just some herbivore was
just destroying so many palm speed I mean everywhere you go.
I mean some of the what was it Coco Thrinac
species I was seeing in Dominican Republic armored as hell.
And the way they use you know, whatever whatever they have,
whatever tools they have, petioles, you know, leaf bracts, whatever,
to turn into spines is remarkable. You could tell something
was or the herbivores were basically selecting for meanor plants.
They were they were breeding meanor plants because anything that
didn't have these spines, they were just gnawing to the
ground or killing. And so the stuff that evolved the
meanor spines was what was left. So Bactris ski and
enssce is one of these really cool bactor species. I
saw another species of bactriss it's one of that edible
palm species, really ethnobotanically important in Ecuador. But yeah, this
was bactris ki and enceince and it forms these little
palm thick it's you know what's palms are not. I
mean they're monocuts, but they're not closely related to grasses either.
They're the closest family is Dazapoganas, which is predominantly Australian
and makes some really fucking cool monocots in Australia too.
Kingya australis the one of the quote grass trees again,
which is a bad common name. It's like elephant tree
because there's completely unrelated taxa, completely unrelated genera that are
both called grass tree. But one of the grass trees
Kingya Australis, is in dazopogan Ace, which is related to palms.
And then Dasipogon is another cool genus that I saw
in Australia in Western Australia that's in the same order
as palms. Another cool native plant that I saw planted
and this elevation was probably what are we like two
three hundred feet elevation, I think planted along the irrigation canals,
and this really beat up their road. That was mostly
you know, I would see a farm truck every like
thirty minutes or something. God, it was fucking great out
there though, and it was just hot as balls. I
really love the heat. Now, I can really enjoy the heat.
Just get yourself a good hat and some baggy clothing.
None of these skinny jeans these guys are wearing, you know, Remberies,
punk kids, the punk scene back in the fucking Bay Area,
you know, twenty tens, show my age here. They were
these skinny jeans, these black skinny jeans. You can't do
that shit. And the subtropical latitudes pal all right with
tropical latitudes.
Speaker 2: Uh so.
Speaker 1: Tababouya rosia. There was a couple species of tababuya, which
is in Bignonia seed to Catapa family, and you could
see it in the flowers. But these were all leafless
because again we're in the dry season, which is roughly
what is December to May, the dry season, when that
that low pressure intertropical conversion zone is down in Brazil
in the southern hemisphere, not just in Brazil, southern hemisphere,
you know what I mean, right now, and it'll be
coming back up. It's probably crossing the equator right now,
coming back up. It'll be coming back to these latitudes
in May or June when the rainy season starts, and
so they're leafless, but they're flowering, just lit up with flowers.
There was a couple of different tababooa species and again
cool birds everywhere. There was Another interesting thing I saw
was guazuma on myfolio West Indian elm, which is not
an elme at all. It's in malvas. You can see
it in both leaves and flowers. Really got to learn that.
You got to learn the flower structures of different families.
It's really worth it. Tribotany in a day, or plant Systematics,
or just fucking download deep seek AI and ask that
I do use deep Seak because that's the AI that
showed up all the all the sleazy American billionaires. Alan
got me on it. My friend Lily was busting my
balls about it. I said, hey, you know what fuck
you pell this is leave me alone. We each have
our vices, so I can't She said, I can't believe
you use that. I said, yeah, well, well I can't
believe you.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: And then I tried to think of something rude to
say to her, but I couldn't because she's the lovely
But uh, you know, I think it's Ai is going
to be here whether you like it or not. You're
gonna be eating the ship, so you might as well,
you know, have a couple you know, delicious fruits too,
figuratively speaking, use it to teach yourself something. Ask you know,
I can have Ai read research papers for me and
dig out the information I want that would otherwise take
me forty five minutes so and if Alan Rockefellers for it,
it can't be all that bad. You know. I trust
that guy's I trust, I trust his uh, his intuition.
He's a solid fucking human. Yeah, but uh, guazuma A
my folia little yellow flowers MALVESI exerted stamens. That was
that was abundant. You know. What I was excited to
see was the calibash tree Crescentia kuhete. And there's a
which is native down there. And then there's another one,
Chrishentia a lotta, which is also big noniac, but it
may make these fucking gourds. The fruit is like a gourd.
It looks like a gourd, and it's what they make
the bowls from any Amazon. You can slice it open,
you gotta, you know, obviously have the proper tool to
do so. I don't know if they just slice them
with a machete. Probably not. They probably use some sort
of you know, electric vibrating saw. That is, you know,
sounds like a dildo, but isn't They just had to
throw that in there. I hope you appreciate it. But
but it's got it's it's got a weird form too.
I thought it was like a rainforest tree, but it's not.
It's it's dry forest tree. It's got fascicled leaves, no petiole.
It looks like a lot of the thorn scrub plants
that you might encounter in South Texas. But it's got
these huge gourds. So that's what Again, these are not deserts.
They're dry forests. They get two meters of rain a year.
No desert gets two meters of rain a year. But
you know, they get two meters around a year. But
they also get six months of dry of just bone
dry as balls throughout deciduousness. But uh god, I would
love to grow this tree in South Texas. I'm surprised
nobody has yet see anything. We can grow a lot
of stuff here in South Texas. It'll because it's the
hottest place in the United States by far, hotter than Phoenix.
Phoenix has individually hotter days. We have more accumulated heat
throughout the year. Phoenix gets cold. It doesn't really get
cold where I live. But anyway, but you know, you
can grow this stuff, but then it'll get knocked back
during you know, the one or two days it freezes
at five in the morning or it gets close to freezing.
So yeah, anyway, Oh you know what I saw too,
there's fucking neme everywhere. It's it's uh, it's neem oil,
as as that rak the Indica, And it's like an
invasive plant in some of these some of the more
disturbed areas, human areas. So mahogany family, you know, same
family as that invasive China buried tree that's so bad
in Texas, like in central Austin with those little golden
berries pinnate leaves, horrible invasive tree. But this name is
in the same family. It's the mahogany family. Meliac Yeah,
as that Eacta indica, and it's you could see it
in the flowers. Of course, if you're catching the theme,
I've mentioned that all the time. Look at the flowers.
Flowers are the most diagnostic. But but it's got they've
got a really cool flower structure they do, and of
course ethnobotanically, it's a massively important plant. Makes little droops
as well. Are they berries or droops? I don't know.
I think cut one open to see if it's got
many seeds or one. But they've got this white corona
like tube with these white, five distinct petals. Neme. As
a Directa indica, you can pronounce whatever you want. You
speak Spanish as your native tongue, you're going to pronounce
things differently. But we haven't even gotten to the cloud
for us. We're just fucking around with with dry tropical
forests yet. But that was really wonderful to see that everywhere.
And then there was the elephant ear tree, which is
this massive fucking legum man. I saw a whole it's
so big. It took only three of these trees to
cover to shade a soccer field, a dirt soccer field
in this little town. I stayed in just little off
the beaten map town and so it created like this
almost like indoor auditory, indoor arena feeling with these giant
elephant ear trees. They're a legum and terra Loobium cyclo carpum.
Was that it was it siiclo carpum. I forget, I'm
let me check this, yeah, And Terolobium ciclo carpum. It's
a memosoid. So it's got these little clusters of white
spherical inflorescences, little white, tiny white flowers, pinnate leaves. It
looks like a lu cana, like a tepewahe or something,
you know, one of these one of these memos sooid
legas they get fucking the ones I saw are they
can get huge, like really big around like three four
feet diameter almost. And then the fruit is it looks
like an elephant there. It looks like some sort of
like weird baguette or croissant or something. And you cut it,
you break it open. The seeds a r attle around
in it, and you break it open and it makes
like a It's got this really distinct smell to it.
It smells sugary and sweet, kind of like a tamarind
and the goo is really sticky. You'll get all over
your hands. But but it's not I wouldn't. It's probably edible,
but it's not like it doesn't smell delicious. There's like
a smell of a little bit of rank in there,
no offense to the tree, a little bit of rank,
like feet and ass smell slightly slightly. It's mostly sweet,
but there's a little bit of foot and ass smell
in there. But you know, you crack those little crescient
there's some crescent crescent shaped croissant leg and fruits open
and there's some cool The seeds are cool, like they're
they're like size, and they've got a cool design. I'm
like tear drop, tear drop shape within a tear drop,
a tear drop shaped striation within a tear drop shaped fruit. Beautiful,
but yeah, it'll becose. I'm gonna try to grow one
of those in South Texas. I'm sure it's not I'm
sure it's not prone or it's not I'm sure it's
aceptule to frost. I'm sure it's supple to frost, and
we get knocked back in a freeze. But you get
to enjoy it while you can, and a lot of
these things grow fast and if it you know, if
you get it big enough, it wouldn't die in a freeze.
We just get knocked back. So yeah, it'd be great
to try it. And Cassia grandez too. So many legumes
down here, so many legumes in these dry tropical forests,
legumes and anti cards. There was a really cool anti card,
Anacardium excelsum. Anacardium occidentel is the cashew which is native
which is native to uh Southeast Asia, I think where
is it Southeast Asia and India. But ana Ardiem excelsam
is native to the neotropics and it's produces a cashew
like fruit. It's got that little arrow and then the seeds.
What what what did these fruits evolve with them? Wonder too,
because they're really distinct and huge, and also it's got
to be something that's not allergic to that you rush
you all like oil. But anyway, Anacardium excelsum is the
native one, the native neotropical one, also known as the
espa vet, and another massive tree. They can get huge
and you can really see it, you know, like a
lot of members of Anacardiac the Sumac and the poison
oak and the mango family. You could see it in
the leaves and the leaf a nation. They've just got
a gestalt around them, if you're interested in that. I
did an interview with Susan Bell, doctor Susan but really, Pelle,
Susan Pell. My bad, God, damn it. This I sound
like fucking Joe Biden, you know with these wait wait,
come on, man, if they did it and then ah fuck,
we broke medicaid man, we beat medicaid man. Susan Pell,
wonderful botanist. She's and uh she's at the uh uh
National God damn it, my fucking memory, the National Botanic Garden. No,
the National Yeah, that was a botanic garden. Jesus christ
Man like remember plant names, but I can't remember someone
I had like a three hour conversation with six months ago.
Maybe it was a year ago, Yeah, I think it
was it. Maybe it was I can't remember when. Maybe
was a year ago. But she studies Antacardier say, and
it was a great conversation, soup. It was super enlightening too,
because I learned a whole ship lot of stuff about
that family that I didn't know. But these these we
really get into the fyto chemistry of these plants, and
that that conversation, which is really cool. I mean these
compounds like you rush you all is an anti fungal
and anti herbivalry compound and just happens to cause contact
dermatitis and people. Same thing with litterol two. I wonder
how many different similar compounds there are in that family
that can cause you know, allergenic sensitivity. Okay, okay, there
we go, there we go. Do your tight chi. Do
your fucking tight chi. Do it? Do it in the
morning when you wake up, go get the sun on
your face, they get outside. Do your tight chi? You
know this? Would you move it? Move it smooth and graceful,
stretch those muscles. Do you do your tight chi? Do
your fucking tai chi. Huh, what's up? I'm back. It
took a little break, you know. Is the tight she
really does help? You know, you get old, you start
having you know, muscle issues take you're creatine or something.
When you do a workout, you gotta do your taichi.
Do your tight chi. I can't. I don't have to,
you know, I have too too quote neurodivergent for yoga.
I got Badie can't do yoga, but I could do
the tight chi. So we'll do the we'll do the taichi.
