Speaker 1: Welcome to another episode of The Crime Pays, but by
a dozen podcasts. I'm a little winded. I'm not gonna
lie as we as send through very wet tropical forest
at an elevation of twenty one hundred feet, which you
know you will go up to three thousand feet around,
up to three thousand feet times three, move a decimal
point over it's roughly nine hundred meters, and then we'll
wear like eight hundred, eight hundred and twenty meters elevation.
Got to use the metric always get disappointed of that,
you know, then start paying attention to the metric system
until the last few years. Anyway, spent the first few
days of this little Ecuador work VAKA up in the paramo,
getting mildly hypoxic. But then it's always nice when you
come back down, you have like bursts of energy because
you've been acting. Made it to the higher elevations. But uh,
we were in parano paramo and montane cloud forest. Oh
this is nice. The cyclant they see the Panama hat family.
I'm looking at one climb climbing up a Uh if
it's a dicranopigium or what made a little Excel spreadsheet
with all the observations I had from last year, many
of which had no species level identifications because they're just
they are either undescribed species or there's I couldn't find
anybody who specializes in the genus or family to correctly
identify them, and there's so little information out there. But uh,
I think this is a Dicranopigium, but cyclant. They see
the panama hat family in the screw Pine order Pandinales
entirely neotropical all New World, really weird in fluorescences, and
they got that y shaped uh leaf? What is it
a fucking snake? Shit? Or is it just plenty of
is plastic? But spent the first few days up in
the paramo in the cloud forest, became familiar with the
genus dendro Forbium, which is in Asta Raci. It's like
basically a small of those snoid sanioid E. No it's not,
is it? Is it a subfamily or Sanicioni? I forget anyway,
the snicios A clade in Asta Raci are all over
the world. They do some wild shit, especially you know,
think they turned succulent in Africa and then in here
in the in central and South America. They can become trees,
especially in Mexico's got quite a few members of the
saneoid the Sinicio clade that turn into very large trees.
But uh, this dendro Forbium was phenomenal. It was like
ten meters tall, thirty feet tall, huge fucking panicle of flowers.
What's that? It's Surrowia, I don't know, actinnitty ac kiwi femily,
huge panicles of yellow flowers. Each plant probably had ten
or twenty thousand floorts on it because remember it's astrac
so there are floorrets inside a capitulum which looks like
a single flower, so like ten or twenty thousand, if
not more fluorits. So yeah, I took an herbarium cutting,
but I can only take like a little section of
because I'm fitting these things in tiny notebooks. That's how
I do all my collections. Then I'll drop it off
at the herbarium later before I leave, and so i'll
you know, press it just in these little notebooks. It's
the easiest way. So it kind of limits the amount
of material you can take. But that's okay because I
get a shit ton of good photos. But yeah, Dendrophobium
was up there, and then there was a species of
blacking them up in the Parmo. You go through this
really wet forest and at lower elevations it's been turned
into cattle pasture, of course, which is depressing a lot
of blue gum eucalyptus, which is fucking mind blowing. If
humanity goes extinct, which you know it's not too far
fetched or has like a bottleneck event in the next
one hundred and two hundred years, maybe not even that long,
blue gum eucalyptus is gonna thrive. It's gonna speciate. I mean,
it's on every fucking continent except that article. Now it's
kind of amazing, you know, it's definitely definitely a winner
in the anthropist scene or anthropos scene, however you pronounce that.
But there's others blue gum eucalyptus everywhere and cattle pasture
with little remnants of native vegetation on the margins. And
then you get up to more thicker cloud forest and
it's just wet and chilly. I was definitely wearing a
beanie and uh. And then you walk through that. Some
assholes took motorbikes up there to at some point. So
there's like these trenches that like grutted out the mountain,
and so you go through that and then end up
in the parmo, which is dominated by tussock grasses, and
you've got a couple of cordiderias and uh, and then
this black numb fern is fucking everywhere and it's it's
fucking beautiful. But anyway, the paramo has got to be
one of the most bizarre and hard to recreate habitats
plant habitats in the world. And if you're from the
tempered latitudes and you've never heard of it or experienced that,
it would blow your mind. You're at such a high
elevation in the air is so thin, so you experience
rapid cooling at night, but unless you're really high, it
never quite freezes. It just gets to a few degrees
of freezing. Everything's covered in fuzz, but everythings wet whereas sorry,
I might have bred them going I'm carrying like forty
puns of shit going up this slope and sweating like
a horn church. So you know, if you're in the
western half North America, you think of hairs and trichomes
as being adaptive for dry habitats, okay, or if like
you know, the eastern United States, you're on a glade
or a sand hill, then you might see some more hairs.
But generally you're not gonna see hairs if you're in
a proper ass humid environment and it's humid as hell
up in the parmo, because that's where all the moisture
goes with the rising warm air from the lower latitudes.
But in this case, well so the hair is not
for drying out. But in this case the hair is
obviously it starts to dawn on you for the chilling
effect that happens at night once the sun goes down. Also,
and when the sun comes out, he gets you can
get upwards to like seventy five degrees eighty degrees fahrenheit.
It's not like twenty five celsius. But uh, but you
know then when when the sun goes down, Oh, why
this is that komalin ac thing I saw before? Just
surrounded by plants. Smells incredible, everything's wet. It's like the
conservatory in Lincoln Park, which is free, and they're gonna
fucking not make that free at some point, I bet they, Well,
they're gonna do with Garfield Park Conservatory in Chicago too.
Nothing free anymore. The fucking they gotta fucking milk you
for everything is an amazing even in a wonderful place,
I can still get mad about stuff that's good. Never change.
But yeah, so so the tricombes in this case are
frost goluth. They're acting is insulation, trapping a layer of air,
which of course takes much longer to warm up or
cool off, and so they're they're trapping that air of air,
protecting the tissue against the cold temps and the occasional freeze.
So yeah, everything's fuzzy. It's just so fucking weird because
you're on the equator, but you're up so fucking high too.
And then when we were leaving, we were looking at
Tungaragua volcano, which is spelled like Tunga Rohua and uh,
if you're a fucking you're a hockey. And and you
could just see the head, I mean, it's like this
massive volcano. We couldn't even tell it was there. And
then once the clouds part, the water vapor parts a
little bit, then you can see this massive volcano towering
above you. Uh, and it's just fucking wild. You could
see there's no plants way at the top. There's snow
at the top sixteen thousand feet tall. You're already nine
thousand feet up, twenty seven hundred meters up, and uh,
but you can see plant habitat because basically see the
Paramo and the lower elevations just fucking phenomenal. Man. I
wish I want to go there so bad to some
of that habitat. It's just as it's probably one of
my favorite habitats. You go, I got deserts cloud for us
and then Paramo, or maybe it's Paramo before cloud for us.
