Speaker 1: Episode.
Speaker 2: Amma, do I'm going down cry.
Speaker 3: Welcome to the cry pace A bond. He doesn't podcast.
I shouldn't be driving, but I am going A got
three and a half hours to go on a night drive,
a misty night drive to South Texas, coming from good
old San Anton, coming from Sagein, from the nursery, coming
from Limestone Tortoise Nursery, headed south back to the border
lands of South South Texas, Deep South Texas. God damn.
I just got back from the Philippines. It was a
fucking I spent some time in some of the most
incredible forests, the Old World forests around so many Old
World lineages of aeroids. The last day hung hanging out
with some fucking wonderful people too, Holy shit, Johnny Altamonte,
Kathleen uh Rob, who told me a wonderful story about
him with his boyfriend going to get jockstraps. It's maybe
he didn't want me to share that. I enjoyed it though,
you know, he was like a forty five year old queen.
I love wonderful fucking man. But they're you know, they
they they started that organization, Philippine Taxonomic Initiative. Jason monse
Bang was fucking great too, excellent fucking bondists and just
like the most fucking sweet, humble guy, like great fucking bondists,
And and Jason really knew fucking everything. Man with no flowers,
nothing like that guy has his plants down to a tee.
That's kind of like, I'm not even there with the
thorn scrub plants, you know, you know a lot of
the thorn scrub plants you have to really use non
flowering characteristics sometimes because they're not always flowering to tell
what they are. You just have to be you just
have to be extremely familiar with your flora, especially since
a lot of thorn scrub plants, you know, just have
the same leaf characteristics. Right. It's like then the tropics too,
you can't always see flowers. So like thorn scrub plants,
fascicled leaves, no petioles, The leaves are sessile, they're short,
they're fucking narrow whatever follow feminists castilla. All these things
look alike, like if a lot of the legumes look
alike to the most soid legumes. But and so Jason
is like that with tropicola, with tropical bonni. Like the
plants we were seeing in these forests are just fucking incredible.
And we were in the north for the first few
days doing field surveys collecting. They have a really interesting
method of collecting that they do too, just using dnatured alcohol,
you know, whereas I just take a I'll take a
fucking food dehydrator with me. I don't bring the trays,
and then I'll just set the books that I collect
specimens on vertically on top of the food dehydrator and
let it blow, you know, one hundred and five degree
no hotter than one hundred and five degree fahrenheit air
through them. And I'll put like, I'll put like, you know,
Q tips in between the pages sometimes so the air
can get through. I just use these little sketchbooks, like
cheap sketch books you get at the dollar store. Nope, notebook, notebook,
notepads whatever. But yeah, man, it was a We had
a fucking great time. And then I spent the last
four days in Manila, and then on the last day PTI,
Philippine Taxonomic Initiative, had scheduled this little like twenty person
hike with this other dude, John Ray, who came out
who's an expert in bamboo and ferns. Everybody was just
so fucking kind and humble and sweet, and you know,
was I was trying to convince everyone down there to
use a Naturalists because nobody down there uses in neat
and it's such a great you know, when people are
averse to it. I like some of the like John
Ray was a little averse to it. He's like, yeah,
I don't know, and I was like, no, man, trust me,
it's not It's not like a social media app, you know.
It's more it's a really great learning tool. It's I
use it for myself, like I'm you know, I don't
post shit so other people can see it. I mean,
I mean I do kind of because I want people
to learn about it and get stoked on things. But
it's not like a you know, it's not like a
trying to garner likes app. I was trying to explain
it to him, you know, and I'm like, when you
contribute to the body of knowledge on I neet And
there's not a lot of people using it in the Philippines,
so it's not that good yet, because it's only as
good as however many people are using it and contributing
to it, you know, so I was trying to explain
to them the value in it. But they've got co's
Digital Flora, which is the website they used on there,
and I guess like a Facebook. There's some Philippine Facebook group.
But I was like, man but yeah, but Facebook, you know,
the admins can shut down the page or it's it.
And it's Facebook too, so you've got to you know,
get sucked every once in a while with shitty ads
like just you know, trying to convince people to use
in at spreading the good word. But but yeah, wonderful people.
It was cool to be in Manila too. I don't
know how I picked a hotel. I just because we
were coming back from doing field work and I still
had four and a's. I wanted to hit the museums.
I like going to the fucking art museums too. We
went to the Pinto Museum, which is kind of out there.
Pinto Museum is like fucking dope art, really good art,
like dark shit that I kind of like, like dark
social commentary art. And then plants, like native plants too.
It's like a botanic garden and an art gallery, but
it's all like open air, like the buildings are not
air conditioned. They're just you know, there's door there's portals
with no doors on them, basically, and like these old warehouses.
It's a really cool setup. It's like the whole gallery
is in a big warehouse. I posted some rant using
some of the paintings I saw there as backdrops in
my stories, and all these people were hitting me up, saying, man,
who did this art? This is incredible? And unfortunately there
was no tag near the art, so I don't know
who did it, but you could probably look it up
online do like a Google image search. But the art
was really really good, and it was all different kinds
of art. And then yeah, they have a bunch of
native plants with labels on them that I guess Jason
actually helped them id out there. So a lot of
the stuff they've got like Sarawia out there, which is
Kiwi family acting adyac, which I thought was just the
New World genus. I guess it's I guess it's not.
I guess it's I guess there's a couple uh milesian
as the FIDO geographical region comprising Orneo, Indonesia, Malaysia, the
Philippines and all these south all those Southeast Asian islands
are known Malaysia, not a country, but a region. I
guess there's a Sarawia there too. I got to see
Sema Carpus lounge of Folius, which is such a fucking
weird member of anacardiac. It's like this sixty foot tall monoculus.
Maybe it branches at the top. It's like a I
saw Sema Carpus lounge of Folius, which is an anacard
and I think it might have you rush you all
in it. I don't know, maybe not. I touched it.
I didn't break out in a rash, but I touched
a you know, a meter long leaf that fell from
the canopy way up. It's so crazy to be in
these forests. It was hot as balls in Manila too,
Like when we were in the mountains the first few days,
the first the beginning of this trip, it was relatively cool.
Like you'd wake up in the morning, it'd be hot
during the day, you'd be sweating like a pig. And
then you wake up in a morning and it's chili
and the cicada. I'll place some of the cicadas and
bird sounds for you later. I made a bunch of recordings.
The forests are just so alive, like loud. The cicadas
sound like burglar alarms. There's all kinds of cool birds.
I guess I can you put can you put like
recordings on the Merlin bird? I d app you know
that app that I these birds by the bird song?
I think he can. I don't think it's got to
be live. We didn't have any service, but so I
just recorded a bunch. But the birds were incredible. But yeah,
the last day I got to see strong glow don
the jade vine fabasi. You know, we saw one. If
it produces these pendent inflorescences. This is some showy shit,
but it's mainly just showy. It's not you know, it's
not showy because it's a cultivar or it's a product
of you know, some dip shit breeding things in a
greenhouse for color or what you know. The things always
make fun of, right, don't don't take it too personally.
If that's your jam, I'm just I gotta make fun it.
I'm into fucking ecology. That stuff kind of discourages people
from being into ecology sometimes, you know, the showy cultivar stuff,
in my opinion, but again, it's not a religious just
my opinion, So don't don't take that to the bank
get all offended. So some people get really offended when
I shit on that. But anyway, but it's a really
really it's like a three foot long pendant. So it
drapes down inflorescence comprised the like eighty iridescent blue like
sky blue flowers, and they're just p flowers, but they're
a very bizarre more morphology on them. So it's like
a flower like like a textius blue bonnet, like a
loopiness species. It's the same flower structure, banner, pedal, wing pedals,
keel pedal Diadelphus stamens nine fused one free you know,
enclosed in the keel. But it's bat pollinated and so
that's why it's got this really bright, beautiful blue color
to it. I think you can see them. And so
they got them in some greenhouses. I know they had
them at the what was it it was at the
DC Botanic Garden, the National Botanic Garden. They had stronglod
on and they're jade vine it's called And it's on
the fucking currency too, like if you if you use
a five philippine Peso bit. They got stronglod On on there.
They got native plants on there, right, they're proud of
their flora. They've got the Delinia delinea philippine ensus on
them too. They got like four or five different species.
New Zealand does that too with their flora, right. I
wish the United States did that. That's what we need
to do. You bring plants into the culture. You know,
you you be proud of them. But anyway, yeah, so
they got you know, stronglod On is a well loved
Philippine plant, and we saw one flowering like ninety feet
above the forest floor. Way the fuck up there with
all these cool ferns and aeroids. Dry in area fern
which is like a kind of like a horn, not really,
it just forms one of those you know, the basal,
the base of the it's an epiphytic fern with like
three foot long fronds, and then the base of the
leaves get those accumulations of you know, old leaves, like
dry bracts. So it does like a similar thing that
the the platys syrium the staghorn does. But these these
monstrous trees, just huge trees, and then all kinds of
crazy shit up in the canopy. They're all different kinds
of leanas you know, which are just like really robust
woody vines, like you know, the archetype jungle vine. There
was a member of lamey Ace that was a leana.