Got to go and get you smooth. And then you know,
we're taking a little break here from talking about plants
where we're uh, we're going down a different road now,
you know, it's a little bit different. Check this out.
We're just gonna we're just gonna jam for seconds. Give me,
just give me forty five seconds here, just stay with me.
Now we're trying to learn the song on piano.
Speaker 2: Just got it up.
Speaker 1: Lobby free, surfree. How you pronounce it? How you do
that stuff? Nika? How you supposed to play? I don't
know how to say this stuff. But just wait for
the chorus because you'll know the chorus because somebody else
ripped that off. They sampled it. Here we go, Here
we go, wait, hold on, hey, hey, stay with me, now,
come here, stay.
Speaker 2: Uh uh.
Speaker 1: You know what that is? The originals are always better
than the one the songs they use, the samples. What
does it starts off in a G sharp? No, no,
G G sharp than a then f? There you go, yeah,
G sharp G G sharp a F. It's a banger.
Speaker 2: Hey, it's a banger.
Speaker 1: That's nice, all right anyway, So, uh, we're gonna talk
about this is this is kind of new. This article
just came out. A tree that benefits from being struck
by lightning. This is wild and speaking of tropical lowland forests,
dipturis oliifra, let's turn this. Let's let's can it for
a second. There we go, Uh, recruitment dynamics in the
tropical rainforest tree. Oh maybe it's a rainforest tree. It's
not a it's not a dry forest. Oh, I'm sorry,
my bad, dip tur This was wild. I came across
this a couple of days ago and realized, God, these
fucking man, these tropical trees are just blowing my mind.
I was, like I said, I was at that one spot.
I got a Airbnb for like thirty bucks. Didn't have
ac but it was fine. I had a fan, and
it was in the lowland for I was like two
hundred feet above sea level. It was as hot as
where I live in South Texas. South Texas is basically
tropical for nine months of the year. It's like a
tropical lowland and forest, and it's got the same kind
of plant community. Doesn't get as big obviously, but it's
that thick scrub, the same density of vegetation, which the
dominant culture here hates. Of course they hate. It's messy.
The plants are messy. We have to cut them down.
We want to mow if it's messy. I got that
fucking that that idea that the native vegetation or just
vegetation in general is messy. It's messy, so okay, so
what's clean? Just like concrete and brick and asphalt. Like
you realize you live in a place where, you know,
it's such a low latitude, you're just getting blasted by
the sun. Like, why don't you want anyway, it's such
as not the case in these these tropical forests. So
like even the dry forest that I was in, it
was so the uh, it was so such a tall
canopy and there's so much vegetation that it's shady and
generally cool, and you can still get a nice brea ease,
so you're out of the sun, so it doesn't feel
as bad even though it's like ninety five degrees fair night,
what is that? Thirty five celsias? All right? So anyway,
this paper just came out and it's not on SI hub,
yet I asked somebody to send it to me. I
just put a call out.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: The only thing is, you know, I get like fifteen
people sending me papers, and which is really nice. But
then I have to I have to thank everyone because
I can't just get I can't have someone email me
a fucking paper, go to the trouble to do so,
and then not say thank you. So then I got
to go through fucking fifteen to twenty emails and say
thank you, thank you, because yeah, it's just the kind
of person I am, you know, beneath the crusty, spiny exterior,
I'm very soft inside. And uh anyway, so when I
put shit like that on Instagram into stories, I got
to make sure I go in after I've received it
and actually delete it. Otherwise I get all these emails
and then I don't. If I don't respond to them,
they're gonna, you know, say he's an asshole. They're gonna,
I'm gonna hurt their feelings. So anyway, new Phytologists. Just
paper just came out by Evan am Gora at All,
Helene C. Mueller, Landoc, Casey Cushman, Janine Richard shout out
to Jannine Philip Bitzer, Jeby Birchfield, Jeffrey Birtzfield, Poplin RD. Anyway,
how some tropical trees benefit for being struck by lightning
evidence for dipterix oliifra and other large stature trees summary.
Lightning strikes kill hundreds of millions of trees annually, but
their role in shaping tree life history and diversity is
largely unknown. Here we use data from a unique lightning
location system to show that some individual trees counterintuitively benefit
for being struck by lightning. Oh shit, there's pdf download
never mind, I guess it's free. Oh no, you can't
download it. You can look at it, but you can't
download it. They'll take a bunch of screenshots. I don't care.
Someone's gonna put it on SI hub anyway. Lightning killed
fifty six percent of ninety three directly struck trees and
cause an average of forty one percent crown die back
among the survivors. However, among these struck trees, ten direct
strikes cause negligible damage to dipterix olifra, while killing seventy
eight percent of their lianas and two point one mg
of competitor tree biomass so dipterix oliifra is an enormous tree.
It's in the pa family Fabasi, specifically faboid subfamily, and
it's it's got pink flowers and I guess it's a
you know, is it a pioneer species. I don't know.
And it occurs in Costa Rica, but it doesn't occur
in the lowland dry forest that I was in, it's
too dry. It occurs on the east side of that
mountain range that receives the rain off the warm Atlantic waters,
of course, because the warm waters cause more rain than
the colder waters and colder ocean currents, and so rains
you know, are coming from the east hit that mountain
range gets you know, squeezed up to higher elevations. As
they cool and condense, they dump all their water, they
dump all their rain, and then the air that comes
they don't they don't reach the west, the west side
of those mountains. So this is this is a much
more a wetter tree, a more music tree than the
stuff that I was seeing, you know, stuff like in
terra Lobium cyclocarpum, the elephant theater tree, which was just
fucking massive. Man. There was at one spot I saw
there was like a soccer field under the under these trees,
you know, like I said, the indoor auditorium, you know,
And it was only like four of these massive trees
that were really doing most of the shade. They get
that big, they're just they're beautiful, beautiful angiosperms. So yeah,
So it occurs in wet forests, you know, rainforests northern
northeastern Costa Rica, eastern Panama. What's the rain, what's the
rest of the range. It goes into Columbia a little
bit maybe, but apparently this tree benefits from being struck
by lightning. It can it can recover, it's adapted to it,
but it kind of sheds all the leanas. There's lots
of leanas in these forests. I was seeing even in
the dry force, I was seeing these massive twisting vines
because you know there's during the even in the dry forest,
in the rainy season, they get upwards six feet of
rain a year. It's very wet. Stuff grows very lush,
very tall, very dense, and so to get light these things,
you know, this is a common growth habit, the leana's
and the vines and so, but they can also be
a pain in the ass to the tree. Obviously, you
know you got like a tree with a bunch of
shit growing all over it. It's going to be stealing
light and also burdening it with a little bit of weight. Anyway,
we'll cut to the chase with the paper results the
minor costs and major benefits of direct lightning strikes to
d Olifra trees to dip direct soliffra trees, the observed
costs of being directly struck by lightning were negligible for
d Oliifra trees. This species survived all ten direct strikes
to nine individuals with only minor visible injuries. And these
are big trees. I mean they have to be the
tallest thing in that immediate area to get struck by lightning. Obviously,
with only minor visible injuries, damage was so minimal that
peak crown dieback of directly struck do oliferate did not
differ significantly from die back among the general population of conspecifics.
Repeat digital surface models from drone photogrammetry photogrammetry what is
photogrammar confirm that these directly struck trees did not decrease
in crown height or crown area during the two to
three year interval encompassing the strike date. In contrast with
the minor damage to these directly struck de Oliphra trees,
directly struct trees of other species exhibited high damage immortality.
The majority sixty four percent of the other eighty three
directly struck trees died within two years of the strike,
as compared to zero deaths for directly struck de Oliphra trees.
The difference in mortality between doliffer and other species cannot
be explained by differences in mean mortality rates among species.
Why is Diptrix olif for surviving? That's what I want
to know.
Speaker 2: How is it?
Speaker 1: How's it doing that? How's it doing it? Stuff? I
don't know's doing it stuff? Did they look into this
at all? Among trees surviving after one year post strike,
mean crown die back was five point seven times higher
for directly struck trees of other species than for d
oli ifra trees five point seven times higher mean crown
die back Jesus and crown loss was three times higher, respectively.
Lightning caused significant damage and depth to trees neighboring the
directly struck d oliiphra. On average, direct lightning strikes. The
d olipher killed nine point two neighboring trees and costs
two point one mg. Is that mill graams? I don't
know what the fuck mg means two point one mg
SD equals to they're using units. I don't know what
the fuck this is. This is some shit. I'm not
schoolding of biomass on average direct lightning strikes the do
olifer killed nine point two neighboring trees. There you go there,
removing the competition and cost two point one mg of
biomass mortality among neighboring trees. Oh MG, it is milligrams,
but it's it's in relation to another unit, like milligrams
perconmet bio biomass density can be expressed as milligrams per
unit area, you know, like milligrams per square centimeter. Okay,
that makes sense. Now they were leaving out that centimeter part.
Direct strikes. Direct lightning strikes that d oli ephra trees
also reduced LEANA loads. Oh, they got a video. Leana
abundance has decreased on all six directly struck the oli
effer that were initially infested with leanas four others struck
the oli effra had no leanas before. After the strike,
the average number of leanas in a tree decreased seventy
eight percent. So this is like, gad, this just like
if God went in there with the hedge trimmers and
just pruned all that shit off. Let the tree breathe,
get a little bit more light, increase the airflow around it,
which is very important in these very these human four
trust too leads to less rot, more airflow, less rot,
less fungal pathogens, less propensity for fungal pathogens to attack
things like bark or you know, crotches of trees or whatever.
I would assume this decrease far exceeds the expected mortality
of these leanos over the same time period based on
community wide rates of leano mortel. Yet duh, they're not.
They're getting struck by lightning. They're gonna die a lot
faster and more abundantly than if they're just you know,
for then a control. So that's cool. So the lightning
this tree is benefiting, is benefiting from getting struck by
lightning and suffering minimal minimal costs. Again, that's the thing,
minor costs and major benefits. And so now something is
selecting for it the lightning in these tropical forests where
every you know, I think it's like every day there's
a thunderstorm. God, it's such a wonderful fucking feeling to
be in these forces and hear the thunder.
Speaker 2: Ah.
Speaker 1: There's such special places. They really are. If you can,
If you ever get a chance to visit a tropical forest,
whether it's a dry forest or a rainforest, whatever it is,
it's so worth it. It's so incredible. Even you can't see.
It's disorienting and it's overwhelming because it's you know, even
from a bondness perspective, because you can't tell what the
fuck you're looking at half the time because the trees
are so high up, can't see the flowers, which you
need for identification. Every once in a while you'll get
flowers on the ground like the you know, after their
post mature and the corolla falls off over and shit
is still up there whatever. But so you could there,
you can figure it out. There's stuff you could do.
I got this, uh you know, I use a Nikon
of take photos. I got this. I found this old
eighteen to three hundred millimeter lens I had purchased. It's
like a five hundred dollars lens or some shit. I
got it a couple of years ago, and I hadn't
been using it because it wasn't very good for macro photography.
You know, it's like an extendable lens. But now I'm
all about it, you know, because you know, you can
still take decent photos even though you have to be
you know, like a foot back from the subject, which
if you're photographing a small flower, whatever it's, you can
still do it. But also just for you had to
have that telephoto capability to zoom in up to three
hundred millimeters, which is like a you know, a really
it's like a telephoto lens. Is great, and to do
it on the fly too. I'm not getting like, you know,
these big two thousand dollars burden nerd lenses or something
like that. I would I would break that, but I
need this stuff. I take so many fucking photos. I
probably took twenty thousand photos when I was there, because
it's it's a kin to taking herbarium specimens, and I'll
use them. I learned so much from the photographs I take.