But those are just the places that you see the
wildest shit in terms of evolutionary adaptations because there's such
bizarre environments. You know, you take a spot where it
never rains, and then how there's fossils in the limestone here?
How about that Saudi's last time? What is this cretaceous limestone?
So weird to see limestone in the Andes because everything's
volcanic here. So I don't know. I guess lava flows
never reached this area where it was already up uplifted.
I don't know. Anyway, Yeah, the fucking Paramo, there was
tons of airicacious generic too. There was Nettia dyster Ygma.
Vaccinium Flora bundum was up there. You can tell it's
a Vaccinium as opposed to a Gutheria because the sepals
are on the distal end of the fruit they think
of like a blueberry, right, whereas on Gultheria the sepals
are up towards the top. They're closer to the peduncle.
It's a nice bird. Pellicoia fucking everywhere, Pellicouria aka Psychotria.
There was Serato stema. Oh what was the Serato stem i?
Forget the species name, with another species of eric casey
with these pendent red flowers obviously going for hummingbird pollination.
Serato stema a lot them elate them and uh god.
There was tons of weird littlebilioids too, which you can
always tell because they got that little fused anther tube
that pokes out and then it's uh, you know, like
a biffed Stega want us in the female phase their
male first secondary pollen presentation, like so many members of
aster Ales, like Stylidiace, the stylidiums in Australia, the trigger
plants like Guthiniac like astace h and so on. A
little beautiful heliconia right here, those long pink bracts, Oh shit,
this is still a leaf's Basically, those pink bracts are
just the swollen petioles, modified petioles of the leafs in Heliconia,
which is in the ginger orders. In gibbereles, the big
pink bracts for humming bird pollination, and the flowers are green,
probably full of neck anyway, So they stuck a break
for a second. Now I'm walking. There's just this giant
county of Guadua and Gustafolia, this hundred foot tall bamboo
species with the combs because it's a grass, remember is
it's a hollow bamboo on like many of the New
World bamboos like Chesca, which are solid all the way through,
Guadua is hollow. Very important architecturally. I've seen a book,
an entire monograph on Guadua, especially it's use in building
and architecture because of how structurally, what an important structural
tool it is for you know, for building houses. But uh,
you know they get fucking massive, and that each calm
is about how what is it? Let's see the only
measured is twelve centimeters across. It's like five inches across,
six inches across, and they just get fucking massive. And
then they got these lateral branches that come off that
don't get very big, that come off at the nodes
that are just covered in uh you know. The nodes
of those lateral branches then have these little half inch
to inch long spines on them, thorns on them. And
then I'm just looking at what looks like a giant
asparagus shoot that's tar than I am. It's like six
and a half feet tall, and it's got it's covered.
Each sheath is covered in these tiny brown irritating heres.
They don't really irritate that much, but they do stick
in you. It's just the very man, what a wild
fucking plan. I love. I'm so happy to see this
thing again. I saw it last year. And they just
from these massive colonies in these tropical forests at what's
their elevation right now, thirty three hundred feet. So we
came up a little bit. It was steeped there for
a minute. We got Gionoma. She's a palm species with
a forked leaf. It almost looks like cyclanth. They see
the Panama half family. But it's you gotta look at
the veins. The veins on Gionoma don't don't taper, they don't.
They don't bow to a point. They don't like bend
to the end point of the leaf. They just kind
of they hit the margin. It looks like a fishtail
palm anyway. Yeah, so the parmo's fucking wild. You first
encounter parmos as as you're heading south from the United States.
You first encountered them in Costa Rica, where you get
a whole bunch of cool stuff, A bunch of cool
pooya is that weird vermeiliad pooya deslaryoides. Tons of members
of Eric Casey, tons of temperate northern hemisphere lineages get
Loopinus gentiana. It's just fucking wild. Man. That's a hummingbird pollination.
Hummingbirds and bumble bees, but no other bees. It's too cold.
I guess you know. Bumble bees have a gimmick that
can do moderately well at higher altitudes or higher elevations.
Excuse me, altitudes is when you're in a plane. But oh,
I just heard a giants cicadas, not that one that's
buzzing in the background. But uh O caesatic gigis the
one that sounds like a hand buzzer, much more obnoxious.
Probably my favorite insect. Yeah, these forests are so lovely.
You're spending time by yourself walking in the forest, digesting
your thoughts, feeling the things you need to feel, do
with some thinking aeroids everywhere. Philodendron pseudoviicosum incredible leaves that
there's like a small erithrena species as well, and then
Iriardia del toidia, which is the it's either Iriardia or Soacretea.
Both have these stilt prop roots that they send out
from higher up the uh we would be the trunk.
But remember palms, I mean, I guess they're trees, but
they're technically herbs. There's no woody tissue, there's no woody growth.
They can have anomalist secondary growth, but tons of Aerardia,
tons of these palms that also have these fishtail like leaflets.
The main leaf is divided up into little h smaller leaflets. Yeah,
got tons of melostone diversity to these these metal I
guess he's more lowland forests. It's humid as hell, it's
not that hot, but it's very very humid, very very wet.
It's probably like, I don't know, eighty two degrees right now.
It's got a little hint of breeze. I'm sure that
humidity has a moderating effect as well. But anyway, back
to the Parmo. So up at the Parmo, I think
we only got I think we got like twelve five
hundred feet, but I mean it goes a lot higher,
and the higher you go you start encountering I guess
chucki Arraga. There's a chucky Raga species, which is a
crazy asta racy. It looks like, you know, conifers and
sunflowers banged and then there's a pooh. There's a couple
of PuYas up there as well, gunnera, lots of Gunnera
as well, Magellanica. I'm convinced it's a different species, you know,
gunnera gunner racy, those big shield like peltate leaves Chile
and rub Barbit's commonly called no relation to rub Barbit's
its own lonely branch on the angiosperm family tree. It's
a gun are all lots of orchids, tiny orchids, terrestrial orchids,
epiphytic orchids, but then it's oh yeah, and tons of
aster ace diversity too, including this really cool genus called
Lino Kylis, as well as diplo Stefium. Lino Kylas used
to be in Diplostthium, but they're not that closely related.
Lino Kylis is a related to coyote bush. It's got
really cool looking leaves, lots of puvescents on them, and
a pinkish or purple floorts. It's nice being here the
second time because I got more of I'm more keyed
into what I'm looking at, because especially you know, the
fucking especially in the lowlands, you can really get thrown
off because there's a lot of families you'll otherwise never encounter.