There's all kinds of crazy shit. And so we saw
this stronglow down way up there, ninety feet above the ground,
which was just fucking dope. And then we got lucky
and there was one right at eye level, and so
I could dissect the fly. And it's cool because they
co evolved with bats, and so bats selected for the plant,
and the plants kind of selected for pollination by bet
and and so they've got this bright color so they
can be seen by the bats up into canopy. And
then the wing pedals, when the bat pushes its face
into the wing pedals, it makes the keel pedal bend.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, that's fine,
don't trip. Just look it up. Look up you know
p flower, Look up banner wings and keel and you'll
get a diagram. And so when the bat presses its
face in between the wing petals, it forces the keel
pedal up like to bend up the keel pedals kind
of shaped like a hook in this case, like it's
like in a loop in the keel pedal is just
a straight up keel. It kind of projects outward from
the flower a little bit. It's two fused petals. It
literally looks like a keel of a boat, but on
stronglodon it's long and hook shaped. And there's a couple
bird pollinated members of the Faboiti subfamily, the pea family,
the p subfamily of the pea family, because Fabodi is
the subfamily that has this flower morphology to banter wings
and keel there's a couple bird pollinated ones, like there's
a famous one in New Zealand that's like extinct in
the wild but common in cultivation. They grow in California sometimes,
big red flower. But it's got the same thing. It's
got like this hooked, this hooked the keel pedal. Like
if you look at like a coral being erethrina, the
keel pedal is the same structure. It's like the same
like long, you know, same thing bird pollinated, but this
case it's bat pollinated. So instead of the flower being red,
it's like this bright blue so it can pick up
the moonlight way up in the canopy, and the bat
pushes its face into the wing pedals. It causes the
keel pedal the bend. When the keel pedal bends, the
stamens that are enclosed in the keel pedal push out
of the tip of the keel pedal and kind of
squirt pollen out onto the back of the bat's head.
And then the style is with those stamens too, like
they're all kind of wrapped together. They're all the filaments
of the stamens, and then the the uh, the style
and so the style. You know, of course, if the
bat already has pollen on the back of its head,
it'll end up dusting some pollen onto that style when
it goes to feed on the nectar inside this flower.
I would have loved to sample the nectar. I didn't
just see what it tastes like or what it smells like.
There wasn't really a smell to strangle it done. Maybe
there's a faint one at night. A lot of bat
pollinated flowers and moth pollinati flowers. You know, evening pollinated
flowers will not emit scent until the evening. But uh,
because you know that scent this probably I imagine it's costly.
You know those osmaphorest that have to produce those scent
compounds that it's not cheap, right, it requires calories to
do that. Anyway, It's a fucking dope plant. It's just
it's so fucking cool looking and beautiful and then it's
you know, the leaves are just like these kind of leathery,
plastic e laborous, smooth trifolia leaves just like a bean,
just like a phaseolus or anything else. But these things
go ninety feet up the canopy. And we were at
this it was like Maga ling forest park. I forget
the name of it. I don't I'm not proficient that
pronouncing to galog, Tagalog to galog, which is the language.
It's funny, man, because like Johnny and my buddy Johnny
and you know, they they've got they're Filipino, but they
got like American accents, but it sounds kind of like
a Staten Island accent. It's kind of funny, like it
reminds me of like friends that grew up in like
New York, you know, the way like I think maybe
like the thh has become t I do the same thing,
you know, D and THH and all them become like
just straight up tease. Anyway, it's just kind of cool,
kind of cool to notice. But but yeah, so anyway,
this uh, this Moggeling Forest Park, it's it's like an
hour south of Manila, and uh you know, we we
it's like a fucking nine kilometer high to the top,
well at least to like where the reflegias start appearing.
And Rhuflesia is like a bucket list genus for a
lot of plant people because it's just such a notable
parasite next to a Morphophallus titanum. It's a species of Rhflegia,
one of the thirty or forty in the genus that
produce the largest flower in the world, which I think
I forget what Rufleesia species it is. It's in Borneo,
but it produces like a you know, a meter wide flower.
And they're endo parasites, right like our native Texas and
native California and Arizona and Pilos Styles, which is unrelated.
I think Pilostes Styles was actually placed in Rafleziacea one point,
though now it's an apodanth These, which I think is
in the cucumber order Kukerbathales and Pilostyles parasitizes legumes, whereas
Reflegia parasitizes a genus called Tetrastigma, which is a fining leana,
like a big, thick woody leana from the grape family
that's common in Southeast Asia. But anyway, Reflesia's got like
three yet, like I said, thirty or forty species, and
it's an endo parasite, no leaves, no stems. It just
spends its whole life living inside the host plant, but
not really seeming to harm it. It's a weird relationship.
I don't know, you know, I think it's probably more
complicated than just parasitism. There might be some sort of
benefit to the plant where it was it. I think
I was reading some paper just came out explaining how
some of the micoheterotrophs actually might provide a benefit to
the fungus that they parasitize. And now, Ruflegia is not
a micoheterrotroph I'm not trying to fuck you up. Ruflesia
is a parasitic plant that parasitizes plants, whereas micoheterotrophs are
parasitic plants that parasitize micro rhizol fungus. Okay, like Sarcodi's sanguinia.
The quote snow plant, which is a bright red micoheterotrophic
plant in the blueberry family that grows in the Sierra
Nevada of California. But I think a paper just came out,
if you'll if you'll give me this digression really quick.
A paper just came out that kind of hinted at
the theory that maybe Sarcod's sanguinea the snow plant provides
a benefit to the micohet the micro rhizol fungus, and
the micro hyzel fungus that snowplant is parasitizing is locked up,
locked up, you know, in a symbiosis with the surrounding
coniferous trees. But this micoheterotroph might be giving the micro
a rhizal fungus, you know, like a basically like a reservoir,
like a spot to lurk and and basically occupy should
it ever lose I guess, you know, should it ever
lose ground in the in the forest. So it provides
it kind of like a safehouse in the event of
any sort of extreme environmental situation. You know, like a
massive tree die off or something like that. So if
the micro rhyzol funguses symbiance die, then maybe it can
still stay alive inside. I don't know. I don't know.
I think I'm fucking this up probably, But you should
check out the paper if you can. I think I
just read it in Science direct or something the last week.
But it kind of hints at the fact that it's
not a strictly parasitic relationship. There actually is a benefit
going back to the fungus with the micoheterotrophs some of them,
and there's micohedrotrophic orchids too. We saw what was we
saw micahedrotrophic orchids. Well, you can always tell them michael heterotrophs,
at least the orchids because or you know, a lot
of members of blueberry family do this, and Bermanniac another
monocop family that does this as well. I think Bermanniace's
and diascory Aley's the Diascoria order. But in any case,
you can always tell because there's no chlorophyll. I mean,
you can just tell the plants to paris like, because
there's no chlorophyll, there's no green tends to be white
doesn't really have much in the way of leaves, maybe
just vestigial leaves regardless. But anyway, so but it was great.
It was so fucking cool to see reflegia because you
see the pictures online and it's this big, gross looking
red flower. The flowers smell like dog shit and rotting
meat because they're pollinated by flies and hold, there were
a lot of there were a lot of flies going.
You know, my navigation lady, I put her it's a
Nigerian voice. I just picked that because I couldn't stand
the the Google lady's voice. You know, she was too
positive and it's too happy. It sounded like customer service,
like the White lady boys. So they had the Nigerian option.
They picked Nigerian. Fuck it, you know. But anyway, so
so you see the flowers are a flegia, and yeah,
they look cool and they're wild and they're weird looking,
but you don't really understand the ecology of it, or
the setup or the fact. The thing that really blew
my mind, I think was that seeing the the flower
buds as they emerged. They emerged like a year before
the plant blooms on the vine, on the host, on
tetrastigma and they kind of look like a little woody
gull and you know, like the size of a marble.
And then they eventually, over the course of the years
swell to like the size of a baseball until they
bloom or however big the flower gets. It depends on
the species. Again, there's a shit ton of species. There's
like nineteen species in the Philippines. I saw a poster.
If you google Reflesia Philippines poster, you'll get images of it.
But I can't find any place to download. If anybody
out there can find a place to download that poster,
let me know. First time I saw it was in
the ut Austin or Barium. They got one there. It's
a beautiful poster. It's got all the Reflecia species that
exist in the Philippines. But I guess there's one in
Thailand too. One in Thailand, but most are on the islands.