I take at least six or seven photos of every
plant from different angles leaves, stems, pubescents on the stems, flowers,
et cetera, habit habitat, et cetera. Both habit and habitat. So,
you know, but if you're just starting out, get like
at eighteen to fifteen millimeter fifty five millimeters stock lens
and if you can afford it, like a decent one
oh five macro. I use Nikon because they got a
nice so they got nice software. You know, Cannon doesn't
have nice software. It's a fucking pain in the ass.
But you know, especially for geo tagging, Nikon is the
only one that snaperdge app as much of a pain
in the ass that can be at time, still works
pretty good. So anyway, so I had this telephoto lens,
I could, yeah, I could zoom in on all this
shit and get photos of these leaves way up in
the canopy, one hundred feet up in the canopy, so
I could at least tell what it is. I could
take a picture and then zoom in on it on
the camera on the screen and see what it is.
It was incredibly helpful. And also you see cool birds
and shit, I get a photo of a bird, it's
not going to be a fucking uh. You know, it's
not going to be like a magazine photo. I could
still tell what it is and it's clear. So anyway,
walking down, we'll finish with the drive force and move
on to different habitat in a minute. But I want
to stick with these drive forces for a minute because
they're so you know, in their own way. And it's
also nobody was there because it's the dry season and
it's so fucking hot. It was at least ninety five
degrees walking around, you know, crunching on the leaves on
the ground everywhere. But you know, the heat doesn't face
me anymore because I live and I've gotten so accustomed
to it living in South Texas at a low elevation
in South Texas too, more like one hundred and twenty
feet here at twenty six degrees latitude. So it's hot
as balls most of the time, you know, unless those
odd odd days in the winter you get like a
cold front from up north. But and so I've gotten
used to just sweating all the time. You wear baggy clothes,
you wear a baggy shirt, you sweat all the time.
Light colors and never fucking wear black anymore, and you
get used to it and you just learn to appreciate
the sweat and roll with it. But yeah, just you
gotta watch your heart rate, make sure your heart rate
doesn't get too elevated because of the heat, you know
above like one forty one fifty hit the one fifty area,
you got to stop and take it easy, you know,
which I definitely did going uphill in some of these areas,
Like when I was climbing to the top of the
karst the car stereo hitting one fifty one sixty, It's like, fuck,
you gotta take it easy because that's when you're gonna
have an issue, So when you're gonna keeel over. But
uh yeah, got cacti and howler monkeys, fucking nuts man
cacti growing in the understory of forests, like tall columnar
cacti growing in the understory of these dry forests with
burst ros simaruba on dog tooth karst limestone that's been
so so eroded by the rain, by the tropical rains,
you know, in a rainy season, and you learn to
you learned to love the heat so and it was
cool too because a lot of those what I noticed
is a lot of those legume seeds need scarification to germinate.
So what I was doing. I got one of those
dog electric nail files. It's like a you know, it's
just a spinning grit disc, not disc, but like a
you know, a roller. You can get them on Scamazon.
I hate to fucking advertise it. There was a alternative
to Scanada. You can get them on Scammazon for like
fifteen twenty bucks. And that's you know. I usually that
to cut the dog, to file the dog's nails down,
because I don't want to. I don't want to, you know,
mess them up. Back when we used to live in
a climate that wasn't hot as balls, I would just
take the dogs out on the bike all the time
and they the concrete would file their nails down. But
now I got it, and now I use this thing
right because we're a bunch of fatties living here in
South Texas. That's what happens, you know, when you move
to Texas, really anywhere in the South. So anyway, so
I use that to scarify these seas. And I did
it with Dermatophylum. Texas Mountain Laurel probably one of the
dumbest common names that exists because it doesn't grow in
the mountains, and it's not a laurel but a Dermatophylum
secunda florum, really common native plant here. I guess it's
on that band that State Bill eighteen sixty eight banned
substances list that you know, only it's so retarded it
could only come out of a place like Texas, out
of the Texas politician's mouth. So some guys filing this bill,
State Bill eighteen sixty eight. I think he was an
accountant before he became a politician. I'm sure he's got
a wealth of world experience. He wrote this bill banning
all these plants that no one in their right mind
would ever use to get high. Most of them are toxic.
They're mildly psychoactive, like I guess a lot of poisons are.
I guess you get I guess you feel a little weird,
you know, in the head before you you have blood
pressure raised and you start vomiting blood. I don't know,
I don't know, but but but it supposedly it's, you know,
you have to show intent to you know, to produce
these for consumption. But they could make that up. That
could be easily weaponized against anybody who's growing any of
these plants like heimiasilisifolia in the loose strife family Lithraci
or Dermatto philem secundaflorum, which has been used for beads
and was used for beads by native people Cohill Tecans
among other tribes in Texas for so long. So anyway,
the mezcal bean, which is where mescaline came from, It
was a confused with peyote a lot when Honkey Death
Cult was you know, initially starting the first culture War
against the natives in the late eighteen hundreds, the first
culture war against the natives in Texas. So anyway, but yeah,
but you could scarify all these things, any seeds, any
legumes that need scarification used that dog nail file works,
works like a charm. So before we move on, what
are the dominant plant families in these ecosystems in these
neotropical dry forests. Fabees, the legume family euphour bac just
exceptionally specios, especially in you know, Brazilian and Katinga in
Central America. You know, crotons Sapium et cetera, burser ace,
the frankinsense family like Bursra simaruba, and burso, Graviolens, Palo Santo, apostanac,
the milkweed and oleander family. You know, species like Espidosperma
or genera like Espidosperma and ruby ac.
Speaker 2: So you know.
Speaker 1: That's that's those are gonna be the some of the dominant,
dominant families that you'll end up seeing. And lots of mimosoids,
but again like dipteryx Oliiphra is not a mimosoid, that's
a faboid. It's from the phaboid E subfamily. And I
we'll take a little break for some shitty commercials, all right,
and now to talk about some of my favorite habitat
besides deserts, is neotropical cloud forests. So anywhere in the tropics,
elevation plays such an important part in the type of
plant community you're gonna get, the type of clades of
plants that is, evolutionarily related groups of plants, you're gonna encounter,
the rainfall, the imperatures, you're gonna get it. And there's
so much variation, all right. It's it's such a there's
so many different kinds of habitats depending on elevation. Whether
you're in Wahaka, whether you're in the mountains around Mexico City,
whether you're in Sonora, Mexico, whether you're in Peru, Ecuador.
You know, you get the you get the lowland forests,
you get lowland dry forests, and on the in the
rain shadow of mountains, you get tropical more tropical music
forests where you're not in the rain shadow of mountains,
like on the on the warm water, warm ocean current
side of a mountain range. And then up at the
mid elevations you get a little bit not necessarily dry forest,
but you get you know, a different plant communities, start
encountering plants you're not going to see down below. And
then up at the higher elevations like eight thousand and
nine thousand feet, you're gonna start encountering cloud forests, which
is totally bizarre. It's unlike anything you'd ever experience in
more temperate latitudes like the United States or Europe. You know,
you'll see a lot of temperate lineages of plants, plants
you would see at more temperate latitudes, but they're growing
at tropical latitudes and they can do that because they're
so high up. And that was where I spent a
lot of time bodanizing and looking at plants, you also
get a lot of cool mushrooms, many more cool mushrooms
than you get at lower elevations. Up in the higher
elevation forests, you know, in places like Mexico, like where
the Monarch reserve, those are all Aby's forests, those are
all coniferous forests. You don't normally don't get members of
the pine family that low latitude, unless it's of course montane,
unless it's a high elevation area, and they are of
course Michael riislhosts to a lot of cool mushrooms, just
like oak trees, And there was a shit ton of
oak trees I encountered in Costa Rica at the like
around a five thousand to six foot mid elevation forests.
I saw Corcus in signus, one of the largest acorns
in the whole oak family, size of a baseball kind
of tomatos. Pubescent leaves, beautiful leaves, very coriaceous and leathery too,
but having like a glabrous ad axial surface upper side
of the leaf, and then a more pubescent like a
rusty indument on the underside of the leaf on the
ab axial surface. And of course these are huge trees,
and they were all over this this mid elevation forest
that roughly, I think it was like fifty five hundred
feet what is that a meters fifteen hundred meters sixteen
hundred meters maybe nah, probably that's a little bit higher
than that. Seventeen I don't know anyway, but really interesting
stuff there. But you're still getting a lot of the
gazaniriads and interesting stuff from lower elevation wet forests as well.
And this was right around San Jose, Costa Rica. So
in Costa Rica, the mountains go from northwest to southeast.
On the east side of the mountains and the lowlands
you've got the more amusic kind of rainforest habitat. On
the northwest side you've got the dry forest, the dry
tropical forests where all the cool cact iron at gaves.
There's even a melo cactus you get in the far
northwest of Costa Rica. You know, melo cactus is the
cake this It looks like it's wearing a FETs like
the fucking Shriners on a big Kennedy's album, you know.
And then you get Paramo really high up, which is
where it's you know, summer every day, winter, every night,
really thin air. The plants have hairs and pubescents on them,
not because of drought like you would encounter in a
desert like in western North America, but they've got hairs
to protect against ultraviolet light, which is much exponentially stronger
up there, like by an order of magnitudes stronger at
higher elevations because there's less atmosphere for that light to
travel through that breaks it up. And also because it's
so high up the air is so thin, it loses
warmth really really quickly, and so it it can get
down to freezing, It'll be eighty degrees during the day,
and they can get down to freezing at night, and
so those hares act as an insulation against the freeze damage,
you know, to deal with those drastic temperature swings. And
I saw, you know, an illustration of the benefit of
hairs when I was growing Helianthus argo fhylus during the
Texas freeze. The spot I was staying at, I had
some of these, you know, the hairy sunflower get fifteen
feet tall. It grows in the Texas sand sheet. I
think there's a disjunk population in Louisiana, which is cool too,
like in coastal Louisiana somewhere on sand, but it's a
sand endemic like many sand plants, many sand dune plants.
It's very hairy and it gets a big taproot. And
during that Texas freeze it got down to like twenty
six degrees fahrenheit where I live. And Helianthus argophylus, despite
being an annual, a non woody plant with just you know,
soft tissue, it survived. It came out through the freeze
because that thick layer of wool. I mean, the leaves
are almost white Argophilus silver leaf. The thick layer of
wool protected against the freeze. It insulated a little bit.
It'll you know, same thing that like if citrus growers
do they wrap their trees with frost cloth when they
know it's going to freeze, and they're you know, in
Florida or South Texas or something. It's a it'll it's
not going to save the plant in a deep, deep freeze,
but it'll buy you a few degrees celsius of protection,
which is exactly what it did. And so that's why
many of the plants in the Paramo are hairy. It
was the Paramo was fucking insane. I mean, it's a
whole other it's above cloud forest. It's like a whole
other world. Esclonium ortilioides is the dominant tree there, you know,
forms these short forests to like fifteen twenty feet tall
seven meters tall, and everything's covered in epiphytes, and there's
epiphytic liver warts, these red liver warts everywhere that don't
they're not like the Thallus rewards the uh, you know,
not the thallus what is the word on the leafy
liver They don't look like that. They're like they look
more like a moss almost, but they've they're just covered
in these they've got these these red and orange pigments
to protect against the increased ultra violet light. Least, that's
what I would assume, just wild shit everywhere. That pooyasilerioides,
which is a bromeliad, was the target plant that I
was looking for. It's the northernmost species in a genus Puya,
which is a fucking dope genus of bromeliad. That's mostly all.