Saw Siparuna, which is a weird one. Ciperunacy smelled really
strongly like lemon, but it was so strong it was
almost nauseating. It's ciperun Ace is in loreles, so it's
one of the magnolids. It's one of those earlier branching
angiosperm lineages. And then also another really fucking weird plant
I saw was Hediosmum, which was also very fragrant, lots
of lots of volatiles being emitted from the leaves opposite leaves.
It was post flowers, so I couldn't see it. I
think it's dioecious hediosmum in Chloranthas order Chlorinthales. If you
look at the angiosperm phylogeny, it's on its own long,
lonely branch, just like Gunnera, but it's more earlier branching.
I think it comes. I think it's next to the magnoliods,
which is Loreles, pipe ales, Magnolilies, and Canalalies. I had
the look that last one up because I don't encounter
it so much. Canni Alies, which winter race is in
just another all these pungent leaves, you know, just like
bay leaf, bay leaf and sassafras, et cetera in the
Magnolia lineage. Shit is that? I don't know if it's
a birder is fucking weird Katie did? Or what you
ever heard of an oropendula before? What a pleasant what
a pleasant sounding bird? Sounds like a like a drop,
like a drop of water falling into a pool. But
if you were on acid, that's what it sounds like.
This monster Bogonia there's like a remember this Bogonia, this
twelve foot tall bogonia. Everything just perpetually humid. And what
we've been lucky with the rant that we didn't get
pissed on only a little bit, didn't have to put
my uh vinyl burka on like I had to last
time I did this walk. And it sucks. You can't
take photos of shit because everything's getting fucking drenched. Where
is Ailing? Speaking of photos, I think he's I think
he's further back down the trail. I don't know. He
and I are competing for you know, slowest walkers too.
You know, you post up there, you take nine thousand photos.
It go be there two hours in the same spot,
half day goes by, you've moved like one hundred yards. Anyway,
as we were coming out of the Paramo, there was
another really weird plan as actually we were far below
the apartment, were like three thousand people of the Parmo.
But it was that same day and we were coming
out of the cloud forest into where you know, the
extent that human development is reached, where it's passed land
with little margins of remnant native vegetation and a few invasives.
And we saw this really fucking bizarre plant. I guess
the common name was spider plant or something. But again,
these common names, you get to avoid them. I'll fuck you up.
They're stupid too. But it's called spider plant because the
six stamens were prominently exerted out of the corolla. They
were sticking out of the corolla as you encounter with
a lot of hummingbird pollinated plants. I think were like
eight thousand feet clouds everywhere, water vapor everywhere, the sun
poking out through them. It's just everything smells incredible because
of all the moisture and volatile compounds being emitted from
the abundant plant life, even though you know there was
a lot of clearing there for cattle and it ended
up being cleome or borea. I counted the sepals and petals,
which were four, and then sick stamens, which you know
you got four sepals and petals, it's six stamens automatically
points to brassicles, I mean, namely brassic cac but this
is not Brassic casing. And then it had that kind
of glucose scinilate secondary chemistry smell, that kind of mustardish
kalish smell to it. It's covered in hair, is like
a burgundy color, just a fucking weird plant had a
distinct smell and then leaves that looked like castor being
that looked like rice in this communis you know, which
is invasive and waterways in Mexico and along the La
River and shit, you know, riceness communists is the plant
that Walter White made the risin out of in breaking
bed Anam. It's TV. You're good for you, buddy, Let
me just settle down. They'll tell me about it. But anyway, Wow,
every once in a while you just find these masses
of epiphytes that fall out of the trees. It's like
six different orchid species of Pileea, A Pepperomia and Tolanzier
or something on this massive piece of epiphytic material a
lag that just fell in the middle of the trail.
But uh so that was really exciting to see. Do
cleomar Boia know anomala excuse me, Cleo Macy same family
as California bladder pod and PoTA androgony which you get here,
and number of Cleo Macy members in Texas and I
think the southeastern United states too, that are mostly annuals
and ruteral plants, but it was this thing was massive,
was like eight feet tall and just huge, huge leaves
totally wouldn't you know. Obviously used a lot of humidity
and cool temperatures. So the only place I think you
could grow out of the ship maybe some places in
Florida in a glasshouse, or in like the coastal California,
like Bay Area, but they're just I mean, so many
amazing plants. Just the parma was cool, but even just
the way up there was filled with tons of dope shit,
even just remnant growing on the margins of agriculture. Anyway,
it took a while, but it finally started raining, and
I just saw a giant aeroid, terrestrial aeroid with leaves
that were nearly a meter from top to bottom cord date.
And then it was flowering too, and the flower smelled
like winter green, and as they tend to do, it
had beetles inside of it, but I didn't get a
photo of the beetle. The beetle fell out, I put
him back on the little space and then he just
fell right inside the cup down below, and I couldn't
see him anymore. I didn't I want to cut the
flower open because that's a horrible thing to do. You know,
things finally getting a chance to bang, and uh, you're
gonna go ruin it. You're gonna go cock block it
or box block it, or whatever you want to call it.
You know it's not right. But the winter green smell
is it's unique. I didn't I thought they had more
of like a starchy smell. They did, many of them
did co evolve with beetles. But what's up with the
winter green? You know suppos like tiger bomb. Anyway, h
got an uphill walk to the research station through thick mudd.
And you gotta wear these these boots, the serial killer boots.
You know, they're like little rubber buckets. Bought a pair
for eleven bucks here because I left mine at home.
But uh, anything else is not sufficient. It's just too
much mud, too much rain, too much mud. Oh there's
some memosoid thing that's not an inga a fuck toens
of large ferns. Anyway, I don't really have much else
to contribute here. It's too exciting. O. What is this
as slainem? It's a nice slenum. Ah. We saw Blakey
a subveginata. I put camillo on my shoulders. Then he
used the pole cutter because it's like a fifty sixty
foot tall tree and he was able to snip a
branch off with a flower on it. We took an
rbarium specimen, got some nice macro photographs of those bizarre
melostomitaceous anthers. All the blaky flowers look cool, and I
think they're all bird donated, but I get fucking weird
anther shapes. Man yellow anvils look like ten or however,
many little yellow anvils inside that five pedaled corolla. But
thank god, there's water up here. I forgot. Somebody took
a piece of guadua and stuck it in the mountain
where there's a seep and then there's just a little rock,
and there's always a whenever you go there, there's a piece.
There's a little glass beneath it. You know, should you
know for anybody if they want to they want to
take a sip the way up? Mean, this is probably
annoying listening to me with this hyperventilating. You know, I
don't know if i'd like to listen to it. What
are you doing right now? Oh God, it's not that hot,
but goddamn is it ball me. It's just you're really
going for the Bickram yoga thing, except there's nobody farting.