But you know, again, to see this thing and then
to see the host and to kind of get the
just I mean, it's a whole other thing to actually
see the thing in person, where you can think about
what you're looking at, ask questions, take a million photos. God,
it was so fucking cool. And the flower morphology is
really weird on these things on reflegia. So you got
five pedals and then you've got this disc in the
center that looks kind of like a what is the
genus of water lily? Is it? I can't I can't
remember the name the lumbo or for anyway, I don't know,
but it looks like this weird disc. It's like a
it's like a bizarre disc on the inside of this flower.
And then under that are the androe seum the male
part or the gino the female part of the flower.
But you can't really tell what sex the flower is
until unless you like look under that disc, or if
the flower is a little post and then you can,
you know, you can the disc withers and you can
see under it. Oh God, I can't wait to go
to sleep. Anyway, Yeah, it's the lumbo, you know, the
water lotus the disc and water lotus kind of looks
like the disc in the center of the Ruflesia flower.
And so I was looking at Ruflesia lagasque and and
it's you know, it's only gets about the size of
a dinner plate, maybe a hubcap, and you know, the
buds though, like the buds before. We saw a couple
of buds that were gonna be going off in the
next week or two, and they were literally like the
size of a baseball, maybe a grape crew, just coming
off like two feet up off the ground. Off this
tetrastigma and tetrastigma, I mean when you look at it,
I didn't see any flowers on it, unfortunately, because I
would have loved to get, you know, photos of the
inflorescences and flowers. I took so many photos, but my
camera I switched cameras the last year, and this one's
heavy as fuck. It takes nice photos, but it's like
really cumbersome. But uh, you know, but tetras stigma, you
can tell it. I mean, you can kind of tell
it's a grape just you can see in the petioles.
You know, it looks like Parthenocissus and Scissus and some
of the you know, those semi succulent viining members of
the grape family. I mean, and then of course also
Vitus to the genus fighters. But but yeah, man, it's
a I guess it's a big genus. I don't know,
I don't I met so many genera that I've never
been exposed to before, and that I mean that for
me is the most fun. Like that's when like you're
actively learning, you know, because that's how I learned now,
I mean I it used to be I would, you know,
go take Plant Systematics like these is ten years ago.
I take the Plant Systematics textbook with me to the
coffee shop, leave the fucking phone at home and just go,
you know, drink my morning coffee, get wired, and you know,
pick up the book anywhere and read. And then whenever
I encountered words I didn't know, just look them up
in the back or you know, look up what the
idea behind the word is, what the meaning is, so
you're actually understanding it, not just memorizing it. But now,
I mean, when you're when you're actively learning new plants,
it's really just about going out there and taking photos
of them because you know, at photo preserves so much information.
I mean, it's just data. It's just data collection. You
can tell so much by uh got I gotta turn
this time. It does not ridiculous. Yeah country looted my
country for diamonds. That's what she should be saying, right.
Uh So anyway, so I'll you know, I'll take like
and then that's why iinad is so important to me,
because that's that's literally my log book for you know,
all the different species I learn, and I'll reference them
for years to come. The photos that I take, you know,
for presentations, shit like that, what date did I see
this on? And then I can go into my cloud
photos and get you know, actual high resolution photos of
it of the things I've seen. So it's basically just
data collection. But god damn, yeah, there were all these
cool climbing aeroids too, like uh, Syndapsis, syndapsis picked. This
was a weird one with the modeled leaves raphid dopa.
Lots of cool palms orenga, these massive rainforest palms. And
it was nice to be there in the dry season too,
because I guess it gets a lot of rain, like
two to three meters of rain a year. The typhoon
season sounds like a fucking mess great but just really
really intense storms and high rainfall. And so the dry
season is like December to March, December to April really,
and then it starts pissing in May. But these men,
these forests were just so fucking cool, I mean, and
then you look up in the canopies of these trees
and there's just so much stuff growing up there. Yeah,
it was tons of rubyac genera that I've never met before.
Because again there's this distinction between Old World and New World,
Eastern Hemisphere and Western Hemisphere. You know, a lot of
things that heavily radiated and speciated in the Eastern Hemisphere
never made it to the Western Hemisphere and vice versa.
And then of course when you know, some somebody takes
those some granny takes a plant from the Western Hemisphere
to the Eastern Hemisphere and plants in New yard. And
then in his case there was a you know, it
becomes invasive. There was a ton of invasive aeroids. There
were some invasive philodendrons that were fucking up these forests.
Mahogany was everywhere, right like the family Meliacees pantropical, but
the genus Swetinia, the mahogany genus is Central American, And
so I guess they did, you know, like foresters, well
intentioned individuals in the Philippines planted these fucking mahoganies everywhere
in the seventies, you know, as part of a reforestation effort,
and of course now they're just invasive as hell and
a pain in the ass and fucking up the ecology there.
You know, it's the same thing that people did with
eucalyptus in California a little bit earlier, like early twentieth century.
It's the same thing that that China did with its
great green Wall project. We're gonna green in the desert.
You know what does that sound like?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 3: Because it's a thing that so many people are trying
to do. I think that guy Sean Overton is now
doing native plants. He had a YouTube channel he was
doing a green in the Desert thing. But I think
he came around. He's a nice guy. I've talked to
him before, but I think he finally came around. You know,
I was trying to tell him. I was like, man,
I wanted to go visit him at the Sierra Blanca
out in West Texas and that is really dry out there,
not as hot as South Texas and it actually gets
chilly there and lots of naked geology too, but certainly
very dry. But I think he finally learned the lesson
and realized you got to use what came with the land.
Like at one point I think he was trying to
plant Russian olives or some garbage. It didn't work, but
either way, Yeah, it'd be cool, you know, it would
be cool. I'm curious now that he's been out there.
This is sewn overton the dust ups.
Speaker 4: Guy.
Speaker 3: I don't know if you've seen that YouTube channel people
every month someone was telling me you gotta go see him.
You know, he's trying to do the screening the desert thing,
and it's it's fucking up the ecology. You can't really
fuck up the ecology there. You're just gonna waste your time.
It's too dry for anything to really get established. But uh,
but it'd be cool to go there and now, you know,
because he's been there for like four years, four or
five years so far, and just see where he's at,
you know, and just be like, so, did you did
you figure it out? You know, did you realize like
in such an extreme climate you got to use the
tools that came with the land. Because I bet he's
into natives now, I think he is. I think lest
I heard from him he was trying to grow a
bunch of natives. But that's a really, really dry area though. Man,
that is like between El Paso and Marfa. Man, it
is in West Texas. Like that's a really harsh anyway
harsh area. But uh, but yeah, there's there's invasive mahogany
everywhere and invas of philodendron. And then there was this
uh this was a ab Wolita plant. There was some
like showy member of acan't they see, you know, who's
one of the hous thesas with all the bracts and
shit and the red flowers humming were pollinated flowers, but
it was just taken over the roadsides in this understory
of this forest. You know, it's like really the again,
it's this something I talk about in concrete body. It's
like these things evolve, is they're not just autonomous entities,
these plants, they're parts of these whole you know, living
assemblages of species that have been interacting with each other
for millions of years and forming these relationships with relatively
you know, few newcomers, like you know, there were certainly newcomers,
there were dispersal events, there were new arrivals, but you know,
at a fraction of the pace that humans have have
have dispersed plants or brought new arrivals in the last
few centuries, so you got to take the whole ecosystem
into account. All the plants had relationships with each other
and and insects and different uh fungi and soil bacteria
and birds and other animals in those habitats. So uh.
But yeah, so this these four there was fucking diasporos
there too, but they look slightly different. The diasporos has
to be an old genus. I would assume that's very old,
because it's fucking everywhere, it's pantropical, and it's there was
a diasporos. Of course, we got you know, per Simmons
in Texas and in the East Coast and North America.
But there's diasporos in Japan. There's diasporos in South Africa.
There's uh, there was a really rare diasporos we encountered
in the northern mountains with Agathis in the Dipterocarpus. God,
there was so much cool shit. It's like, it's what
I love. I love coming back from these trips and
just going through photos again and remembering, like recollecting everything.
Tons of cool bamboos, Giganta Kloa cloa meaning grass. Giganta
Kloa was a genus h and counted out there massive
hollow tubes, you know, to ninety feet tall. Old world
genus at bamboo. There was Dinah Kloa, which is again
it's it's so funny to me. It looks like some
tweaker plumbing job, like you invited some tweaker over and
they were gonna build this like doctor Sussian style PVC
pipe because it looks like green PVC pipe that dinahkloa does.
It's a climbing bamboo. It's a climbing leana bamboo that
just it just looks like pipes like you you know,
like loose pipes, like some tweaker was trying to build
a waterworks system or something. So there was Dinakloa. There
was a couple other bamboo genera. The Ficus diversity was
fucking nuts. I mean, there was there's fining Ficus small
or baceus Ficus massive tree ficus. The strangler figs Ficus
minahasi was everywhere as well, which with its flagelliform peduncles
they look like they look like anal beads. I don't
know how to say it. You know, remember when anal
beats still the thing I don't know that was. Remember
it was like the butt of there was a butt
of some jokes back then, you know, like the little
plastic beads you put in your where I come up
with this shiit, See, this is why, this is why
some people really don't like what I do. And I
get it. I totally get it. You know, you get
some clenched you know, sniffing our own farts, you know,
some of the the genteels, some of the squares, you know,
they don't they don't want to hear this stuff. They
don't want to listen to a body podcast where he's
talking about anal beats. I don't know what else they
look like. I don't know how else to describe them.