It's all South American except for I think a couple
of species, this being one of them. And this grows
of course at high elevations. And what's remarkable is Pooya
is a really drought tolerant genus, like Puya Alpestros, Puya venusta.
You see them in Chile. They form these huge clumps
of really razor sharp, serrated leaves that would be a
horrible thing to fall into because they they've got these
recurved teeth that would just turn into yours. But they
get these inflorescences, these flowering stalks that look like wooly
blue torches, just fucking incredible flowers, a lot of them.
Most of them are bird pollinated. There's a whole group
in the genus Puya and evolutionary clade of plants in
the genus Puya a number of species that produce sterile
inflorescence branches. So it's a branching inflorescence, but the branches
don't produce any flowers. They're sterile. They literally just provide
a perch for birds to hang out on so they
can stick their heads in the flower, suck nectar and
pollinate it. And the pollen is like this orange. Puya
Alpestros gets these iridescent blue flowers and then gets like
orange pollen It's just incredible. I just one I planted
is just about to uh. One I grew from seed
and plant that on eighteenth. The Mendela in West Oakland
is just starting to flower. Someone sent me photos. I
think that I already mentioned that probably who knows anyway,
So this was Pooya dasillarioides because it looks like Dasileian,
the genus of sodaal, which you know people make booze
from and generally don't grow. They just go take it
from habitat, which isn't very cool. There's got it. Come on, guys,
figure out a way to get around it. You can
grow Desilarians so easily. Someone started dasillian farm. It's worth
the investment. It'd be fucking cool regardless, right, Just start
planting a bunch of Dasillyrian, uh texanam or Leophylum, which
are the main ones we get in Texas. You get
Dasillarian wheeleraye in Arizona and uh Dasillarian some of the
colescent ones that look like the Kingy Australis the Australian
grass tree. You know, they got like a stem wild
looking plants down in Correthoro, Mexico and tom alipis. It
was a desialarian logisimum. I forget, well, I forget what
they are, the collescent thesillian. But anyway, this puya apparently
whoever named the things that it thought that it looked
like a dasillarian, which it does. It's got a similar
form to it, but it's it's a clumping bromeliad with
recurved teeth. But it grows in fucking bogs. It grows
in sphagnum bogs. It's not drought tolerant at all. It's
it grows in Sphagnum bogs at nearly twelve thousand feet
elevation in Costa Rica with a really cool fern species
that looks like a psycat. It looks like some sort
of what, you know, what you would call a sago palm,
what a fucking layperson would call a sago palm, you know,
which is like, you know, it's like a plant that
gets planted. I have terrible visions of sago palm surrounded
by blankets of Saint modes, freshly mode Saint augustine grass
kept alive with a morphine drip of irrigation and fertilizers
and pesticides and like the Florida suburbs. Horrible vision, horrible
place to be, But that's a sago palm is a pycat.
It's not a palm at all, but they call it
sego palm. And that's what this black num species look like,
which I guess is now in the genus Lamerio Psychis,
and Psychis is a genus of psychad. It's a fucking
super confusing so you would think lamerio Psychus is a psychat.
It's actually a fern species black them black nacy is
a very common family of ferns at lower latitudes, and
so Lamerio Psychis Buktinia or was it blackham buctina. I
think it's Lamerio Psychus book tinII. Now was growing all
over the place with this puya Puya des larioides and
cheskeaa subteslada species of bamboo. In these really low growing
Sphagnum bogs, there was fucking Sphagnum peete everywhere, like living Sphagnum,
you know, like red and yellow. I think it was
Sphagnum magillanicum was the species. But there was I mean, god,
it was just such a fucking wild habitat. It was
so cool. You know, in these PuYas, they weren't blooming
when I was there. I guess if you can be
there when they're blooming. It's literally a wooly torch. The
inflorescence is a wooly torch. There's so much hair and
wool on theeds things to protect them against the UV
and of course that frost. Especially Espiletti, which is like
the iconic genus of paramo plants. It's an astorace E
s p E l E. T I A. It's a
fucking wild looking genus that's had an adaptive radiation. Many
different species at the higher elevations in Colombia, and even
there's a couple disjunct populations in Ecuador. They're very remote though,
you have to hike to them. They're far the fuck
out there. And when I was in Ecuador, I read
about this disjunc population that was it was the southernmost
population of Espaletia and it was just north of Mara,
where I was staying. But it's again it's you got
to like hike way the fuck in there. It's way
in there, but it's an interesting disjunk. It's like, you know,
the rest of the population is much further north, and
then this by the Colombian border, and there's just one
stand farther south. But all the espialetias are. You know,
they've got this same form that a lot of plants
at the high elevation. It's a convergent form, an evolutionarily
convergent form that a lot of plants that are not
related end up evolving when they grow at very high
elevations at tropical latitudes. The spiletti has looked like that.
You know, they get like and they retain their old
leaves because it acts like an insulation skirt. You know,
as the thing grows up, it acts like an insulation
skirt along the stem again protect it from frost and
I guess from UV to a lesser extent. But this
where this pooyu was growing, it was so foggy it was.
It rained on and off, it pissed on and off. God,
it was just so fucking cool. And all the other
plants there there's ferns on growing on everything. It's but
it's scrub vegetation too, and it must have been hard
panned beneath it, because I could see it was the
dry season now, but I could see there were areas
where water certainly pulled up and formed little bogs. And
I bet there's so many cool amphibians up there too.
I came across the paper that talked about some sort
of salamander species that uses Puya dasa leary oides to
hunt arthropods like it climbs up the stem. But we're
getting ahead of ourselves, so we'll talk about the paramol
in a minute. If there's anything left to actually get
to tons of cool lycopods and ship up there too.
But uh, but anyway, so the main things. I started
off in Santa Sidro General down there on the other
side of the mountains and got like a little fucking
Airbnb and took this little shitty sedan that I almost destroyed,
took it up and started. You know, the road starts
getting interesting. Right around five thousand feet. You start seeing
gunnera and sickness with you know, the Chilean rhubarb. It's
called a lot of plants that you see at these
higher elevations you also see at lower elevations in Chile,
like gunnera. That was a good it was. There was
a couple other ones too, or at least you know,
related species in the same genus because those temperate rainforests
of southern Chile have some floristic affinities with the higher
elevation paromo or higher elevation cloud forest. So Gunnar run
Sigmas was there on five six thousand feet there was
wigandhia urins, which is a giant borage. They can get
like eighteen feet tall. It's one of the coolest rutural plants.
What do I mean What do I mean by rutural plants? Well,
ruteral comes from the word rubble, the land word for rubble,
which which is you know, just means human disturbance. So
like on the edge of the city or a developed area,
a neglected area with gandy urns will pop up. It's
got it's a fucking great plant. It's got leaves that
are probably a foot and a half two feet, you know,
half a meter long by out of I fuck, I
don't know what a foot wide, big peltate leaves, big
big peltate leaves. And and they got you know, those
little urticade hairs all over them, like so many members
of bridge. And they see the flowers at the size
of golf balls. They're purple. This is a really common
plant you see in Mexico, and it's a ruteral plant
in Mexico too, like Mexico City wahaka, especially growing on
the side of the road. It's it's everywhere. I think
there's a couple of trees. If you want to see
some cool stuff and you're in California, go hit up.
You see Berkeley Botanic Garden, right. I don't know what
they're charging to get in there now. It's probably way
too much. It's fucking Berkeley. I'm sure it's charging way
too much. But there's other ways to get in. You
can go around a bag in the fence. Whatever. I
don't recommend that, I would never recommend it. I recommend
purchasing a membership and then using the fuck out of it,
you know, because you get the reciprocal admissions. You can
go to any botanic garden that they got that's part
of that program. But purchase a membership for like eighty bucks.
They're probably charging more the fuck no than God. Everything's
such a goddamn rip off now, but go there. They
just go the religious and that's you know, it's like, oh,
you'll fucking learn something every time. One of the best
botanic gardens in the country. None of that just esthetically
pleasing Hallmark greeting, card board housewife shit, you know, like, oh,
I need something to do, so I'm going to go
volund there at the botanic No offense to board housewifse.
But that was the thing in the fifties I noticed,
and that's why a lot of botanic gardens are garbage.
They're scientifically worthless, and they're just for looks. They're just attractive,
you know, five hundred of the same thing planted because
it applies color whatever. I've been saying this like nine
thousand times on this podcast. But you see, Berkeley is
not like that. You see, Berkeley's got a lot of
good stuff, and they've got an amazing cloud force collection,
partially because my friend Martin Grantham worked there and was
really interested in cloud forest stuff and was collecting and
growing a shit ton of it. And so that's where
I encountered many of these higher elevation neotropical music forests.
High elevation music forests, montane force, or even cloud forest
cloud forests generally very high, like just below Parmo, the
central Pogons, the all the cool Obelioids, you know the
central pogon Lobilia bermistera, which is bat pollinated central pogon
normally hummingbird pollinated. Libilia can be anything. I guess. The
difference between Lobelia and central Pogon too, is the way
the fruit the hisses, among other characteristics, but they can
be really hard to tell apart. But the fruit splits
laterally at the hisses laterally in central pogon, you know,
like up and down the fruit and then it op
the In Lobilia, the fruit just opens at the end.
But I've seen lobelias that produce like a a berry
fruit too. But in all these things, the seeds are tiny,
and that's how what makes them so ecologically successful and
so good at getting around. It's like the fruits produce
tons of seeds and then the seeds can get around.
Bermistra produces these like inflated little leathery bag fruits, like
the size of a golf ball, maybe a little bit less.
And then the seeds are on this little structure that's
in the center of that air filled bag. It's it's wold,
but the seeds are still tiny. And Bermestra bremeistro looks
it's a lot looks a lot different than lobelia, but
they've all got that same flower structure with the rod
and the fused anther tube, no visible sexy parts inside,
just that single rod sticking out of a bioletterally symmetrical flower.
But anyway, so I started off with Gunnara and Signus
and then just started photographing and stopping a check out
everything I saw. On the way up. I was at
like five thousand feet and on the other side of
the mountains in the kind of a more music forest,
you know, getting more rainfall from the Atlantic. That's where
that quirkus in Signus was that giant oak and h
Micuna was it or was it moocuna? Hold on, Yeah,
it was moocuna mcuna monte coola, which is a legume
that produces these like bean pod fruits with this really
weird texture to it, like it's broken up into I
don't know, man, it's not smooth. It's not a smooth text.
It's got a weird fucking texture. I don't know what
that's about. But the it's a leana. So it's this
big ass vine that goes like sixty feet up the
tree and you'll see them draping across the middle of
the canopy, and then when it has the flower, it
sends down this pendent influorescence. It can sometimes be, you know,
hanging twenty feet down from the vine, well, maybe like
ten feet down from the vine. Was the three four
meters down from the vine. And it's got these big
p shaped flowers. They look like a p flower banner
wings and keel petals, but they're they're kind of pendant
and like a light lime green color, and they're pollinated
by bats. I guess all the mucunas are pollinated by bats.
But it's a cool genus that I did not know
about until just recently when I saw it. It kind
of looks like the jade vine, which is in the Philippines.