You know. The arison smell like like hydrogen sulfi and
methane gas, like I imagine it would in a Bickram studio,
because even if they're cleaning that, there's still a lot
of people, you know, passing gas, and people just generally
smell like hell, it's so humid, you know, guess is
better than smelling hair care products and whatever toxic shit
they put in those toxic chemistry. You know, I wanted
to do a video that I've been doing these videos
that sound like WG and Chicago Channel nine infomercials, you know,
late night infomercials, really annoying voice. You know, it's kind
of what makes it funny. But it'd be nice to
do a rant instead where you're just you're just talking
about the futility and a meaninglessness of human existing and
then the fact that our species is still continuously governed
by pigs and wolves, you know, and the hierarchies that
our society creates kind of filters out, it kind of
selects for those personalities, because anyone who's actually got substance
doesn't want to go into business or politics. Probably at
least most people you know, or at least strive to
have so much, you know, I think most people, if
they got any sense about them, they'd stop at a
certain point, say I got enough to live comfortably, now
I want to go accumulate experiences, passions, you know, creativity,
shit like that. What is this? You got a slime
mold coming off. I'm at the little founta where to
guadua the bamboo branches. I gotta take a where it's
coming out to sleep in a mountain. I gotta take
a sip here. I thought it was nice, like a
hat towel from the dryer, if you got the drink
water all day. I gotta filter on me. But it's
one of those Sawyer squeeze filters, and the fucking bag broke,
so it just when you squeeze it half goes through
the filter and the other half just leaks out all
over your face. It's really nice. There's a big selassiby uh.
I think it's it's either muliercula or who higani. Those
are the two common silassaby. That is the psychoactive mushroom
genus species. There's a big one just growing on the
side of this trail up there, up to the research station.
It smells some nice here. Fucking I can't do they
really planted some like I will eat a plant on
the side of this trail You're in, like this incredible forest,
and they planted these what is this? What is it? Thing?
It's like a dressina or something. All clones the home
Desperate Garden Center. God, the Home despert Garden Center bums
me out? Does it? Bum you out? I see plants
from there, and I'm just fucking set a sinking feeling everything,
you know, Modern horticulture needs that about everything, and so
much of like modern First World or Second WARLD whatever
the fuck horticulture just sucks. It's just so bleak. It's
like the SAME's. I mean, it's the same if you
go if you shopping centers in the United States or
like any of the socolos in Mexico. Though I do
appreciate the socolos the town plazas, they never have cool
plants there. It's always the fucking home Desperate garden center garbage.
Just more disconnection you know more, just once again, so
emblematic of modern sieves disconnections from the living world. Right,
the only plants are just supposed to look good. Here
we fucking rant that before. You don't need to hear
it again. You don't need to hear it again. Did
somebody pick that so it has to be? Oh, I
guess they did anyway, Oh lovely sandstone. Oh crapping, We're
almost there. Oh. I saw a lot of nice frogs
last night. Holy shit, frogs and snakes the genus priystamantis
of frog, especially Priystamantis, and then it's really cute little
tone and the genus Ranella. But uh, some of the
snakes we're next to selling three species like ribbon snakes.
One's called like a shoelace snake or something. I don't know.
They were fucking adorable. They were all relatively harmless calubrids. Anyway,
I'm gonna go sit my ass down, have more of
a temper tantrum about my TTL cable fucking up, and uh,
dry some specimens with a blow dryer and sip on
some YU said, I'll talk to you tomorrow. Okay, have
a GIRs today for now, go by.
Speaker 2: I'm trying to sleep. The research stations just open air.
Everybody's fucking around in a laboratory. Everybody's messing around the
laboratory looking at the microscopes. I was just hanging out there,
drawing and going through some of the forestry books. But anyway,
I just wondered, I wanted you to hear the rain.
It sounds nice. A lot of thunder very close by. God,
we really lucked out today. We barely rained at all.
Got a lot of nice got a lot of nice footage,
a lot of nice photographs. So the fragment Pedium pierci
again that's only pollinated by the single species of hoverfly
and tricks them using pheromones that mimic the alert pheromones
of aphids. And and then it's like Cranopigium species from
the Panama half family. Put the staminodes, you know, the
frilly staminodes that emit odor and also serve as visual
attractions for pollinators.
Speaker 1: But listen to the rain. Is that nice? No?
Speaker 2: I mean it's no windows, no glass, just you don't
need them. It's open air. But then again, if you
you know, if you're all you got is like these
curtains hanging up, but it's just these It's like bay
windows without the glass.
Speaker 1: Really nice.
Speaker 2: I could live like this forever. They got a solar
panel set up. They got the interweb, I guess they
got satellite internet, so in a library full of books,
they got microscopes, flow hood, all this good shit. Anyway,
I'm gonna try to go to sleep, but try to
get some sleep right now.
Speaker 1: You know what I'm wondering, Actually, if I can, if
I can stand up the.
Speaker 2: Piss, because we're on the second floor, If I can
urinate out the window it's not really.
Speaker 1: Wind us an opening in a wall.
Speaker 2: I can urinate out the this opening without falling out.
You know, that would be nice. If I fill out,
that might be that might do hurt. I'd be and
I'd do web. But I could probably piss out the window.
Say other words, I gotta go outn stairs. The whole
building smells nice too. It's got this wonderful rustic smell.
It's locally harvested wood from the surrounding forest, traded with
diesels so that the termites and the insects don't get it.
They wash it down. A diesel makes a very nice smell.
It's better than creosolt. Yeah, I hope I'm a foul thing.
I got a piss like cow man. I've been drinking
green tea, you know, real light green tea. But still, well,
hopefully it's not enough caffeine to keep me up.
Speaker 1: All right, that's all I got for tonight. I'll talk
to you tomorrow. Anyway. It's a few days later, and
now we're in the Amazon what could collectively be called
the Amazon. There's not much to our east except except
the vast expanses of tropical forest lower elevation, tropical forests
worth two thousand feet. When's the last time you played
in a good pile of muck, or even just smell
the good pile of muck. I just fell in one,
and I wasn't wearing the fucking knee high boots were
normally wearing we walk out here. I was just wearing
my little steel toes, and uh, I'm just covered in mud.
It's got that smell to it too. There's heliconias everywhere
as well. Heliconia's aeroids and cyclanth They see the cyclanthus,
the namesake of the cyclant. They see family the Panama
half family Cyclanthus also have guadua and costafoya, the giant bamboo,
and just saw a tree senna to like thirty feet tall,
had kind of a scrambling habit, but not a lot
of reproductive structures to see, you know, used to the
fucking nice nice muck a nice big muck pile. Some
ferns too. Ooh, what is that? It's a large fern.