The flagelliform peduncles with this Sinconia right, a very specific
kind of flower that applies to the figs and I
think a few other members of Moraci, the mulberry family.
It's it's like a flower that has an obligate relationship
with wasps, so only wasps can pollinate a certain kind
of wasp can pollinate these Ficus species. But they've got
these really just the flowers, the inward facing what is
technically a flower. They guy, they're so weird looking. It's
so cool, you know. They they they're these flagelliform peduncles,
so like the whole inflorescence stalk you know, can be
like a meter or two meters long and just comes
directly off the trunk and looks like some sort of weird,
you know, space creature tail coming off of this ficus tree.
And this ficus tree can get upwards of like sixty
or ninety feet tall, twenty or thirty meters. And then
the figs, you know, once the flowers pollinated, the figs
that later emerge are quite tasty. They're they're like edible
and kind of good. But I guess all the ficus
bleed that latex. See this is what I'm talking about. Like,
it's it's so cool to meet this new genus. And
the more time you spend in the forests and the
habitat here examining the different variations on a certain genus,
you know, the more enriched I now feel, you know,
learning what this genus does and some of the traits
of it, the synapomorphies of it. Some of the rock
figs in Baja are really cool. See, Ficus is pantropical too.
There's quite a few in Mexico. But I remember seeing
what was the ficus I saw right on the Baja
California Baja California Sir border out there in the desert
with grown with giant cacti and Euphorbia xantai and a
bunch of other wild shit. I think it was. I
don't know if it was Ficus palmeri or I don't know,
but yeah, there was so much Ficus diversity, and there
was Ficus religiosa all over the old brick walls, you know,
just growing as a pioneer species as well, a ruteral
plant really a plant that thrives of human disturbance in Manila,
and so, I mean that was kind of cool just
being able to like bodanize the rock walls of the
old Spanish garrison fort in Manila, like where I found
the I got a hotel, you know, the last couple
of days I got a hotel and a way I
found it was. I just looked for, like the dense
old city center with all the close the streets that
are close together, something that looked like it'd be fun
to walk and found a cheap hotel there, and it
ended up being a perfect hotel too. It was like
kind of a dump, like, it wasn't super fancy. There
were some stains on the walls, but it wasn't like
a bed bug hotel either, right, because I don't want
super fancy. I don't want that. I don't want to
be around the kinds of people that are going to
be at a super fancy hotel. I try to avoid
those kinds of people. I also don't want them being
around me, because then they can complain about me, you
know whatever about me, or I don't want to just
it's better if we just don't interact. And also the
price was right too, and also the spot's not gonna complain.
It's already like a semi dump. I would never say that.
The proprietors are such an establishment. I don't want to
offend them. But it's already kind of a semi dump,
so they're not gonna it's like a real road hotel.
It's like the hotels used to put us up at
the railroad. All Right, they're not gonna complain about me.
I'm not gonna have to complain about the other clientele.
It works out great. The price is right, it's affordable.
I'm not expecting too much. They're not expecting too much
out of me, except for me to just not put
holes in the wall. It works out good. It's great.
It's terrific. And I could hear the city down below.
It was loud. I kind of like that. I like
that ambiance in the background. I like that human presence.
If I'm gonna be in a city, that's what I want.
If I'm gonna be out in nature in the living world,
I don't want that. But i'm gonna be in a city,
that's what I want. So it was nice walk uple
streets close to the museum. Kind of a dump, but
not not really bad. You know. They had a little hotpot.
I could make my fucking green tea and coffee in
the morning, and the ac blue cold. It was perfect.
It was perfect for me. Yeah, and so I could
just go, you know, fuck around during the day. Got
it was hot though, man, it was really really hot,
like really hot, like ninety five degrees fahrenheit whatever it
is in Celsius is at like thirty three celsius. But
it was really humid. So every day I go out.
I got heat stroke a couple times, or near heat stroke.
You know, like three or four pm rolls around, you've
been walking around all day. You just takes the It
takes the wind out of you.
Speaker 1: Man.
Speaker 3: You feel like you feel he got roofed. You know,
you gotta go lay down or take naps. Then I
go back to the hotel, take a nap for a
couple hours, read, dick around, and then head out again.
But that old Spanish garrison, I guess Manila got heavily
bombed in World War Two because it was occupied by
the Japanese. It got heavily bombed, and then it was
occupied by the Americans for a while. But they were
nicer than the Japanese, but they were still you know,
exploiting it for their business interests. You know. American government
of course, like it's known to do, is getting its
dirty hands, making sure that the you know, the corporations
could uh get established and you know exploited. And I
think that's when they they ended up cutting. The American
companies ended up cutting a lot of the dipterocarp forests
and those trees, those dipterocarps are fucking beautiful, man, They're incredible.
The National Museum has a really good bod neyed display
and they get into the ultra Mafic areas. They've got
some like Ultra They've got an Ultra Mafic diorama, which
is fucking cool, right, kind of like the similar I
like plant dioramas, right, Smithsonian Museum has one. American Museum
of National History in New York is really good with
the plant dioramas. They've got animals in there too, but
they've got you know, regionally relevant models of native plants
to go in the diemas where the animals are, which
is cool. And I think they've got labels for all
of them as well, so you're getting the whole habitat.
It is really cool. You've ever been to the the museum,
the American Museum in National History in New York, It's
totally worth it. I went a couple of years ago,
and I complained about the price. For non New Yorkers,
it was like twenty five bucks. But I'm sure you
can find a way to sneak in there, or if
you have the money, pay it. But you know, the
museums shouldn't cost twenty five bucks. I rant about this
all the time. They should be supported with tax money.
They're vital institutions, they benefit the public, you know, and
then they get turned in, like all the ones in
Chicago got turned into theme parks for suburban tourists. And
you know, some admit this is all like product of
the Reagan shit right. It's gonna be silfs stating we
don't need tax dollars going to support public education. Tax
dollars are supposed to go to support corporations and give welfare,
welfare tax cuts to wealthy corporations. It's just another reason
to lower taxes for the rich. But am I still
going the right way? Where the fuck am I? God?
He's sketchy. You know, there's deer. You're gonna clip it deer.
You drive long enough in Texas, you're gonna clip it
deer on these farm to market roads. Shouldn't have killed
off all the jaguars, assholes, and the jaguars would help
keep the deer down anyway. The fuck else that I
want to talk about? There's so much, I mean, there's
so much to talk about. I'm just going through my nashvillis.
Oh yeah, there was a really dope uh member of
Malvasi in the uh, the lowland forests, like you know,
three hundred meters. It was terot Symbium with a P.
Is the genus. Turn off your brights, you schmuck the
fuck fucking where's your etiquette? Ttero Symbium tinctorium. And I
think it's actually drought deciduous. So it's you know, it's
like this ninety foot tall tree in the forest. You'll
see it on the slope and it's leafless, and then
it flowers when it's leafless, and then the fruits look
like maple somorrows, but it's malves and the whole fruit
you know, that's like a little fruit with these two
wings on it. And so it helicopters down for dispersal,
can get a little bit more distance than in what
otherwise if it just fell straight using gravity, you know,
So helicopters down and it's a beautiful tree and really
big and and so it's produces just shit tons of
these winged helicopter fruits ptro Cymbm cym b i u
M tinctorium, and yeah, a large component of the forest
there and just massive and it's really it's cool to
see them leafless, but with like you know, all in fruit,
so it just looks it's in the fruits kind of
like whitish yellow wit yellowish, like this little looks like
a thick marble or a thick bean with the little
helicopter propellers on it.
Speaker 5: You know, the.
Speaker 3: Samaras really cool looking tree. And it's relatively common there too.
I wonder how much of the Philippine flora is endemic
quite a bit. But anyway, but yeah, but going back
to the National Museum, it's it's a fucking grave. If
you get a chance to go there, check it out.
They've got some pretty they've got some weird taxidermy. The
taxidermy didn't come out right. There might be you know,
some cross eyed, misshapen mammals there, like the cloud rats.
Got a lot of cloud rats in the Philippines. They
live in the cloud forests and the mossy forests. But
they've got you know, they've got a nice Kars diorama
and ultramafic ultramafic diorama, and and you know some good
examples in the Penthees, the god the ultra mafic stuff,
those little dwarf elfin forests on those harsh soils. I
think Dinnegatt Island is a is prob I think Dinnegot
Island is all ultramafic. In the northwest part of the
country there's some ultramafic, and then on Pottawan Island there's
a lot of ultramafic areas too, And then of course Pottawan,
you know, shoots like northeast to southwest. It's northeast to
southwest oriented and then at the southwest end it connects
to or At, you know, basically leads to Saba. There's
a channel there, but it's close to Saba in northern Borneo,
which is all ultramafic as well and known for a
shit ton of cool flora. And so you get these
pigmy god, I guess there's like dwarf agathists there, you know,
the monkey postal family. These I love these ancient conifers.