I forget the name of the jade vine. Forgive me
for using a common in this case, it applies. But
jade vine's a cool fucking legume, a cool leana, a
cool vining legum with incredible inflorescences like those iridescent blue
anytime you see an iridescent blue, iridescent blue flower. But
the mukuna was like in the foothills of volcan POAs,
which we went up to but it was blowing up,
so they had the road closed and there was like
the fucking plastic horses they had to protect the road
to block against going up like the plastic you know,
road horses. They had had volcanic ashole over it, like
grains of pumps and shit all over you. Like the
thing was freshly blowing up. They're worried about some tourists
getting killed, getting cooked, but you know, even just going
up that high, there was a bunch of cool shit
on the side of There are giant chef flearras and
Oreo panax and god, there was where Rawia I think
it was, what was it mont I think it was
where Rawia montana, which is a bromeliad. There was a
a tree. It was Drimus granit edensis. Drymus is in
the family winter racey. It's one of the more basal
angiosperm families. Got Appocarpus fruits. The carpals aren't fused, you know,
typical snapomorphies and traits characteristics of the more early branching
lineages of angiosperms, and winter Race is normally a southern
hemisphere like almost Gondwanan genus there's some I saw some
really cool drymis. There was drymis and dina and another
one was it d was drymus winter in Chile, you know,
but it's more of this Gondwana and flora. But up
here at like seven thousand and eight thousand feet, drymus
granted dentist was everywhere. It looks almost similar, like glabrous leaves.
You crack the leaves open, they smell kind of like sassafras,
which is another trait of a lot of early branching angiosperms,
and Lora or Magnolia leis or any of those orders canalales,
pipe rayles, Magnolia alies, loreleis, the four orders of the
Magnoliods and winter aces and the canalales. And then you
know like Aristolochia the pipe vines, and piper uh and
Soroa soura lizard's tail, which is a kind of plant
you get the Midwest and in East coast like it's
a wetland plant. Those are all pipe raleys. And then
Magnoli a lies is like the anonas, the pawpause and
an ac uh. I'm really going off the fucking deep
end here with these magnoliods, and then Loreles lorace monimiace
athospermatase is like a southern Hamshere a lot of these plants.
You crack the leaves open, they've got that sassafras smell.
They've got this distinct smell that they produce volatiles in
the leaves and dry mass. Of course, winter ace is
u does that same thing. So that was I did
not expect to see that genus up there either. It
was wild, but there was a dry miss covered in bromeliads,
which turned out to be the genus where rawi at
w E r a u hia. And you know these
epiphetic promeliads producing these upright stalks, these upright inflorescences everywhere
with these white flowers that were very obviously bat pollinated.
That was fucking cool to see, just like the perfect
shape of a bat's head, like these flowers, just you know,
very obviously these things didn't evolve for for bees. It
was very obvious and probably produced a ton of starchy
nectar too, But some epiphytic promeliads that evolved with bat
pollination bats being their main pollinators. I'm sure there were
probably hummingbirds that hit these things too, but uh, you know,
hummingbirds generally go for more red flowers, and then I'm
sure the nectar chemistry will be different, like the nectar
content will be different. It'll be a richer sugar, most
likely for humming words. But POAs was it was wild
they end. There was gultheria everywhere, and all these cool
epiphytic blueberries and you know family Eric Casey, but Macleania Satyria,
big red flowers, delicious fucking fruits. I think it was Satyria,
or maybe it was Macleani. I forget, but I was
eating the fruits of one of them later on in
the cloud forest and uh in the Talamanca range, and
it was just it was so fucking good. It was incredible.
We were at our friend Nacho's house, who grows shittaki
mushrooms and lives with his family, and it is an
amazing chef. He lives in this this Qrcus coasta ri
Kansas forest, these massive beautiful oak trees h courses Corcas
coco coasta ri Kansas and Corcus copaiensis. Uh, there was
a zanthoxlim. There was a zenthoxlum milano sticktum which I
thought was uh. I almost thought was a sumac of first,
because I had glabrous leaves and similar flowers, tiny white
flowers in a panicle, and one of the leaves had
black spots all over it, which I guess was probably
just the fungus, but I assumed it was one of
the allergenic you rush you all oils, because they tend
to do that when they're oxidizing, so that if you see,
you know, the same leaf structure, same flower structure, and
you're in you know, the pinnate or odd pinnate leaves,
tiny white flowers, a bunch of flowers in the inflorescence,
tiny flowers, and the inflorescence in a panicle, and it's glabrous,
like the leaves are glabrous, and you're in like lower latitudes,
stay the fuck away. Especially see the black spots because
it's probably in anacardiac the mango family, and it's probably
producing one of those super allergenic oils that's going to
give you an as rash, you know. Comocladia, of course,
was the one I touched the Dominican Republic that really
fucked me up. And then there's Amphipterygium and pseudo Smodingium,
which are Mexican genera Mexican. They might go into Nicaragua too,
Mexican genera Nicaragua hinders, the you know, neotropical genera that
produced those same volatile oils too, and you can see
it on the leaves some of the neotropical bamboos. The
chiscaeas that I saw, and I was midland, those mid
elevation cloud forests were fucking incredible too. What was it chskeaa?
Was it piti Ei? I think they were massive and
they had this wax on them. They had this white
wax which made them give them like a blue hue,
and they were like twenty feet tall. It was fucking great.
I wish people when they want to go wild with
bamboos in North America, I wish they'd planted some of
the Chiskeaya species instead of the invasive Asian ones. I
just feel like it's better to have something that's a
little more local that at least has been on the continent,
you know, for longer than the Asian ones. Another cool
plant I saw, and this was on volcan poass it's
like eight thousand feet was clebadium Surinamnse, which is astoraci.
It's a member of the sunflower family that produces berries
like almost like a viburnum. It looks like it looks
like a viburnum kind of, but then you get up
close you see those discoid flowers. They don't have any
any rays, there's no ray flowers, and you realize it's
a composite. It's asta Raci. I saw viburnum too, I
think was what was it by Burnham? Maybe it was
by Burnham coast re Kents, but that was at nine
thousand feet on the other side of the mountains. There
was God, there were so many cool epiphytes in these
these trees though, in these Quirkus in Signus, especially Jesus
Christ and the yeah, you know, so it was mecuna
growing in Quircus in signess. And this is probably the
lower extent of the range of Qurcason signas. You get
Carcason signas in Veracruz, Mexico two, which is probably one
of the closest. You know, vera Cruz has a lot
of it's the northern extent of the range of many
of the Central American meso American wet montane forest plants,
and there's a lot of cool stuff and vera Cruz God.
I'd love to fucking go there some time, So Fido
lacar ugosa to the poke berry. It looks like a
poke berry with more vivid pink flowers. You know, a
poke weed. You get phytal whaca, one of the final
locas you get in in uh in the Midwest. They
could be really weedy. You have to eat the berries.
They'll make you puke. I think they're toxic, but they're
really beautiful plants. And there was there was monina too,
which is a genus of Polygalaci. It's like a polygalacy,
little spikes of purple flowers. Uh Polygalasis, the family and
the peace order for Bailey's which the flowers kind of
look like peas in some cases. Some a bunch of
different moninas, Uh yeah, Gunnar and signats again. There were
climbing hydranges, fourth ferns, h a bunch of acanthoids acanthace,
and a bunch of Uh saw a few peppermias. I
saw Heliconia torturosa right there, which is in those same
mid elevation forests just below Volcano POAs and uh, Heliconia
of course is ginger orders in Gibberele's heliconi ac a
lot of them are bird pollinated. It's a fucking dope
family of plants with you know, often bright red flowers.
They they've got the table cale almost looking like a bird,
a quote bird of Paradise, which you know we say
for for Strilizia, for the genus Strilizia, which is in
South Africa, same same order, but unrelated. Then there was
a ton. I mean, it's like anywhere in the neo tropics.
There's a shit ton of melostomatas University too. The melastomes
with those anther connectives, those really in those those three
veined leaves that are so distinct, you know, one of
the few plant families where you could see the leaf
and know automatically what family it's in. Okay, we'll take
a break to listen to some shitty edge, then I'll
get back here we go. Okay, so anyway back to
the other side, the south side of the Talamanca Range
where we're starting off with Gunner written Sickness. We talked
about the mid elevation forests just beneath the POAs Volcano,
which was closed due to the fact that wash there
were some slight explosions, but that was you know, that's
that's a little bit closer to San Jose. Now we're
on the other side, a little bit south, on the
other side of the Talamanca Range, starting off, and they're
Sandy's Seedra de can Aral. Going up. We started off
with Gunnerra and signus massive peltate leaves, leathery, correaceous. This
genus of course forms a symbiotic association with nitrogen fixing
bacteria in a genus nostoc photosynthetic bacteria cyanobacteria. Remember the
word algae blue green algae. Remember the word algae is
a polyphyletic term. Doesn't mean that they're related at all,
doesn't mean they're all the same. It's just it's like
calling you know, it's like saying birds if you had
a word for birds and bats, just because they both
have wings, but they're not related. You know, it's a
polyphyletic term. The word algae is unrelated clad It's just
means generally photosynthetic and very small. Photosynthetic, very small, generally aquatic,
not always its terrestrial alergies too, as we see here
with Gunnera insignus, but it was it's such a weird
fucking lineage.
Speaker 2: Man.
Speaker 1: I had just seen the same plant in southern Chile
and videos I still have to edit, which hopefully I'll
get around with it. They get fucking massive. They've got
these kind of prickly petioles to the leaves. They're an
herbaceous plant, but they can be sometimes twelve feet across
by eight feet tall, just absolutely massive. Again, if you
want to see a good one, go to UC Berkeley
Botanic Garden. They're also invasive, I guess in the UK,
but hey, whatever, it's the UK, it's trashed anyway, No
offense to the UK. There was also Dahlia imperialis there,
which is another plant which is that I knew from
just horticulture in the Bay Area of California. It's like
it looks like basically like a pink, a big ass
pink sunflower that hangs down from a stalk. You know,
it's an herbaceous plant. Well, I guess it can get
a little woody towards the bottom, but they'll be you know,
fifteen feet tall in some cases with these pendant flowers.
Almost certainly evolved for hummingbird pollination. I'm sure bees hit
them too, But it was cool to see that these
giant dahlias, you know, and they're easy to root. You
can cut them, and then they don't like it dry.
They like it cool and wet, which is why they
do so well in the Bay Area of California. But
of course they need an irrigated garden there. They don't
like the dry Mediterranean summer. There was a Biden's species
as well, the same bidens that you get in a Midwest,
East coast whatever, with those those seeds that can stick
in your to your pants. You know, you get those bidens.
That's the goddamn it. Thanks Joe Biden. You got those
two prongs you know at the top of the sunflower seed.
Bidens is in the sunflower family. Asked the racy. But
this was this Biden's was like a scrambling shrub. It
was almost like a Leana Biden's reped hands and it
had you know, it was just like like like yellow
sunflower with less rays, less ray flowers with less rays
around the flower head. But yeah, it was fucking like,
you know, twelve feet tall, like twelve feet scrambling through
another plant. That was pretty uh, pretty cool to see,
you know, just the variations on a theme. That's the
main reason I traveled to see this shit is to
see what evolution is produced in all these different climates, latitudes, elevations,
different environments, cast of pollinators, cast of antagonistic fungi and
herbivores and insects whatever. So anyway, so that was that
was fucking wonderful. Still only like six thousand feet, So
we keep going up and then the alders appear, Yes,
the tropical alder all this Acuminata which also has nitrogen
fixing bacteria that it associates with. It associates with nitrogen
fixing actino my seat bacteria actino my seat because it
was thought to be a fungus for the first like
eighty years that it was now to exist, I think,
and that was later realized to be kind of a
mycelium producing bacteria essentially is what it is, a filamentous bacteria,
but in the genus Frankia. But they produce, they can
fix atmospheric nitrogen using nitrogenase enzymes, and they still require
root nodules because that nitrogenase enzyme requires a low oxygen
environment to function. But all alders do this so far
as I know, so all the Sacuminata is no exception,
and it was growing when I first encountered it. Here
was growing in kind of a waste theea. It looked
like a quarry, like it had once been a quarry.