Some psyathias as well. It's balmy as hell. The giant
cicadas in Casata Gigas were out last night, which we
also get in South Texas where there's vegetation left where
it hasn't been turned into a car dealership or a
parking lot or anyway. Trying to keep a positive mindset
here and not think about things that bumm me up.
But yeah, God, damn though, man, it's it is. You know,
it's sweaty. It's not even that hot, it's just sweaty.
That this reminds me of where I live in the summertime.
You know, it was already like ninety two where I live.
I think it's that already. It's like it's already ninety
two degrees. God, the palms here are just incredible, and
a lot of them four or five of them have
independently evolved. Those stilt roots. Here, I am looking at
Iriardia del Todia, fishtail like leaves, fishtail pinnate leaves, and
then the dong roots. The root cap looks like the
the head of the cac, the head of the cac.
Can you say that on a podcast? Amazing species, though,
I'd love to see the flowers someday, hundreds of tiny
white flowers arranged on spikes or panicles. But uh, yeah,
we got here last night. We set up a mothlight
last night. God, the fucking insects that came through three
different species of cicada, a Dobson fly, which I've never
heard of before. And then the moth diversity was just insane.
It was just off the charts. It was fucking wild,
incredible moth diversity, large moths. So what is that? Oh
it's a fycus? Is it a climbing fycus? I can't
even tell, man, But lots of heliconias. You know what
was weird is so Heliconias are in the ginger orders
in Gibbereles, along with the costace and moran taesi at
least in the New World and an old world families.
You know, you got the gingers and Strelitzia family, et cetera.
But uh, but these heliconias can have erect inflorescences or
pendent inflorescences. And I saw them with a pendent inflorescence,
bright red like zigzag inflorescence, and there were ants all
over like guarding it. They weren't moving, they were just
big ants like maybe an inch long, hanging out one
on each flower, you know, each breaking the zigzag is
a different flower like this pendent zigzag inflorescence, and the
ants are just hanging out there guarding it. Fucking bizarre.
And then if you touch it, they'll like come at you.
So I sat there and took photos of it for
a while and then went to, uh touch it right
before I left, and they didn't come out anymore, like
they were just gotten used to me. It was really weird.
Oh here's a little micena, a little white micena. I
guess there's a bunch of bioluminescent mushrooms in this forest.
Forgive me. I'm a little out of breath. I'm sweating
like hell and walking up a hill. Can you hear them?
Can you hear them? Going? Off. They're really going. Now, God,
I feel like everything everything at the lower elevations is
ruby ac. Everything in the lower elevations the tropical forest
is ruby ac. Not everything, of course, there's a lot
of monocots here, but goddamn or inga. There's like twenty
different species of inga within like a square kilometer of
where I am. But I'm looking at this moth pollinated
rubiaceous thing. You know, it's got the interpetiolar stipules. That's
the big giveaway for the coffee Family's those interpetiolar stipules,
and then petals, four or five petals in this case,
they're fringed in liciniate laciniate. Uh, and then white tube flowers.
A lot of moth pollination, I presume, but uh, Jesus man,
big fucking leaves, large leaves, probably nine inches, an interesting
flower structure. And this thing is a tree. This is
a tree, you like, goddamn fifty feet tall and lots
of drip tips too. Let us not forget the drip tips.
Here's no what is this? This is rubyac too? Oh?
You know what? Maybe not? Oh, this looks like it
might be different, and it's got exerted. It's got exerted stamens.
What is this? Maybe this is a this might be
an eyelex, but all the leaves have drip tips in
the fucking insects. Or oh, there's that fifteen foot tall
bogonia too, Maybe I should give photos of that. I
probably should. Oh there's an orchid back there something. It's
overwhelming and hot and balmy. But don't forget the drip tips.
You know, you know when you got that the distal
end of the leaf terminates in this uh moucrenate, well,
more like a cuminate point for a shedding water. I
gotta get a photo of this thing. Hold on, Well,
it's the next day, and I feel like dog shit,
and uh we're just going lower into the Amazon. It's
just balmy as all hell, just very high humidity index.
And I did have some loose stools the last couple
of days, which hopefully you can enjoy picturing net And uh,
I feel that like food poisoning fatigue. But I didn't
get food poison. I don't know what it is, you know,
I don't know if it was a yellow dragon fruit,
but it definitely feels amoeba like, you know, maybe I
got some damn produce. It's always the fucking protests. Oh
it's this climbing fern. I didn't really want to go
on this hat his like today, but it got bad fomo,
you know they. I guess everybody saw a viper last night,
one of those green both roped species. So uh anyway,
but oh, buttressed roots? What is this? A ficus? Just
stopped to take a picture of some blaky as some
interesting vining mellowstone species, as well as some legume with
balhinia shaped leaves, which indicates the Bohinia and red bud
subfamily of Fabasia. That's a cool fern. Oh yeah, this
is nice. Whatever this is. Damn, this looks like a
fucking fern. That looks like a psychicad. But uh, but
the fruits on that thing were wild. It was like
two carpoled I guess it was just a sing just
just these beans that split open and dehess I couldn't
really figure it out, but there were three of them
attached to a single pedicel or a peduncle or rather,
and anyway, yeah, it was very interesting. But uh, and
the seeds were out and already germanying, but we couldn't
really see him or we couldn't see the tree that
they were coming from. It was too high up. It
was either a tree or a leana, a large vine.
I'm sitting here, look at it. Some member of zim
zim Gibbereles, the ginger order in Kushi the dog, this
little terrier, Alex's dog. You know, she comes with us everywhere.
She just decided to come lay down next to me.
Thank you. You could tell them feeling like shit. Hopefully
I don't puke up my ass again. One thing I
did see that was pretty remarkable yesterday, I think I
don't think I mentioned was a member of the cannonball
tree family lecythidesi, which is in the order Eric Hayley's
and has is califlorus. So it produced its you know
call as in coallescent or et cetera stem referring to stem.
It flowers from the stem directly and then has these fruits.
The most famous member is the cannonball tree because it
produces which it looks like canniballs that come right off
I think they come right off the stem as well.
But it's a it's a pantropical family. I think it's
most diverse in the New World that's also in the
Old World Order is Eric Hayley's flowers are rather large,
like baseball sized in some cases. I think the genus
I saw was Gria g R E A. I might
be spelling that wrong, but it's a remarkable family. The
family is l E C y t h I D
A C E A E and uh. I have little
experience with it. I just know it from the Field
Museum Botany room, the Botany Hall, which I always fear.