I love these ancient conifer fans. It's like the Phyloclatus
we saw Philoclatus Hypophilus two. Just these bizarre, really old lineages.
They're just like old models of photosynthesis, like they shouldn't
be alive. Still, they shouldn't be extants still they are.
Just the only reason they are is by some sort
of fluke. But in being able to see them, it
gives you an idea, you know, and just looking at
their morphology, the parallel veins, these uh verticilate, these these
whorls of branches, it gives you an idea of what
some of the flora may have looked like in the
early Mesozoic. I like when the dinosaurs were getting going.
It's just they're they're such cool trees and they're just
such a I mean, they're they're it's so simple compared
to angiosperms. I know, the taxonomists don't like it when
you say that, but they are. They're simple. They're like
a simple model of plant. But you know, in the
case the age at this, they get fucking massive. You
know the Cowry tree in New Zealand, which is one
of the largest I mean, those things get as big
as giant Sequoia is around. That's an Agathis, that's Agathis Australis.
You get a agat this robusta. Remember seeing agat this
I think it was Ovada in New Caledonia. You know,
it's been around for a while. It's a conifer, but
it looks like it's got broad leaves. Remember the first
time I saw one was at San Francisco Botanic Garden
in like two thousand and nine, and when someone told
me it was a conifer, I was like, what the fuck? Really,
this thing makes a cone because it just looks like
a quote, you know, broad leaved tropical tree. But then yeah,
when you look at the veins, they're parallel. You look
at the bark, it looks kind of like, you know,
Eri Carria bark, like monkey puzzle bark. It's all pimply
and flakes off, and you know, the bark looks like
a fucking dinosaur. It's a it's a cool lynch. So
you know, Philo clatus is Potocarpesi and then agath this
is air Carrie a c. I think those two families
are sister. They're both fucking old though, and they've both
got an extensive fossil record going back. I think in
the case that Ricarria, the Ricarria family like two hundred
million years, two hundred and fifteen million years, so what
is that Triassic? And then you know they're just in
these these these deep forests, like these dark forests covered
in all kinds of aerids and cool orchids. I saw
also a really cool lichen called Conagonium, which my buddy
Winslow id on inine. I had no idea what the
fuck it was. I thought it was a basidio liking
you know, is in a basidio micey, a bisidio micey
being the fungus, and then of course there's an algae
in there as well. You know, typical lichens set up
an algae, cyanobacteria and a fungus, you know, menagetois. But
but but this turned out to be an asco my seat,
And I thought it was a basidio my seat because
it kind of looked like like the genus Cora, which
is a you know, a really common, at least in
the neotropics in the Western hemisphere, really common bisidio like
in it looks looks like a polypor but it's a
lichen and they're often blue. It's super species rich. I
don't know who's doing work on the genus Cora. I
don't know. It's a fascinating genus though, and you see
them a lot in the neotropics. But and this kind
of had that like polypoor look to it. But it
looked like it looked like it was almost like a
green polypore lufa, like it had that kind of spongy
texture to it, but it was entirely green. And it
was a lichen in the genus Conagonium, which is an
asco my seat lichen, like most of the lichens are.
And that was that was with the file clayed us
up at higher elevations. That was like fifty six hundred
feet So what is that sixteen hundred meters seventeen hundred
meters about? You know, you go up. That was in
the first few days in the northern part. It was
like four hours north of Manila, in remnant forest that
is slowly being cleared for agriculture. And god, it was
fucking cool. Though. I should have collected some and dried it.
I'm sure it's been collected. I'm sure it's in the urbarium.
I just want to go there. They're collecting stuff. PTI
was collecting stuff for the orbarium. There's not a lot
of I mean there's I'm sure there's a lot of
people doing things in academia, but there's not a lot
of just community science, like just random motherfuckers like me
or anyone else who aren't affiliated with any institution doing
a lot of collecting, and so that was kind of
why PTI was foreigned Philippine Taxonomic Initiative. Like Johnny doesn't
you know he works in like renewable energy, He doesn't.
He is not like a bondist by training. Jason is
Rob isn't Rob just loves plants, you know, loves plants.
Doesn't like people. Wonderful man, very nice. But you know,
misanthropy a little bit of that, which is completely understandable
if someone's not a little cynical about the current human
state of things. I can't really, I can't do that
forced positivity thing that they do in California. No, normally
it's the Caucasians, right, the Caucasian liberal California thing. They like,
you're too negative, Like you know, they shit on you
a little bit. Whereas like I like my tragedy, but
I like it with the comedy too. I don't like
lying to myself about the tragedy. I just like drenching
it in comedy. And then of course keeping keeping a
good outlook on the geologic timescale and the relativity of
all of it. And I mean, you got to otherwise
it'll eat you alive. You gotta be upbeat about it.
But you gotta be honest. You can't do the force
positivity thing. But there's so much positivity in the beauty
of the living world. I mean, fuck, what do you need?
But I'm like that, I gotta. I see, if I
don't focus on plants, then I start focusing on all
the negative shit, and that's when you get the long
ranting podcasts that you know, don't talk enough about Botanan
or just me ranting about the car death cult and
consumerism and shit, which I do understand gets a little tiring.
But but but anyway, Yeah, so they just go out
and collect a ton of stuff, and thank god they do.
But again they put in like a big clear planstic
garbage bag, soaka in denatured alcohol. Just pour the straight
up pour the denatured alcohol in the garbage bag with
all the press specimens, and then they dry it later.
And the bummer with that is that you lose a
lot of the color, but the specimen doesn't rot. And
of course, you know, you have to worry about mildew
and rot when you're in warm, humid areas, and it
was really, really humid. I felt like I was doing
Bickram yoga the whole time. The heat wasn't the issue
for me. It's the heat combined with the humidity. It's
that you're just you know, I used to do U
Muytai and uh I remember Aftermuytai would get like a
headache because we would just we'd be training so hard,
just completely bathed in sweat. And so that's what really
takes an audio. It's like you lose your electrolytes and
at some point you just your core temperature isn't cooling
down anymore because the sweat isn't evaporating, and so you
know that humidity is the same. It's the same issue
with plants. I mean, unless you can, unless you have
a dehydrator. You can put that thing on a you know,
the specimens on a dehydrator for two days at low
heat with air blowing through it. They're gonna get mildew
when they're gonna rot. The dehydrator is nice because you
can preserve the color. But if you don't have that,
the denatured alcohol works and those things will keep for
weeks until you can dry them without rotting. And I
think it's just the fumes in that sealed garbage bag
with all the specimens too. Obviously that prevents fungi from
getting established and from molding. But in any case, this
conagonium was fucking delightful. It was such a cool you know,
it was like three inches four inches across, looked like
these little disks. It was coming off of a tree.
But it's entirely green, so you know, it's photosynthesizing. You know,
it's got to be like it. It was just it
looked like a weird cross between a moss and a polypoor,
like some some sphagnum moss and a polyport. It was
so bizarre, it was so cool. But it was in
these these what they call the mossy forest, which is
like that's like a definitive habitat type in the Philippines,
and it was kind of like cloud forest, but it's warmer.
It's not cool. It's a little bit cooler than down below.
Certainly more comfortable and it gets chilly at night, but
entirely different forest composition. You know, up there at fifty
five hundred feet, then you would get at like nine
hundred feet in the lowland forest where the stronglow down
and the reflesia were and there was a really cool
Pananga species there too. Pananga is a common genus of
palm that gets maybe six to eight feet tall. But
I think it was Pananga philippinensis. It had been tentatively id'das,
but it had these. It had a spath. The inflorescence
comes out below, you know, below the petioles, and forgive me,
my palm morphology vocab is not what it should be.
But this it's got this spath on it kind of
like an aroid, like this protective bract. And then all
these things that again look like some sort of had
a nine tails or forgive me, anal beats. You know,
those are the inflorescences of this palm, and there's many
of them. It looks kind of like a almost like
an octopus. The inflorescence branches are maybe I don't know,
ten to fourteen inches long, and they come out of
the space. The spathe falls off, and then the what
looked like these tentacles or anal beats come off from
from below these these petioles. And but this Penaga philipinensus,
it had these really weird It was really confusing, and
I still don't really know what was going on with
these things. There were the flowers or what would what
I presume would be the flowers, But they were beneath
these like romboidal fatty structures, and there were many of
them on one of these inflorescence branches, and it was
really puzzling to see. I guess it's I mean, they
weren't fruits because again this the spath had just fallen off.