There was disturbance there. There was rock talus everywhere, but
there was also a lot of cool shit growing, including
Hemichina fruticosa, which is a monkey flower if you know,
aaryth rant, and the plachis and the genus Mimulus. They're
all monkey flowers because I guess because the flower head
looks like a monkey. I don't fucking know. It does
maybe really cool and specios uh out West, very species
rich out West, Like in California, there's a Death Valley
monkey flower. There's a there's a mojabbi monkey flower. There's
a fucking uh the play is pict This is like
the really rare looks like a rat fink, you know,
bloodshot crackhead eye monkey flower. The flower head looks like that.
And there's a bunch of earth rant species you get
in Chile as well as in uh all over California.
There's a couple of earth rants we get in UH
Texas to UH and then you get you know, the
genus Frima. Anyway, frim Ac is the family order is
lamey A LEAs so opposite leaves bi ledosymmetrical flowers for
stamens Hemmikina fruiticosa. Again, it was another plant that I
had seen in Wahaka. Tends to colonize disturbed sites, roadsides,
gets five feet tall, big yellow flowers, probably bumblebee pollinated,
I would assume, but it's very sticky, like incredibly sticky,
uh and just a really fucking cool plant. Another plant.
I think they used to sell it at Antie's annuals
or something in the uh I wander whatever happen in
that place and in a Bay area and it was
in It was another plant that was you'd find in
like San Francisco Botanic Garden or Berkeley Botanic Garden. You know,
it was nice when the botanic gardens used to be
free and you get you know, everyone from like graffiti
kids to just any degenerates going They're like, hey, let's
go hang out in the botanic garden like they would
just you know, because it was a culture to just
like to fucking be around plants, even they didn't know
what they were, you know, so you get like fun
people to hang out with. You just degenerates and mischievous
bastards whatever, going to enjoy the botanic garden. Surely probably
taking forties and smoking weed in there, but still enjoying
the botanic garden. You know, much different get up than
you might expect, a much different demographic than you might
expect to see botanic gardens. You know, the region to
a country, you know where you might get kicked out.
You tried it edit Chicago Botanic Garden. I'm just kidding.
They got a nice library. Shout out to the region.
Stein Library. I had a dream that it was closing.
But then when I gave that presentation in Chicago last month,
I talked. I spoke to somebody who works at the
Botanic Garden and she told me that they're not closing
a fucking reagan Stein Library, Reagan Stein, Reagan Stein Stein.
So anyway you get so if you get a membership,
you get in there free too, reciprocal admissions. They can't
throw you out unless you're peeing in the bushes like
they did to me. Where is the security guard that
kicked me out. However, long ago in two thousand and nine.
He kicked me out in two thousand and nine because
I was peeing in the bushes. He he accused me
he was exposing myself to old ladies. I said, hey, pal,
I didn't know they were in that trailer. Why the
fuck are they looking at me? I didn't know there
was a trailer. Donal way. I don't think they could
see my schlong though I was. I was pissing in
the bushes. It was, you know whatever. Maybe they were
just they called the cops to me because I peed
in the bushes. Which if you do that to someone
who pees in the bushes a botanic garden, you're dick
because that person's nourishing the plants. They're providing nitrogen and
as long as the irrigations on that spot, it's not
going to burn the plants or be too much. It's
they're doing a favor. Yeah, fucking prude, somebody's somebody's genteels.
You know, you gotta you gotta know, you gotta dose them,
you gotta do something with them. I can't take them.
I can't take these fucking people, these stiffs, these prudes,
these genteels, these pearl clutchers, you know, I want to
live in a world that's free of them. Anyway. Uh
hesperomile's uh ubtusifolia was there as well, which sometimes has thorns,
sometimes doesn't like other members of the rose family, the
rose a see. But I'm not thinking about it. Don't
think about roses. I'm talking about, like, you know, Pyracanthus
probably one of the worst there's plants I've ever encountered
in my life. I'm sure they're great where they're native.
They're not native in North America, but people they'll plant them.
I don't know why they cause not only do they
jab you with this razor sharp spine. They're in the
rose family rose cy, but they also can be really
hard to get rid of. They form colonies, they spread
by rhizomes, send up shoots, and once that thorn goes
in you, it like breaks off and it hurts for
like six days after. It's fucking wild. I don't know
if they're I doubt they're injecting anything, but maybe they
just leave little pieces of barbed you know, woody tricomb's.
I don't know who knows, I don't who the fuck
knows anyway. Hesperomilees is in the same family Hesperomiles of
two sifolia cool flowers, edible fruits as well white rosaceous
flowers rose cy typical flower morphology the rose c five
white petals, dentate leaf margin, they're glabrous. I also saw
this same species, just like escloni and Murdalloides, growing in
eck at higher elevations as well. That Dahlia imperialis was
all over this quarry site on the side of the
road too. I saw a white flowered phenotype which was
nuts and then there was Fuschia piniculata, evening primrose family
on a graycie. But it forms these dense clusters of
pink flowers, four petals, four sepals, a prominent pink stigma
and style indicating you know, exerted out of the flower
indicating it's hit by hummingbirds. Lots of hummingbird pollinated plants
in the cloud forest, lots of reds, lots of pinks,
lots of orangish reds, whatever, you know, because the hummingbirds
get going.
Speaker 2: There's that.
Speaker 1: David Edinburgh had a nice documentary on his stuff. He
talked about why hummingbirds tend to prevail in higher altitude
montane neotropical areas because it's generally a little bit cooler,
especially because that air is so thin. Cold air at
higher elevations is not the same as cold air at
lower elevations. You've got that much thinner atmosphere at higher altitudes,
which means that the air is not as dense, it
can't hold as much heat. Things cool off a lot quicker,
there's more UV, et cetera. So anyway, now we're going up.
We're continuing to go up in these forests in the
Tallamaca range, and it's getting it's getting darker. Well, the
trees are getting taller, uh, and it's it's we're starting
to see some really cool stuff. Massive oaks start appearing.
There's a tree carrot, a member of the carrot family
apac Merhidendron M. M y R R H I D
E N D R O N Donald Smithy I was
the species that I saw, I believe, but there's quite
a few species in a genus looks like a giant angelica.
It's got the whole leave, it's got the leaves and
the floral structure and the inflorescent structure of the carrot
family of a partially celery carrots, et cetera. But it's
fucking eighteen feet tall. And one of these I saw
later in the paramo, growing above a little pond. It
had a trunk that was easily a phot across. It
was wild. I mean, these are massive forms. Plants that
are normally herbs or small perennials in more temperate latitudes
turn into giant trees and take on these arborescent forms.
Not giant trees, giant shrubs, small trees and take on
arborescent forms at these higher elevations in the lower latitudes,
these neotropical montane forests. This mirodendron was massive, though. I mean,
this thing blew my mind. It was so obviously you
see and you're like, that's a fucking carrot. It's an apac,
it's got leaves like an angelica, it's got influorescence, it's
got you know, the compound dumble looks like an umbrella
that's been blown upwards, like blown upside down. Just just
wild shit. And I'm sure it's got tons of phyto chemists,
like toxic phyto chemistry, weird chemicals. It's it's synthesizing. I mean,
to be that big and not be getting chewed on
by giant ground sloths, you have to evolve some chemicals,
some fucking chemicals, my friend. Many members of APAC, of course,
are toxic or can produce photodermatitis, you know, compounds that
upon exposure to sunlight, burn your skin and cause blistering,
et cetera. I don't know. Maybe so with myrodendron. And
of course there's tons of cool obeliads everywhere, centripogons. There
was a fucking raspberry. I don't rubis is such a
nightmare of a It's such a cluster fuck of a
They all look the same except for very subtle differences,
all the raspberries and blackberries. This was very obviously a
native one, though it was clambering up a tree night shade,
a tree solanum, you know, that was probably the so
I think it was Solanum storky. It was probably like
fifteen feet tall, like five meters tall. This raspberry or
BlackBerry produced delicious fruits, though fucking delicious. There were a
number of native blackberries that I encountered here. You can
tell their native because they're not forming these massive monocultures
and overtaking things. They're kind of just you know, taking
their place amongst the other species. And they were all delicious.
They were all incredibly delicious. They produced delicious fruit. They
had cool flowers, pink flowers. I think this one I
saw had white flowers. I saw one later in the
Potocarpus forest. I couldn't believe there was potocarps there either,
these massive Jurassic fucking conifers in the cloud forest. There
was one in the potocarp forest I saw later in
near Eyok that had big pink flowers, just stunningly gorgeous,
all cords, all kinds of fucking jupatore, you know, the
Stevia tribe of Astraci, the joe pieweed tribe of Astraci,
with those long styles, large shrubs, opposite leaves, big leaves.
I mean just this is a really pleasant environment to
grow in if you're a plant. I'm sure there's ample moisture.
It never gets too hot, it never gets too cold.
This is why I love these forests. There's so much diversity,
and they're so cool, and there's tons of epiphytes too.
It never freezes, it'll freeze up in the paramo maybe
at twelve thousan thirteen thousand feet, but down here at
eight thousand feet elevation, nine thousand feet elevation, it's not
going to freeze. Well, maybe sometimes it can, and it's
not going to get too hot either. I'm sure you
can get upwards in ninety degrees on certain certain days,
maybe certain hot days, but otherwise it's not going to freeze.
I went and saw. I knew it was there. I
wasn't looking for it, but I went to this one
area that was again really boggy. There's sphagnum. It probably
just didn't drain for whatever reason. There was a black
num there. Another Lamerio Psychis species looks like a psycha,
but it's a fern. It's got distinct vegetative leaves and
then distinct sporophylls. The sporophyll is like a rusty orange
leaf that comes up in the center of the plant
that doesn't you could tell. It's not built for photosynthesis
as much as the vegetative leaves are. This is a
leaf that's just built predominantly for shedding spores, for shedding
those haploid spores so that the fern can reproduce. But
this fern was I don't know, eight feet tall, almost
three meters tall, you know, six foot spread on it,
two meters spread in a fucking bog with just such
a cool habitat man again, they look like psychads. They
look like some sort of short palm. Palms and psychads,
of course are not related, but they have that same
similar form. And down on the ground I realized was
this member of the coyote bush clade, the Backerus clay,
but it was a spreading herbaceous plant, the creeping crawling
herbaceous plant, Talamancaster saccharanas, which was I guess just describe
in twenty seventeen. But you look at the flowerheads and
they look like backars flowerheads. They've got that very distinct
yellow little rod. This looks like a you know, it's
the pollen pushing pollen pushing rod, a little style poking
out of it. And I think there was only one
other observation on I naturalist that I had seen up
to this point, and it was just described in twenty seventeen.
The taliman casters are a relative. I think it's like
six or seven speaks and the genus some are much
larger than this. This was tiny. It was just a
little spreading, creeping plant, but it was still cool to see.