That's where I got the Welwitchia Mirabolis diorama, and I
always fear because plants are so disrespected in culture in general.
It's some fucking administrator is gonna, you know, they're gonna
hire some new administrator, some you know, higher up pencil
neck knob at the Field Museum, and they're gonna they're
gonna say, we got to get rid of the fucking
Hall of Botany. Why don't we put another you know, uh,
giant bug exhibit there, or you know, Hall of China
exhibit or something like that. You know, it's my worst
fear regarding me, well, I can't think of a lot
of worse things, you know, I can get really dark,
but regarding that museum, but that it's got a remarkable
or barium. They being here does make me think of
the Field Museum. I was you know, it was instrumental
in my upbringing, that pee Wee's Big Adventure to movie,
as well as pee Wee's Playhouse and a few other things.
But the Field Museum, fucking that was it. You know,
if you've got kids, you live in the Midwest, you
got to bring them to the Field Museum, right like
three times a year at least, right, hopefully they won't
turn out like jackasses. Right, it's better better at than
you know, other elements of culture that could poison their youth.
You know. But this this member of I'm not sure
if it's morantasy or or cost thecy, but it's got
these really it's got this this infratessence that's on ground
you know, ground level maybe eight inches max, so about
I don't know, sixteen centimeters tall, and it's got bright
orange I think that I think that's just the old
corollas or the Yeah, I guess it's just the old Corollas.
And then subtending that is the fruit, which is like
this little three carpled so like a berrier I'm wondering
what this thing evolved dispersing it? What the fuck is this?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 1: These are like, these are the little seeds covered in
this powdery, gelatinous material. I should take somebody, so go
plant them up top. Really remarkable though, it's you know,
it's obviously going for conspicuous. We're going for a tractive
you know, to attract something, possibly some ground bird or
some other small mammal. And the whole plant it's you know,
it's a monocot. It's got alternate alternate leaves coming off
of this shoot. Guess he wouldn't call them alternate leaves
in that case, since the applical marastem is down below.
But it only gets about, I don't know, half a
meter tall. What interesting set here? But again, it's all leaves.
I've never paid so much attention to leaf venation, and
I've been drawn drawing leaves a lot too. You really
pay attention to leaf venation when you're drawing them. Oh,
here's this monstrous fucking palm. What was this genus? I forget.
It's got leaves that are probably twenty feet long, very fibrous. Drunk, God,
I feel less like dog shit. Somebody gave me some mombie,
which is like crushed coca leaf with sacropia ash, and
it does it does help. God, damn, I just felt
like dog shit. I don't know what it was, you know,
you piss all your nutrients that I took some took
some creatine vitamin. See it took a one of those
you know, electrolyte packets. But I just feel fucking out
of it. Man. Probably not very fun to listen to
right now because I'm you know, I feel like I'm
about to pass out. But uh, hopefully we can get
something out of this. Eh, what are you doing? Anyways?
You're working? What are you doing? Working on something? I
tend to listen to podcasts when I'm working on doing
some shit work or something. Fuck. Okay, Well, anyway, we're
gonna keep clambering on here, and I think we're dropping
an elevation. We're at like twenty four hundred feet now,
probably twenty six. Goddamn it. We got a long way
to go for us. Sounds so nice though, the singing insects.
You appreciate singing insects, I hope. So, okay, we'll get back.
We'll get back with you a little bit. Can you
hear the waterfall over there. This is what it's gonna
sound like later tonight. You know, when I'm pissing out
my ass. You know you got the really the auditory effects.
You so so crisp. You can hear it, you can
picture it hitting the bowl. Ah, God leaves, leaves and
more leaves. Only a guess as to what families some
of these things might be more racy. Melostoma tasi. There's
a cool vining celadjanella. This shit is this? This looks
like a dan night as skullus. Lots of U four bac.
What the fuck is this? There was a cool there's
a cool melostome, lots of milstone taty. There's a cool
melostone that gets maybe a meter tall that's got domatia.
That is little hotels for these tiny ants. Except the
ants aren't aggressive and you can reportedly eat them. I mean,
I know you can eat They taste like lemon. So
if they're not doing what is it? Is it a dong?
What the fuck is this thing? It's like a Is
that a phallus? Is that a fungus? I don't know.
There's some cool members of Burmanniac, which is a monocop
family that's micoheterotrophic, that is, at each eat fungus and
some cool members of Bolano for ac, which is a
plant parasitizing fungus plant parasitizing plant family, So plants that
are parasites, some of the parasitized fungi and some of
the parasitize plants. And there's records on iinad from here,
but the chance of them being out at this time
and flowering seemed to be nil. But anyway, back to this,
these domatia, these little swollen leaf bases, swollen two locku
oled leaf bases, two compartments that are formed at the
base of these melastome leaves that are very pubescent. They
house these tiny ants. So I'm guessing it's not for
detection because the ants are so fucking tiny and they're
not very aggressive to begin with. So it might be
maybe for some sort of nutrient acquisition, but it's some
sort of mutualism because nothing the plant wouldn't evolve these
dumatia if there wasn't something selecting for it, some benefits
selected for it. So I realized last night that the
UH three notebooks of herbarium specimens I've been collecting over
the past few days to a session at the herbarium
for further study for anybody who might be interested. Half
the fucking specimens got moldy, as you could easily predict
they would, But I was a dumbass, so I fucking
ruined that it's a nice philodendron, and you know, I
promptly lost it and I tapped into this city is
not going to be a safe part of the podcast
if you have younger viewers around, Okay, just a forewarning.
I realized I had to tap in at that point
to my vocabulary bank of turetts like curse words, and
just fucking let it out, you know, shit cock, cunt,
shit on my tits, fuck you mother, you know, just
just really going. Do you have one of those? It's
important to have a you know, a word bank, which
you know, this is probably more of a male thing,
I suppose, though I do know some salty women who
might engage in this kind of behavior, but it's really
I realized the fucking sip of rune I collected was
all moldy and just fucked. And the blow dryer I
brought what is that red flower? The blow dryer I
brought to dry things was not enough, and so I
looked up on Google scholar methods for drying or barium
specimens in the tropics, and wouldn't you know, some cunning
slippery shit had already thought of it, and there was
a paper described me. It was from two thousand and six,
using a Lakewood model space heater that stood about ten
maybe eight inches tall, and then using the rack that's
used to hang files in a file cain, which you know,
a good three quarters of people listening to this podcast
probably don't even know what it is. I didn't know
what it was, but a metal rack that can screen.