The spath was still attached. It was like this inflorescence
was just opening up. But these these white, you know, fatty,
oily romboidal structures were everywhere, looking like beads kind of.
They were maybe like half an inch half an inch across,
and there were many of them, each one seeming to,
you know, pertain to one of these tiny flowers that
wasn't mature yet. I'm not It's got to be some
sort of attractant for whatever pollinates these things, you know,
and I guess it's probably bats. Like it's probably bats.
Bats are attracted to these white, fatty structures and when
they go to get those, they somehow pollinate the flower.
I don't know, is anybody out there a palm freak?
What's going on with pananga? Pananga and heterospath were two
of the genera of these palms. But it got me again.
You know, palms have been bastardized when you see them,
you know, in human horticulture, But when you're seeing them
in the forest, in the context of the ecology of
the whole ecosystem, they become so much more interesting because
you're like, what the fuck is this thing doing. It's
here on its own, itsself sustaining, it's not being babied.
It's not a cult of var It's tied into this
whole network here, this whole network of life, you know,
the insects, the fungi and the soil, the birds, the bats,
whatever's pollinating this, whatever's dispersing the fruit, and so it's
you know, it's like a puzzle. I mean, every one
of these living things is like a puzzle, and you
got to figure out why they're behaving the way they are,
why they have why they produce these kind of structures,
why the flower is shaped the way it is, why
the leaves are shaped the way that it is. You know,
where is it growing, what is it? What others speed
she's is it growing with? And this pinaga was it's
a really beautiful palm. Doesn't get that tall. Maybe six
to eight feet and it's growing there with these these philoklatus,
these ancient conifers that get maybe thirty or forty feet tall.
And there was Nepenthes ventricosa draped all over these things,
and I guess those have been getting poached to. I
think a lot of the you know, the villagers, and
because it's an indigenous village in this area still, you know,
the villagers will go poacht these things. Man. Some of
the guides, I mean, because you're forced to have a
guide by the U d e n R, the Department
of Environment and Natural Resources, and so you know PTI
they know all the guides there, and the guides were chill,
but they don't really have much interest in the plants
aside from you know, can they sell them or something
or whatever. This one guy uh Kuyah which means older
brother in Tagalog, I guess Kuya Pugo was cool guy,
but man, he was like he was addicted the betel nut.
They're all chewing betel nut, which is a highly carcinogenic
stimulant from the areca that's the genus of palm, and
then they wrap it in a piper leaf and put
some tobacco in there and put it in their mouths,
and man, it fucks up. It fucks up a human
mouth like you get these orange teeth. It's and it's
up like highly carcinogenic. What is it aracholine like aureka.
You know, the alkaloid is named after the Areka genus,
and it's incredibly addictive. Everybody's on betel nut. You know.
It's not like speed, but it's it's a stimulant. It's like,
I assume it's somewhat akin to cod leaf. Cod leaf
is in Celeus. Tracey knew a couple people used to
grow it in California just for shits and giggles. They
wouldn't actually use it. And I chewed cott leaf once
and it didn't really do anything to me, but I
probably wasn't preparing it the right way. But you know,
off a friend's house is you know, San Louis obispo
choots cott leaf, but you know cot is like COT's
another stimulant. It's h on the African content, I think
in Central Africa. But but anyways, yeah, but but Kuya Pugo, man,
he was starting fires everywhere, like every any time we'd
stop and we'd be in a certain area along the
trail collecting for a while, he'd he'd start a little fight,
And for me, I was like, fuck, man, isn't he
worried these are gonna spread? Because you know, I'm coming
from xeric environments where everything's super dry, and we were
there during the dry season. But again, it's it's it's
still pretty humid, and it's it's a it's a short
dry season compared to how much rain they get. So
I guess there wasn't really a risk of much much fire,
but it was still kind of jarring. I'm like, why
is this dude sudden fires of the way. I guess
he just likes fires. It smells nice. But you know,
what's the point? I think it just maybe a little
bit of a pyromaniac. You know, he's all hopped up
on betal nut pyromaniac, but just you know, why not
start fires? A nice guy? But and then you know
that the mosquitoes weren't that bad here. That was a
weird thing, really bizarre. You know, you go to these
intact forests and the mosquitoes are not that bad. And
I'm certainly and I'm sure there's certainly situations where that
changes and the mosquitoes can get really bad, like if
you're near a body of stagnant water or something. But
for the most part, there wasn't a heavy mosquito presence.
I think I got bit like once or twice when
I was out there. And again, there's tons of frogs
and probably a lot of other things that are keeping
mosquite the mosquitoes there in check, not to mention other insects.
So again, you know, you're always gonna get the worst
mosquito problems in areas where the forest has been cleared
and there's a lot of human development. But in any case,
we made it up to about that for those first
few days where the phyloclitus was. We made it up
to about fifty six hundred and fifty seven hundred feet
and then turned back down to go around. The forest
got pretty thick. The trail was non existent at times.
You know, you just have to kind of look for
the machete hacked panangas. This palm too, that's the other thing,
This pananga palm, which is a really cool palm genus.
They only get, you know, like an inch and a
half diameter at most, but there it's really structurally sound wood,
you know, and Pogo made us all. I think he
was making umself, you know, walking sticks out of this
and goddamn and coming down from the first ridge we
went up to, uh, it was really steep and coming
down was just fucking brutal on my knees. I was
walking because I'm carrying all this shit too. The camera
I have weighs like three times as much as my
old camera, my old Nikon I used to just use
a little D seventy five hundred. Now I'm using a
Nikon Z and it doesn't have a built in flash,
so you have to bring a flash because it's this
dark forest and I'm trying to get decent depth of field,
you know, some I'm shooting at F sixteen F twenty apertures,
which are small apertures, which means not that not that
much light is getting in, so you got to use
a flash. And so I'm just carrying all this shit.
My knees are just getting tore up. So I ended
up just walking backwards down some of the steeper parts
of a hill, like literally just looking behind me and
walking backwards so that my toes could absorb the shock.
The ball of my foot could absorb the shock because
these forests were really steep, and I have not been
nice to my knees over the years anyway, you know, running, biking,
all this shit, and so yeah, man, it was just
it was fucking rough first day, you know, living in
South Texas and not getting as much exercise as I
probably should because biking is terrifying. I literally bike with
a baseball bat in a holster just to keep the
cars away. And the drivers in South Texas are probably
some of the worst in the United States, so there's
no bike lanes or anything. So if you know, if
I literally bike, when I'm biking around where I live,
I'm literally have a holstered baseball bat that I hold
out to the side, you know, to make sure that
the trucks and cars because they don't they don't care
about hitting you, but they don't want to fuck up
the paint job on their car. So you're holding this
baseball bat out to the side, they're gonna keep a
wide berth, they're gonna steer clear. So anyway, but having
that Panaga walking stick really helped, you know. And it's
like friends of mine that do long distance hiking, they
all say the same shit. They're like, Yeah, I used
to make fun of those, those like yuppie hiker walking poles,
but you really need them, especially on long distance hikes,
and especially if you're carrying a bunch of shit and so.
And also it's good to you know, for snakes too,
if you're walking through a bunch of brush. You can't
see you can't see the ground in front of you.
But a really cool fern that I guess is common
throughout Malaysia and one that I had never seen before.
It was just a terrestrial fern, maybe three or four
feet tall at most, but it forms these massive colonies
and the whole stem, of course, is underground. It spreads
rhizominously and then sends up these petioles, uh, you know,
petiole attached to a leaf blade, which and the whole
that whole structure, the petiole and leaf blade together is
like you know, sometimes three or four feet tall, and
they they look like these umbrella ferns. Really bizarre structure.
And it was dipterous kunjagata. So look it up. It's
a really cool fucking fern. All these plants if you
want to see them. You can see him on my
I naturalist. You can just go to Explore user Joey
Santour and then type in for country Philippines and you'll
see a list of everything I observed there. But Dipterus
kunjagata was dope. I mean, the leaf blade looks like
an umbrella. It's kind of palmy, it's got these prominent
yellow veins in it, beautiful colors, beautiful lime green underside,
glabrous up top, kind of scaly on the underside, in
a smooth and plastic y up top. And then of
course to figure out, you know what family you're looking at,
you gotta find the story. You gotta find the clusters
of sporangia, which you got to find that one leaf
that has the story on them, because of course most
of the leaves don't, they're just sterile. You find the sporophyl,
the reproductive leaf, and then look at the story and
it just had a you know, sorai condistant with dip Terodacey,
which was the the family. But it was formed of
these large colonies. It was fucking beautiful fern. Really cool.
It'd be cool to grow that from spore. See how
long it takes to go from gometophyte to a full
grown sporophyte, So what the fuck? What the fuck is
there was a Bogonia. God that there was a Begonia
species that just got described in twenty twenty two, Bogonia
naima n A E m A. And it looks like
this genus known as a latto stema, which is very
species rich in this region. A latto stema E l
A t O S T E m A so called
because I guess it's a These are wind pollinated plants.