It was, you know, this little known plant endemic to
Costa Rica, only described in twenty seventeen, and a relative
of the coyote bush. The bacharis was in the Baccaris
claye of astrac and I love the fucking bacharis. I
love that clay. Whether it's backers Helmutholia that I saw
growing on the Newtown Creek and Queens and near my
friend Pauli's illegal houseboat, or whether it's backris pillolarius, which
used to come up in the destroyed fucking mad Max
like train yard in West Oakland, which later turned into
like a massive bummy camp, a bummy camp and tweaker.
It was like an outdoor tweaker lab. You know, they
would have tweakers and it was a chop shop too.
There were all kinds of cars there. They'd flip over.
You know, why would they flip over these cars that
were stolen, because that they didn't have a lift and
that was the easiest way to pull parts off the bottom.
So they'd flip the fucking thing over like a tortoise
on its shell. And then you know, looted for parts.
Oh that brings back memories to twenty nineteen, when you
know where I used to live in West Local, My
neighborhood really got just fucking wrecked. And it was all
because housing prices went up, rent went up. People got
pushed out on the street, and when they get on
the street, they get into dope, you know, heroin or
meth or fentanyl. Obviously no one does hero anymore. It's
all fendanyl. That's why people just dropped. They just turned
fucking zombies. And then of course there was this ment
that just came out. God, this is what drove me.
I'm all for harm reduction to a point, but when
it comes to the point that people are shitting in
the park, like shitting on like children's playground equipment, and
like setting fire at the oak trees, like these beautiful
seventy year old oak trees that have been in the park,
you got to you gotta crack down a little bit.
You gotta be you can't do this. You're destroying the commons.
Like a harm reduction my ass. At that point, you're
just enabling fucking degeneracy. You gotta there's gotta be some
some level of discipline now in stigmatize Fuck that, if
you're gonna it's more not stigmatizing homelessness, We're stigmatizing shitty
behavior that ruins the park for everybody. You know, how
did I go from a cloud forest in Costa Rica
to talking about, uh, you know, the bummy camps and
mad max degeneracy of the homeless problem caused by the
obscene hustle for wealth in the Bay Area and these
grotesque housing prices by these shitty corporate landlords and investment
firms that base caused the homeless crisis. And then, like
the fucking weird blend of all that shit, those Republicans
say too. I hate it that they're right about some
of this stuff. I fucking hate it because it's they
have so little experience and so much of this stuff,
but on some of that stuff they absolutely are right.
Like the shit I saw in California just got got
it got so gnarly, man, it got so crazy. Pardon
the pardon the digression. You'll be all right, don't worry
about it. Shut up. I don't want to you whine
about it. I'm talking. I get a chance to vent
now too. That's how I keep this that's how I
could do a two and a half hour podcast. It's
not all you, okay, part me too. All right, I'm
I'm treating like my therapist. It just got so gnarly, man,
God damn like it just would look like everyone was
living in RVs, of course, because you know, rent cost
five thousand dollars for a fucking two bedroom, and they
were living in RVs and then like every once in
a while. But then at the same time they were
on meth in fentanyl. So it was just you know,
if you've ever been around junkies, I have. I've had
plenty of friends that are now dead that got into
heroin or whatever, you know, wise life choice. They decided
to make no offense to them. I always love them,
but for fuck's sake, man, And so anyway, so if
you ever been around and you see the behavior, just
totally shit the bed and go down and you just
see the fucking trash. They start like pack rat style
behavior like bringing garbage home and just I mean, I'm
gonna use that one day, I'm gonna I'm gonna do something.
And then in these failed projects everywhere that they swear
they're gonna do, you just watch as you watch their
life fall apart, and did you so you just get
these explosions of garbage spilling out of these RVs like
cartoon style, you know, like a water balloon that got
filled up too much, and instead of water, it's just
like garbage, the detritus of consumer society.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: God, it was gnarly though. But when they set the
oak tree on fire in Remande Park, that really bumm
me out that way. I said, this is fucking too much.
Like you can't go to the park anyway. Used to
like to go to the park and hang out, walk
the dogs, whatever, just to like have some open space.
You can't do that anymore because there's human shit and
like rigs, needles and anyway. I don't know how I
got to talking about it. I need event though, so
you know we're gonna keep going and just let that go.
I don't I don't know how we got anyway. We
were talking about back rists. So telemancaster Saccharinus sakkaranus was
growing all over this boggy area and it was like
an opening in an otherwise thirty foot tall canopy forest
ten meters tall canopy forest. But it was God, it
was just so cool. I think it was mostly Escalonia
murteloides the main tree, but again just covered in moss,
bryo fights, probably a few orchids I missed, just wild shit, bromeliads,
there was a Greggia species and you know, and I'm
sure there's a peck and other things. There was some
animal that was producing a lot of shit that we've seen.
We've seen the turts, I've seen the evidence. Pal you know, tapeiers.
Did the tapeiers go up to the high elevations? You
bet your ass they do. The tapers do go up
to the high elevation. So does pecori ta jaku? What
is that? Does have a lina collared pecory the muskhog anyway, Yeah,
so that is uh, what is them? I'm looking at
the mammal diversity and igh naturalist Jesus got puma con
color bassariskus Suma crasty. What is that?
Speaker 2: What is that?
Speaker 1: Weird little man? It's just ringtail. Coco missile is a
primarily nocturnal, arboreal omnivorous member of the carnivor the pro scionage,
the raccoon family of course, the pro Scionage prosyonity. It
just looks like a ringtail, but I guess it's like
a lower latitude neotropical ringtail. The cocko, missile cake, a
missal basariscus, Sue mccrasty, Jeffrey's spider monkey. That's got to
be at lower elevations. I don't think they're up in
the parmo. I've seen those guys, leopardess part Dallas. What
is that? Ocellent? My high naturalist is set to use
scientific names only because I fucking hate common names, especially
for plants. They don't help me. But obviously with this
it doesn't. The mantled howler, Oh there's that howler monkey?
Is that the same one? I don't think that's the
same one I seen. That's a terrifying sound they make.
Listen to this, Listen to this, Okay, that's one. That's
the difference. I think there's a couple of different species,
because the ones I heard didn't sound like this. They
sounded like a damn giant cat. It was terrifying. I
mean this would be terrifying too, But okay, yeah, this
is what I this is, This is what I heard.
There's a different species. You listen to this, Okay, this.
Speaker 2: Is the fuck?
Speaker 1: Is it? It's terrifying. It's not a howl, it's like
a guttural. It's like being it's like being accosted. It
sounds like some sort of fucking horror movie, you know,
all right? Anyway, yes, anyway, the point is there were
tapers up there. They were shitting, so, uh, they were
shitting a lot. It must have been a tapers up
there at ten thousand where we had ten eleven thousand feet.
So anyway, so up now I'm getting to the paramo,
and there's the forest has all but disappeared. Now I'm
going up. I'm high enough up the paramos disappeared. And
I actually went to this little outcropping to see if
I could look over this hill which looked like looked
like it went for miles, to see if I could
see any of this puya or any of these bogs.
I knew it grew in bogs. It grew with the
corded area, a pampas grass and a chiskeaa, and that
bleck num which is now lameriopsychis that coalescent tree fern
looking black num. And when I climbed up to uh,
there was a small outcropping with one a single tree
of Esclonium or todya on it that was otherwise looking
over all this scrub vegetation, and on that tree was
a species of Epidendrum, a flowering pink orchid here at
what had to have been eleven five hundred feet so
roughly thirty three hundred meters. And it turned out to
be Epidendrum pastifolium, which is only known. It's a Costa ricanandemic,
bright pink flowers. It's hummingbird pollinated. It's an epiphyte. It's
growing on Esclonium murder looides again. And I think the
only other trees there there was bud Laya Nightada bud Leya,
the butterfly blues genies. But this is a this is
a wonderful but layd. This isn't a bud lay It.
It's gonna make you see red and want a sept
fire at that the home deepot garden section. This has
got little orange flowers and very white pubescent leaves, almost
tomatos leaves that grows in the parimo. I mean it
grows further down too. I saw it at my friend
Nacho's house at the nine thousand feet with camaro staphless arbutoids,
which is again a Kamara staffless arbutoids I. I haven't
really talked about that much, but the mushrooms that come
up beneath that tree and some of the quircus in
that habitat have got to be fucking incredible. There's got
to be so many different mushrooms. There's probably silasiby, maybe
even new species of silasibe because there are some endemics,
you know, in terms of just plants and fungi that
have apparently have been isolated in these mountains in Central
Costa Rica enough long enough to not have spread very far,
you know, or to be physically distinct, morphologically distinct from
you know, the mountains to the east in Panama or
Nicaragua doesn't really get any tall mountains like this. I
guess Honduras gets some pretty tall mountains similarly tall mountains,
but uh but yeah, you know, and then of course
most of eastern Panama's lowland. So these mountains right here
from central Coasta Rica that go south into southeastn to Panama,
I mean, they're kind of an isolated little island. So
there's going to be some endemics. But that Kamara Staphlis
Arbuti's I don't think it grows up into Mexico. Maybe
it does a little bit. Maybe it does a little bit.
I would assume it does because the berries are bird dispersed,
so there's probably some birds making the long flight. They
don't take a shit, apparently, probably if they're you know,
or maybe it takes a long time for them to
pass the seed. But when I saw this Camaro staphlus.
Now we're out of the Paramo, we're back down at
nine thousand feet. Will I distract you from talking about
the paramo to talk about this fucking oak forest because
it was so cool. I'm trying to cover a lot
of material here. So we're back down at nine thousand feet,
we're not at thirteen thousand feet where this epidendrum was.
And U Camara Staphlus arbutoids. When I saw it, I
thought it was a madrone. I thought it was arbutus.
That's the name rbutoids because it looks like an arbautist
looks like a madron. But of course all these this
ar buttoid clade of the blueberry family Eric Casey, the Manzanitas,
the Arctostaphalos, the Kamara Staphalus, the arbutus, the Texas madron,
and all the cool manzanitas you get in California and
highlands of Mexico, et cetera. They are all they they
all form endopitic relationships with or endo micro hizel relationships
with Ecto micro hyzol species. So they kind of let
these ectomycro hizel species penetrate the cortex of their roots
and form associations with them, like me and Allen saw
happening with the Baja bird bush or not those staphlos
in northern Baja and the chaparral of northern Baja Mexico,
Baja California, Mexico. And so I would assume the mushroom
diversity there is insane, because you know, the oaks and
this Kamarastaphlus are all micro hizel, they're all ecdo micro hizol.
They form, you know, relationships not just with the glomero miceats,
the small fungi that don't produce fruiting bodies that you
can't see, not just with those micro risey, but with
the Ecto micro rise that produce a lot of the
choice edible mushrooms and some of the toxic amanitas and
some of the edible aminitas et cetera. So I want
to go back this summer and check out some of
the the fungal diversity there because it's got to be nuts.
And some of these oaks are just fucking massive. There's
such cool oaks Corcus Coast, three Kansas. I believe that
is an endemic oak. It might it might go on
the Panama a little bit. But this Camaro staffleus was
really cool. Camara stafflus. I think we only get one
species in the United States. It's in California. There's quite
a few in Mexico, and then of course this, but
you know there's shrubs there, like the one in California
is a shrub or a small tree. This was like
a forty foot tall, maybe fifty foot tall, you know,
fifteen meter tall tree. It was nuts, but it's still
got those ersy lit flowers, those white blueberry shaped flowers.
That whole habitat down in that oak forest was just incredible.