It's basically they were using. The rack is like a
frame to prop up the herbarium press, the plant press,
the corrugated cardboard is instrumental to and the corrugations, the
open parts of the corrugations have to go perpendicular to
the ground to facilitate airflow. Vertical airflow through them. Wonderful
buttress trunk over there by the way. I'm really looking
at it. I'm urinating into the forest right now. Next
to some member of Cyclant. They say, wow, look at
that inflorescence. What the fuck? So anyway, uh, and then
you drape a cloth with this seems kind of sketchy.
You drape a cloth over the plant press and then
over so that it's like funneling kind of. It looks
like one of those sheets from like those old style uh,
you know, silver plate cameras from like the mid eighteen hundreds.
You drape that cloth over the space heater two space
heaters on the ground. Frame is on the ground, plant
presses on the frame, and then it channels the heat
and you want like one hundred and five degrees fahrenheit max, right,
which is what is that? Like thirty five to forty
degrees celsius, no hotter and just airflow through it. And
supposedly eight hours of that works. But of course you've
got a hip. What am I? What is it? What
the fuck is this? This is like a little crabspider.
I just fucked up. You're a web I'm sorry. I
can already feel you can feel the sugers is they're
gonna come. There's been little sweat bees coming in to
tap me too for sweat, but they don't you know,
they're not really a nuisance. But anyway, so that's what
I'm gonna do, or you could do the blow driver,
but you know the blow drivers, even these little travel ones,
you put it on low. You don't want high heat,
put on low heat. They're not meant They're not meant
to fucking run for five hours. I'm such a dumb ass.
I can't. But I just wasted so much fucking time
and specimens. And also I forgot to label these, so,
I mean, I can remember what they were, but I
had to go back and fucking label them with in
at numbers and goddamn sit to pain in the ass.
I just can't believe I fucking waste me fuck, you know,
I just it's still just thinking about it. It's like
whatever dopamine is the opposite of that, whatever you call that,
that feeling, that's what I'm feeling right whenever I think
about it. So avoidable. Right Normally, if I'm like collecting
and we've got a rental car, I just put it
on the dash. Blow the fucking defrosters. That's fine, that
works like a charm. Maybe take some Q tips, insert
them in between the pages to facilitate airflow through the pages.
But god damn it, just I can't believe I didn't,
you know, I dried these things half fast and then
put them in a suitcase. Then then just the suitcase
was closed in the fucking uh the other place we
were gonna go for like three days, and they just
molded the shit. Such a dummies. I could have seen
it coming, you know. I feel remarkably better though in
just an hour. Still sweating like hell, but it's become overcast.
Now we're just bathing in vapor. It's so humid you
gotta spoon the air into your lungs. But it's amazing
what an electro like packet can do. Holy hell. Yeah,
I feel tons tons better still just taking pictures of leaves,
though very few reproductive structures. Okay, it's a couple of
days later, don't worry. He's I've been talking to this
in a lot of ops. So I'm in a town
of bonios at my friend Crazy MIC's house. Crazy Mic,
the bee guy. He's not crazy, he's just eccentric. Spent
all day with him, I said, a wonderful man. He's
uh seventy two. He inhales a lot of naphthaline. You know,
his whole office just smells like mothballs because he's got
these insect cabinets. He's you know, he's an entomologist. He
studies him an out there are wasps and bees, especially,
oh the sweet volcanic soil. This climate where it never
gets hotter than eighty degrees, where it's sixty two hundred
feet in the town of Banos, which literally means baths.
I think it's some religious shit. We didn that makes sense.
It's all religious shit. It's all Catholic. You know, a
lot of Catholic guilt. The Spanish went hard when they
were doing the whole genocide thing. They really infused it
with Catholic Catholicism, Catholic punishment, Catholic erotic never mind, that's
a that's a horrible thought. Anyway. So anyway, Mike spends
a lot of time breathing in annapoli, in vagers, vapors
because he studies insects. He's pining insects for the last
sixty years of his life. So, but he's got a
wonderful house, very kind enough to let me stay there,
and then took me out yesterday like a fucking sweet man.
And so I bought him dinner, and uh, anyway, he
took me some really nice spots. It's crazy that it's
so fucking steep here, because the mountains are still uplifting.
There's still a out of earthquakes. See an every earthquake
you get a couple of feet right, Probably have a
large earthquake every thirty or forty years, maybe less. But
I'm just right now. I'm just looking at these mountains
just bathed in water vapor and covered in either pasture
or eucalyptus trees. It is crazy how little of the
native vegetation here is left. And you see the same
horticultural atrocities. They got scotch broom. You want scotch broom,
We got scotch broom. They got fucking Himalayan blackberries. It's
like all the shit you'd see in the Pacific Northwest.
It's the climbing of the Pacific Northwest. And we're only
an hour two hours west of the Amazon where we
were before. We were all sweating balls, and uh, you know,
when they booked this tour and invited me to come
on and help it, they told me to we were
gonna stay at our friend's place in the Amazon, and
it was nice, but this guy was like needlessly extravagant.
It was kind of like a phrase of joy. It
was uncomfortably extravagant, the kind of place I'm normally getting
kicked out of. And so we stayed there for three nights,
and I think and his staff was all really sweet,
the cooks and shit, they were fucking you know, they
were really wonderful people. They wanted to take a picture
with me afterwards, which kind of weirded me out, but
that's all right whatever. But uh, but everybody got sick.
Camilo was pissing out his ass, everyone got diarrhea. Ever
was fucking you know. I thought maybe it was like
a neuro virus, because that happens sometimes you get neumal
viruses sweeping through. But it wasn't as violent as a
neuro virus, you know. It was just it was just
mild food poisoning. I don't know, you know, maybe he
ate some maybe didn't. Maybe no fruit didn't get washed
and there was some turred on it somewhere. I don't
know a way. Uh, that day, that day I was recording,
I just felt fucking destroyed, just like the fatigue you
feel after you do get food poisoning. And uh, but
then you know, they gave me some electrolyte packets. Alex
gave me some et cetera, and so then I kind
of came back and uh some mambe the coca powder
and put a little bit in your cheek. Coca powder
and soacropia ash. That always helps you don't feel high,
but it just like gives you a little bit. I
don't know, it's it's a it's nice. It's a nice plant.
So anyway, so then uh, we came after that, we
went back up to Mara after three We spent three
nights there. We didn't need to spend three nights there. Right,
needlessly extravagant it was. It was not the most diverse.
It was hot as a nutsack wrapped in a vinyl
fucking sack next to a space heater, right like it
was hot does a nutsack and a sun. It was
just fucking not. But the it wasn't pleasant, you know.