They're in erta case the nettle family, so they're wind
pollinated and they eject the stamens actively eject the pollen
out onto the air current where we'll then hopefully blow
over to you know, a female flower and pollinate the
female flower. And a latto stema being an erta case
is not very pleasant I imagine for many herbivores to eat.
And so there's been selection for plants that kind of
look like that have the leaf shape and it's a
very distinct leaf shape. It's kind of falcate and toothed.
There's been selection in this region because of this plant
that a lot of herbivores presumably don't want to eat.
There's been selection for plants that look like it. So
a lot of plants have evolved to look like a
latto stema, and this Bigonia is one of those. There
was a couple Cirtandra that do this as well. I
think that, I mean, the leaves look like a latto stema,
and I guess they've just been Certandra's a genus in
the African violet family gas near aac so showy by
laterally symmetrical flowers, often with tricomb's on the corolla trademarks
to the African violet family gets near ac and so Cirtandra.
There's a couple of species of Cirtandra that have leaves
that seem to be mimicking a latto stema or a
more appropriate way to say it would be have been
selected for, evolutionarily speaking, to look like a latto stema leaves.
And the same thing was going on with this Pogonia.
And there's a ton of Bigonia diversity in the Philippines
as well. There's, you know, a couple new species that
have not been described yet, Like there were some that
we saw where rob was like getties have not been
described yet. This is a new probably new species, and
this Pogonia naima, I guess just got described in twenty
twenty two. And yeah, man, it looks like it straight
up looks like a latto stema, you know, from And
I think that's part of the reason it maybe wasn't
described until then. It's because people just would pass by
it and if it wasn't flowering, it would just be
assumed to be another species of a latto stema. But
it's you know, you look closer and it's there's key trademarks.
It's missing, it's missing some of the stipules, you know,
those bracts at the base of the leaf, at the
base of the petiole where the petiole meets to shoot.
You know, there's defining characteristics. Once you know the genus Aladostema,
you can look for and if it doesn't have it,
you can tell, oh, this is that Bogoonia. But for
the most part, it's it's it's a really good mimic
and apparently that's worked for it to avoid or bivy
because I imagine a lot of the bogonias, a lot
of the burgonias, a lot of the begonias are you know,
being as succulent as they can be, are probably highly
desirable on the menu for the local herbivores, most of which,
though I think, have been hunted in their populations, are crashing.
It is the anthropis scene. Remember again, it's the whole
time I'm there, I'm thinking about this. The arguments you
always hear on social media that get you know, just
such simplistic binary thinking, like it's just capitalism, it's just
what about a digital stewardship, and like yet there's you know,
those are generalizations and there's a lot of truth and
reason behind them, but that they're also just way oversimplified,
and it's it's too simplistic. It's kind of idiotic. It's
black and white thinking. It's slogans, it's shit that gets parroted,
you know, you know among people in their twenties, no
offense on social media, you know. The uh, it's just
not as simple as that. The reasons for the land clearance,
for the overhunting, for all this shit, it can't be.
It can't be broken down so easily, right. The one
thing that prevents that is having an enlightened society and
enlightened outlook that values the living world around it and
to assume that just inherently comes with any kind of
indigenous siety, or that they would come that would inherently come,
you know, with some other form of of economic system
is foolish, right, It's not entirely wrong, but to just
put it as black and white as that is, it's
pretty fucking stupid. You know. Capitalism certainly doesn't it doesn't make,
it doesn't help, you know, it certainly inflames the problems
a lot. But you know, and especially in the case
of huge multinational corporations going into put in hydro electric
electric dams or mining operations, I mean, that's fuck. That's
that's obviously, you know, a blatant case of of an
economic system fucking over the landscape and the ecology. But
again it's not always it's not always as simple as that. Like,
there was a population of another Reflegia species that Jason
had told me he had seen five or six years ago,
and when PTI first started going to those northern forests
that we were at the first couple of days, that
got entirely extirpated and is now just tomato fields for
the local villagers. And you know, a lot of the
tomatoes are just still sitting there rotting on the vine,
you know, and there refleag is gone, the host plant
is gone, you know, and at what point does it stop?
It's what point will it stop? I don't think it will.
I mean, what what is going to prevent that that
land clearance from gobbling up everything? So it's frustrated, But anyway,
they're trying to get they're trying to get these this
area protected, you know, at least protecting little remnant patches
of it and also documenting it. But then of course
it comes down to enforcement, and you know what, who's
going to enforce it? Who's gonna I mean, we heard
chainsaws the entire time we were in those northern forests.
We heard chainsaws. We saw cut dipterot carps, you know,
trees that were they had the little uh what is
it called? The little Alaska mill is the common name
for it here. But you know, just basically a way
to like a brace for the chainsaw so that once
you cut down a tree, you can mill your own
lumber out of it, just right there on the spot
in the field. I mean, we heard chainsaws the entire time.
So yeah, I mean, who knows, man, I mean it's
not necessarily going to stop, but in any case, it
was wonderful to see these these forests. Man, it was
really really special. And I want to go back, man,
and I want to do I want to like set
up some presentations, get people into using eye naturalists, get
people in to valuing the native plants, and getting away
from like the indoctrinated European horticultural outlook that I'm always
shitting on. If you get a chance, watch that wild
Ones presentation I did. It's on YouTube if you just
type in wild Ones Joey Santor. It's basically an hour
and a half long rant, which you probably heard if
you listen to this podcast. But I think it was
received pretty well. There were a couple people that seemed
defended by it, who maybe had never heard of me
before and didn't know what I was going to do.
You know, they were just kind of watching it because
wild Ones does these presentations, and you know, they go
to all of them, they follow all of them. They
didn't do their homework, and obviously I was not what
they were expecting when you look at some of the
previous presenters that wild Ones has had. But I really
appreciate wild ones having me though, and being willing to
break with break with the status quo and uh and
and have have me come on there and do my thing,
because again it's very different from many of the other
presenters or much have a much more softer tone and
are you know, more just traditional landscape, very clean cut
the native plant advocates that we're doing presentations on landscaping.
They're cool presentations. I've seen a couple of them, but yeah,
I think it's what I do is a little bit different,
and of course what I do isn't for everybody, but
but I think there's obviously a big difference between when
you come at plants from that background of the European
gardening style, wanting the bougain villas and the hedged all
the hedge stuff and the showy flowers and variegated leaves.
There's a gap between that and actually having a context
for the native ecology and wanting to grow things because
they're a piece of that native living ecosystem around you,
even though they may not be the showiest things. I mean,
I think they're all fucking beautiful because it's the context, right,
It's understanding the context, Like you know, a laddo'stema is
not a plant anyone's gonna want to grow if they're
coming at botany or at horticulture from the standpoint of
nineteenth century Victorian European or Spanish colonial style gardening, right,
they want the bugain villas. They're probably not going to
like a plant like a latins thema. But when you
learn about the ecological importance of a lattos dema, the
insects that use it as a host plant, how other
plants have evolved to mimic the leaves of a lattos
stema to avoid being eaten, things like that, it makes
it a lot more exciting. And it's just it's such
a dominant co opponent of the flora there. How could
it not be important, How could it not be playing
a huge role in that living machine in that place,
in that specific time. All right, enough for that, Let's
take a little break and listen to some of the birds.
Listen to these fucking birds. This is a really pleasant
little background. Per pardon the buzzing too. I had and
I was recording with my phone, just recording the forest canopy,
and I was getting notifications. So it's fucking annoying. I
should have put in do not disturb, but whatever, you
can't ignore. It's only a second. And this was like
this was like six in the morning, so the cicadas
hadn't even woken up yet. The cicadas that sounded like
burglar alarms. I mean, the cicadas were fucking deafening. And
it's it was really cool too because they would they
would wane in and out, which made it feel all
the more psychedelic and surreal. And now a word from
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Speaker 3: Okay, I'm back. We're chilling out right now. You know
it's nice. I gotta tell you it's not too hot.
It's only like ninety degrees, maybe eighty five degrees. We're
hanging out in the shade. Me and Louis near the
semi legal garden over here back in South Texas. It's
been a few days since i'd last talked to you
and went to Thorn Scrub checked on some things. It's crazy, man,
all the payotes at thorn scrub. I was there two
weeks ago and I seen all the payote. I was
looking for the payotes and they just, you know, unlike
so many of the other cactus that we have there,
like the Mammaluria sphica, which are almost all gone. The
pigs have almost gotten all of them, and a couple
you know it kindo serious any Acanthus, which is known
as the Pataia hedgehog cactus. It's one of the common
it's one of many species known as the Patia hedgehog cactus.
But you know that thing, the hedgehog cacti. When I
was there last, because the drought has been so bad,
we're all sucked in like it. It's like its own
thorn scrub drought gauge. I mean, they looked like absolute shit.
They had flower buds, but they were not going off
yet because you could tell they were probably filled with
stress hormones that we're telling them to conserve their energy.