Speaker 2: Man.
Speaker 1: I saw Nasa speciosa hiked down in this ravine, three
hundred feet down this ravine, super steep. It was good,
though I needed it was like a Brazilian butt work up.
Get down to the ravine. There's Nasa speciosa down there,
which is a member of Lois sace, the Loasa family.
The Menzilia family known for the stinging hairs. Sevalia sinuata,
which we get in Texas, is a member of the
same family. Savilla is the only one that stings. Yuk
Nitie and Menzilia don't sting. Menzilia get. You get a
couple in the Midwest to it, but they generally all
like dryer sites. They're more like a Western plains, Western
plains like the northeast end of their range. California there's
a ton of diversity. Deserts there's a ton a ton
of diversity. Mexico there's quite a bit of diversity. Chile
there's a lot of diversity. There's a one disjunct species
in the Mibia in South Africa that's got really cool
little helicopter like fruits like it's got those the sepals
form these little propellers. But the whole family is cool.
It's got little barbed hairs, the velkral leaf family and
so this. But this Nasa was it's evidently hummingbird pollinated.
It's got a big you know, baseball sized orange flower.
The whole thing stings like hell. And it was just
growing in this one of the few sunny openings in
this otherwise dense forest near this creek, at the bottom
of a ravine that certainly seems like, you know, it
gets a lot of puma traffic. It certainly seemed like that.
I definitely had nightmares day, nightmares of being pounced on
by a large, you know, two hundred pound cat in
this forest. And anyway, so this isn't in the forest.
Then when I came back out and hiked back up
past all these cool aeroids, I mean, the cloud forest aeroids,
cloud forest and thorium, there was Chiscaia everywhere. It's all shady,
it's all generally cool.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: And I get to the top of the redge again,
and then that's where I saw. I saw this viburnum,
a fucking viburnum coaster ricanem again one of these more
temperate latitude ude genera. But this is growing in the
tropical attitude. But it said, again, it's at nine thousand feet.
That's how can do that? Really really cool? I did
not expect to see if I burn them there, it's wild.
It's always cool being in the tropics but at high elevasions,
and then seeing these more temperate North American or temperate
South American lineages just so cool. Then you think about
the biogeography, like how they got there, were they you know, uh,
how is it? How how long did it take, how
their distribution spread, how did they speciate once they got there,
et cetera. I remember seeing Klethra too, which Clethra is
in Clethracy order Eric Hayley's blueberry order. I don't know
what clethrough species it was, but it certainly had the whites,
the spikes of white pendent flowers almost they almost look ersiolate.
And there's I think, I think Clethra in the United States,
it's almost all eastern US, right, It's like southeast pretty sure,
but you know, you get Clethra. The only places I've
seen it was in Mexico, so another I think it's
a neotropical genus. There might maybe there's Asian species. I
saw a Loopinus two up there. Anyway, So this is
we go from the forest now to up to the Parrimo.
So now we're back up at thirteen thousand, twelve thousand
feet thirty two hundred meters thirty three hundred meters scrub
vegetation interspersed with like this short these patches of short
canopy forest dominated by Escalonia myrtiloides. There's cordaderia there. There's
entire thickets like you can stand on a ridge and
look out over this thicket of chiskeya bamboo, you know,
like corn maze height, like six or seven feet tall,
seven to eight feet tall, maybe corn maze height, and
it's just the thicket of chiskea that extends for three
hundred four hundred yards. There was a Loopinus species I
saw there as well. I forget what it was. And
then I went up to this. I hiked up to
this like little TV tower area, looking again, just looking
to see what I could find, what wild shit I
could find. Getting a little hypoxic, losing a little bit
of steam, you know, the lack of oxygen, the low
air densities getting to me. But uh, you know, as
I keep going up and I just start seeing more
weird ass members of Astorasi, but they've all got arochoid leaves.
What do we mean by arochoid leaves? Leaves like in Erica,
you know, like the genus erica like you would see
in South Africa and some of these Mediterranean climates. You know,
these these you know, that kind of candelabra shape sometimes
or monocolus a single stem, but then the leaves looking
like almost snake scales around the shoot. No petiole, glab
you know generally sometimes glaber's up top and then pubescent
down below. There was a couple massive thistles uh circium,
I think it was pretty sure was circium, circium subcoreacium.
There was another member of the coyote bush lineage, the
Backerus leneas Lino Kylis coast three knses had that same form.
It was well, it was mildly. It was mostly glabrous
on the top surface of the leaf, mildly plute, pubescent below.
This is obviously so it can shed water, doesn't You
have hairs in the top of the leaf. Water is
going to collect Your leaves are going to be more
likely a rat and the stomata are generally on the
underside of the leaf anyway. Lino Kylas coast three kinches
it was a shrub six foot by six foot, but
like purpleish flowers, coyote bush looking flowers on it in
a panicle, but or a syme rather, but they had
this kind of purple texture to them. There was monte
Kellia two, another genus of Astoraci, which is in Sinisio,
the Sansio tribe, so unis syriat you had multi syria fieries,
yellow flowers, but same general leaf structure like no petiole
glaber's up top, smooth up top and then pubescent beneath.
Monte Calia fermipes was up there too, just wild stuff.
There was Jamisonia, that cool fern up there as well,
and and what other shit? So this is so yes anyway,
so we're this is again parmel vegetation. I'm looking out
over all this just scaya. There's hesperomalles of twosofolia. I
saw some of that cora, liking that pisidio lichen that
looks like it's almost a little shelf mushroom, but it's
like papery and it's just growing on the ground with
a bunch of other lichens. So it's a basidio like
in instead of a asco my seat lichen. It's meaning
its forms a relationship with basidio my seat fungi instead
of asco my seat fungi. There was Gaeodendron punctatum, which
is a parasitic shrub hemiparasitic shrub in Lori anthesi, the
tropical misletal family. But it was growing in a much
different form here, like it wasn't forming a shrub, it
was forming these little stems of opposite leaves and they
were all red and yellow, probably probably due to the
increased UV, remember, because there's there's much more intense, exponentially
more intense UV up here. And there was a wine
mania two q nona, which is not surprising because you
generally see wine manias in similar climates, like you know,
Lose New Zealand temperate rainforest. You know, they like it
chili and wet. And then you know, getting to the
Puya dass larioides spot was once I finally got you know,
I started seeing the inflorescences from thirty or forty feet away,
those stalks, you know, those so tall like stalks, and
that's when I knew I was there and just lost
my shit, lost my absolute shit. It was just felt
like I was on another planet, just the wildest flora.
And then of course that red Sphagnum mog bog mad
mog that way that Sphagnum peats fag the magillanicum. I
got this fish eye lens too, so I was taking
much of cool habitat photos. Fucking great for doing that.
You know, you could feel like you're like a nineties
like a nineties alternative CD cover, but you could do
it with habitat shots, which was great. And then it
was there that I realized my macro lens took a
shit and the little plates that spiral around to change
the aperture size were fucked and fell off. So I
got to send that in. But but overall, I mean
the whole day I went so hard. I went from
like eight am to like eight at night. I mean,
the sun's only out from five to five pm. But
I was fuck it. You know, it's the sun going
down at five point thirty like it does in the
tropics is not going to affect my my botanizing. Those
those red liver warts were nuts too. It's so weird
to see again again. Why red y orange because of
that increased UV intensity. They're protective pigments. You know what
else I saw too, There was that uh Gentian that
neotropical gentian genus. Let's see where the fuck did it go?
Where was it that neotropical gentian genus? I saw it
in Ecuador too. It's another paramol plant. They'll be videos
out on all these. It was, where the hell did
I put it? I hit it thought, oh, hold on,
that was it Helenia. Yeah. I wonder if it's I
wonder if that's how I parasitic because it looks like
it's not producing as much chlorophyll a is it otherwise?
But it's not as green as you would normally expect.
I couldn't find anything Helenia aqualgiella because I guess it's
supposedly looks like aqualsia, a little bit like columbines. But
you know, some of those Gentians and Gentian ac like
especially the Voyrhea clad are micoheterotrophic, so they're parasitizing fungi.
But some, I mean, Helenia is not in that clade.
But it certainly looked just the just you know, the
same way you could look at some members of oor
bank cacy and tell that they're they're a little parasitic.
There's just the there's just the look about them when
you look at the leaves at the veg they're not
as green as they could be, or they're off they
look kind of you know, there's something about like that
helenia that I made me wonder is it partially mico heterotrophic.
It's obviously it's got chlorophyll in there, so it's not
fully mico heterotrophic. It's not fully parasitizing fungi, but maybe
it is a little bit. There's no studies. It does
grow in shady ass environments, so form where you know,
in a place where forming a symbiosis with fungi or
parasitizing them a little bit taking more than you give
would prove beneficial. I mean no doubt. Genti and ac
is you know mico rhizals. So it's there's fungi doing
someone the work. There's an exchange there, but is it
an unequal exchange a little bit? I wonder it would
make sense because where it's growing is very shady, so
who knows. Anyway, I could keep going on and on,
We'll say for another podcast. It's been two hours and
a half the paramo. It's fucking wild. Look for the video,
which should be out. I'm trying to figure out what
I should do, like a long ass just go fucking nuts,
like totally insane, do an hour twenty minute video which
nobody will watch, or like break it up. I'll probably
break it up. But because I filmed a lot of
footage that day, and I don't cut a lot of
stuff unless it's repetitive, I just I'd like to put
everything in there, because there's so much. You never know it.
I mean, the coast of Greek is pretty protected, but
you never know what will happen, especially in the US,
or especially in Texas or in other places in Mexico.
What'll be what habitats will be gone in thirty forty years,
maybe even sooner. So anyway, hopefully got something out of that.
I didn't even talk about the herb farm that I
went to, This guy, Harrvor Thomas, wonderful man. It was
growing i boga. He had the little sacred garden area
with a whole bunch of cool psychedelic plants in there,
which are all legal, those three tabern anti boga and
Banisteriopsis and really cool, really cool guy, really cool garden,
really wonderful spot. That the giant cicadas were out. They
were fucking insufferable, But I love them just in saying
they were just so loud. It's amazing. I love it.
It's so pleasant, though, it's so I'd so much rather
hear loud, obnoxious cicada noise than than the the noise
you hear in dense population centers, human population centers that
you just become accustomed to, and you don't realize it
until you're like standing on a boat, you know, in
the in the San Francisco Bay looking at Oakland, or
in the you know, the the East River looking at
at New York, and you hear that that rory, Like God,
I live in that What the fuck? That horrible road
noise and fucking morons with their stupid revving engines and
oversized cars and shiitas, oh, you know, all the sounds
that just start debilitating. It blows my mind that people
find shit like Cicada's annoying, and then they live and
some of the loudest, most insufferably just like offensive, cacophonous shit,
you know, the fucking car noises, especially, God, it's such
an awful, awful noise, you know. I just I find
so much about our current predicament as humans just totally revolting.
You know, it's like every day I just I hear
people say shit, whether it's on a form of media
or in person, that just blows my mind. God, it's
the dumbest shit I've ever that's like the most or
it's just the most vile shit whatever, you know. And
then of course the places we build, at least here
in first world America. Who doesn't love car dealerships and billboards?
Speaker 2: Eh?
Speaker 1: God, may they may they all burn and fall over. Anyway, Okay,
that's all I got, have aggressive day. Probably do another
podcast here next week following up on this, talking more
about a little bit more about the Parmo and some
of that more cool Lowland forest shit. Alright, have a
gross to day, Go bike