But then we got a little bit of rain, the
peyotees swelled up. The kindo serious any acanthus all bloomed.
It was like that drought we went through was like
a genome altering event, like a population the genome of
the population altering event, you know. Whereas surely there was
some mortality among all the different shrubs and other plants
because it was just so intense. Normally we get a
little bit of rain. It had not rained at all
since January. But uh, oh god, it was sad man,
it was said, thorn scrub looked like shit. It just
was really brutally dry, and so now everything got water
and things are starting to leaf out again. Even saw
a baby tortoise, baby Texas tortoise. But but you know,
when the droughts get that bad, I mean it, it
really does act like a filter, like not all the
plants make it through it, even though they're all, you know,
drought adapted that kinda. I don't know, it's inter I
like thinking about shit like that because it's you realize
so many of those intense drought periods. I mean this,
who knows what's causing this? If it's climate change, is
anything to do with it or what? You know. The
oil companies have been really good at propagandizing people, getting
them to dismiss climate changes any possibility for a lot
of this depending on where you are, it's all regionally specific,
of course. But you look at you you look at
droughts like that over the course of the last however
many five hundred, six hundred years, five thousand and six
thousand years, and you realize that's how that's basically a
natural selection works. You know, it's it calls a few
members of the population, which maybe assuming it's something phenotypic
about them and not just they were in a bad location,
you know, where like the soil wasn't as deep, it
was a little thinner, whatever, but it but there's something
phenotypic about them that enabled them to not cope with
the intense drought conditions as severely as well as some
of the uh you know, some of their neighbors in
the same population, the same in the same species, and
uh and so over however many drought periods it happens.
It basically it breeds a more drought uh drought adapted population. Right,
I think the same thing a human being does with
I know I've ranted about this before. I just I
think it's interesting because it was I've never seen since
I've been in Texas. I haven't seen a drought that bad,
and I haven't seen the thorn scrub looking as rough
as it did, you know, three weeks ago. But yeah, anyway,
now we got some rain and so it's crazy the payotes.
Some of them are bursting through the soil like lifting up,
cracking the soil and lifting it up, just like a
truffle wood, you know, or a mushroom. So I forget
some of them are there, you know, or I just
assume pigs got all of them. And then suddenly like
there was a mesquite tree where there's one, I know
there's one. There used to be more. I assume they
were all gone. And then I was there after a rain,
after the rain, just like a few days ago, and
there were like seven more that I didn't see a
month ago that I saw maybe two years ago when
they look good, but you know, so and they were
like busting up through the Soil's it's really remarkable to watch.
And you got to remember peyote, of course, has that
deep d cell battery literally looks like a de cell
battery of a root. But yeah, it was. It was
fucking great being there. I just hope we need more rain.
You know the tortoises. We saw one tortoise. There's probably
a lot that are not out. I think a lot
of the tortoises took a hit from the drought too.
Found a lot. And I found like three or four shells,
three or four empty shells, you know, dead tortoise remnants. Anyway,
in other news, my publisher reached out to me a
couple of days ago, and I guess Concrete Bondi's number
seven on the New York Times Hardcover nonfiction bestseller list,
which is you know, holy shit. I had no idea
it made. It made like number fifty four on USA Today.
Remember USA Today? Remember when I used to go to
the hotel, the Railroad hotels, and they always have a
free copy of USA Today. And every year it's like
the number of pages in each you know, the number
of total pages in each episode. Got there's a big
crab spider on me, beautiful Got shorter like that, you
could just tell the newspapers where nobody was reading newspapers.
I remember at a time when you used to have
to go in to Starbucks and shoplift the New York Times. Right,
you go in there, you sit down and use the bathroom,
pick up a New York Times exactly, you're just gonna
read it and you just, you know, slip off with it.
That was a long time ago. I don't steal New
York Times from Starbucks anymore because there's no New York
Times left to steal. It's all it's all online. But uh,
and everybody gets their news from social media now. But yeah,
so uh but yeah, concrete Bondie number seven. So if
you haven't got it yet, please get it. Please get it,
even if you're just gonna use it to beat your
friend or you know, you want to give it to somebody.
I don't I get royalties from it. It's but it's
not about that. It's just get the message out there, man,
Get the message. I think it's an important message. If
you already know a lot about botany and biogeography and
plant spciation and evolution, all that shit, natural selection, it's
not going to be enlightening for you. It's mostly to really, uh,
get more people. I guess I wrote it for an
audience of people who just have no clue about botany.
But you know they're not they're not sniffing on it yet,
but they're curious, right, and uh and really just I
like tying the horticultural atrocities and the way that most
of landscaped America looks to the mental health crisis, because
I think it really they the two go hand in hand. Man.
I did an interview on some radio station in Calgary
today and they were asking me about that, you know,
and it's like, uh, you know, all you gotta do
is is mention it to me. And it's like you
let you let the give me and give me an
end to run my mouth. And suddenly I won't shut up.
I just keep talking about it. I got a whole,
a whole uh riot act. I can read about, uh
you know, the mini golf course landscaping and the hedge
boogain villas and the hedge box woods and Emerald Green
Arborvid's and and the fucking lawn especially right. But I
always to make the distinction like there's lawn has a purpose,
movie night in the park, maybe spot to go kick
a soccer ball around or with the shit. But it's
just the fact that it's been normalized. And then why
are we surrounding our infrastructure with mode turf grass right
edges of retention ponds that should all be native plants.
Edges of bleak strip malls, it should all be native plants, perennials,
native trees, et cetera. But anyway, I'm speaking on August
twenty No, what is April twenty third, Thursday, April twenty third,
at Keita Maza Lan. I'll be doing a plant i
D Class, then a book signing. We're going on tour
through the Southwest. I think we're doing El Paso, El Paso,
through Tucson, Phoenix, maybe someplace in southern New Mexico. Maybe
need a venue in southern New Mexico, still, La San Diego,
et cetera. In late May, early June, we're playing at
the Troubadour in La and it'll be nice. It'll be
a nice fucking you know. You come out, you can
listen to me rant about shit, you know, attack modern horticulture.
I'm going to be showing a bunch of cool plants
from all over the world to some of my favorites,
including Bobbyana, the genus of iris in South Africa that
makes its leaves look like they've been munch done already
as a means of as a strategy of avoiding or bivery,
and and then I'm working on a third book, a
photo book, a coffee table book just from plants, just
of plants from all over the world as well, which
has been a few years in the making. I originally
had it with a different publisher, but they were flakes
and didn't you know, they were just incompetent, And there
was a different publisher than the publisher that I used
for Concrete Botany, and so finally I just once Concrete
Botany went off, Oh cool, soalth theory b then I
approached that publisher said hey, you guys want to do
this book too, and they said yes, So so I
get to throw They just gotta throw a bunch of
photos on end design and do some quick write ups.
It should be really good, though. I'm looking forward to it.
It's going to be really nice. There's some really cool
plants in there, really cool shit, and uh yeah, that's it,
so uh what else?
Speaker 2: In all?
Speaker 3: I'm gonna be speaking at the Kinivor's Plant Society too
in May. I'll be in North Carolina, supposed to be
there for a week. I might cut it short though,
because my daughter is u graduating from kindergarten. I've never
heard that before graduating from kindergarten. I guess they do
that down here. It's like a big deal. It's you know,
we got the bar pretty low down here in South Texas. Right, Yeah,
you made it through kindergarten. Good job. We'll get your
photo and or it could be it's a nice way
for the school to fleece the you know, they make
a big, a big deal out of it. And then
they can sell gowns. You know, even though she's only six,
they could sell gowns. They could sell photos. You know,
it's a nice way to fleece the parents. And then
you know, if you don't want to buy one way,
you don't. You don't care about your kid. You don't
want to You don't want to commemorate this moment, right,
don't you want to commemorate the moment buy this fifty
six dollars portrait of your your kid graduating kindergarten. Anyway?
H but yeah, god damn, I hope we get more rain.
Oh it's so nice here man, this little semi legal
garden that we set up, right and my friend Louise
started it and then I approached them and then we
just I was like, hey, we could add onto this.
We just started adding on to it now. It's nice.
It's such a nice little oasis in the middle of
urban sprawl. So you could do this too. Everybody should
do this right, just start reaching out. You just got
to get more shit in the ground, more natives in
the ground. Anyway, Uh, I think that's all I got.
So there'll also be more episodes of spiritually depraved than
misery inducing landscapes coming up. If you've got a recommendation
somewhere for me of a really bleak landscaping job or
strip mall hell, you can email it to me. Just
try to keep the email short. And I have not
been responding to a lot of emails lately. It's just
too overwhelming. I just don't want to look at the
email inbox. But if you got something good sends me anyway,
that's all gotta have. Ad they go function it bike.
Speaker 5: Trust to imagine that.
Speaker 1: My post beds las.
Speaker 5: Indeed,