And he says things like that. He really alienates a
lot of his viewers. I just don't, you know. I mean,
I really appreciate what he does for the plant science community,
but I just he's just not my cup of tea.
I just can't get it. I'm just I just imagine
these conversations I've overheard or been exposed to. You know,
the squares always think it's for them. It wasn't for you, buddy.
It's very obviously not. But anyway, so, but the thing
I did liked on it, there was a lot of
members of Costs. They see the family which is in Zingibarele's.
They have this spiral stem, this spiraling stem uh. And
then these really bizarre flowers with one stamen that's fused
to a stigma. And then they have pedaloid stamens. Right,
so these like they look like petals, but they're essentially
sterile stamens. They're pedaloid staminodes. Excuse me. So that was
cool to see some of those because that family always
blows my mind. Then you have marin Tasty, which is
also in the ginger order, but those that's this Maritasy
is more like your typical uh, you know, office plant,
like you buy him at Ikea or shop lift them
at Ikea and then put them on a desk somewhere. Right,
It's just it's like, you know, they label it tropical folders.
It's kind of marinthasty. Don't get too big. They got
pretty leaves, they got different colors and patterns on the
leaves right to make it interesting for the people who
think there's nothing else worth paying attention to about plants.
But I saw on Acarpus battoir b A T A
u A pronounce however the fuck you want, that's a
freebie right there, batulua. But how will and that it's
it's this palm that's got these fucking thirty foot long leaves,
like a single frond from pettiole to where it turns
to racus, the racers is where it's got the leaflets
on either side. It can be thirty feet fucking long. Insane.
It's absolutely insane. And then the base of these leaf sheaths,
there's this hair that peels off of them, so you
get these mats of hair beneath it. Absolutely fascinating and cool.
Plant ethnobotanically very important. They start in the forest. You'll
be walking through this dense rainforest and then there's just
this giant fucking palm. You know, before they get a stem,
before they become coalescent, they become colessenant, like age thirty
or something. I think they probably grow slow as fuck.
They probably lived two hundred years. I don't know. Maybe longer,
but it's if eventually they get a stem and they
keep growing up and they eventually emerge through from the
canopy saw Siba pentandra, which you know, you get siba
grown as garden plants where I live. But the Siba pentandra,
the ones when they form that giant buttress trunk that
looks like a ficus, and a number of plants do that,
I should. That's a convergent evolutionary trait. The form buttress trunks.
The fucking palms, the dong palms, the walking palms, they
form buttress trunks as well. That's what they're doing with
those roots that emerge, you know, a meter or two
meters up the trunk and then root themselves into the ground. Right.
It's for stabilization. The pumps don't actually fucking walk. They
might move, they might lean a little bit, they might
shift their growing access a little bit as they if
they're growing on the hillside and they lean over and
their proper roots prop them up. But it's all just
you know, it's all just buttressed trunks. It's stabilization and support.
That in drip tips, the drip tips on the leaves
where the the leaf turns into this would it be
mocrinate point or aerostates, I don't know, you know, when
it's basically trying to channel water off the leaf. Those
are two things that the two traits, two of the
traits that the many plants and related plant lineages converge
on evolutionarily when they're growing in such a wet, vapor
bathed environment. And it was great because we were on
this hill and you could look out over and there's Onocarpus,
that giant palm popping up here and there throughout the forest,
and you can just see the fucking vaporizing off of it,
you know. And there'll be a lot horizon line of trees,
and then another horizon line of trees behind that, and
then another horizon line of trees behind that, all different couts.
It's fucking incredible beautiful. There was this guy Marley who
brought uh water colors and he uses a little refillable
brush pen that he fills with water and he'll just
dip the tip into colors and then when he needs
to change color, he just squeezes water out of it,
which like flushes the inking and they can put a
new a new water color and color in there and
he was doing these sketches of of all the uh
landscapes we went to. Is really nice, but that Siba
was fucking dope. And everything's covered in mosses and brow
fights and ferns and incredible shit. It was really incredible shit.
Saw a member of the genus Teculia that had these fruits,
these woody fruits that opened and then were covered in
these little irdicating hairs that kind of stuck in you.
Camillo picked one up and got these hair stuck in it. Yeah,
it was. It was a fucking dope trip. The Amazon
was cool. It's the fucking Amazon, man. I mean, you know,
to look on the map and you see everything east
to you and there's nothing there. It's just green. There's
maybe a couple settlements here and there in a busted road.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: It was cool, man, It was fucking cool. And then
I was out at one point, I was out taking
pictures of plants on the road, Lots of ruder uls,
lots of you know, invasive bullshit, you know, gingers from
Asia or whatever, just you know, some native plants to
a lot of pine, just native pioneer species. Fucking every
bus that goes by just fill with indigenous people, right,
because the only people who live east of there in
the Amazon are mostly indigenous people. It's uh, I really
love that though. Just looking on a map and you
just see everything east it's just fucking dark green with
very few human settlements poking up. Pretty incredible. But but yeah,
after three nights of that, you know, you're like Jesus man,
it's just vapor on everything. Shit molds so quick. So
after that I went back to the Marah and then
now I came up here because there was a bunch
of shit I wanted to see, and I wanted to
see this stuff in Banios for a while because it's
you've got these, you know, large lava flows, columnar basalt,
epic road cuts covered in puya's puya, glomarifhra. It's a
it's a bermelia that looks like in a gave, with
these incredible torch like inflorescences that emerge from them, tons
of orchids, all all the shit I love. You know.
It's like this weird mix between chilly, foggy vegetation mixed
with more xeric stuff, more drought tolerant stuff growing on
these rocks, on these like these rocky outcroppings and microsites,
like on the west side of Banios yesterday we saw
borzicact this which was a it used to be in
Kleisto cactus. It's a hummingbird pollinated cactus. You know, forms
these stems that get maybe three four feet tall. But
then they'll like fall over, you know, is the rocks
they're on shift or part of the wall, the rock
wall they're going on the roads, and then it'll form
this little curve, you know, this little curving stem and
they end up looking all it just looks fucking wild.
Tons of cool orchids. I saw fragment Pedium lyndle lie
ainum or lindinii. Excuse me, fragment Pedium lindinii growing in
this really interesting spot Mike took me to. I guess
he was collecting wasps there a couple decades, a decade
ago or something, and uh, this fragmentedium, you know, fragment
Pedium is an orchid. They're in the Lady slipper stupid
common name Lady slipper subfamily, the sipper pedoid, which has
two statemens and a staminode. Most orchids only have one stamen,
especially the epidendrods, one stamen, one anther, you know, and
then each side of the anther, each each each of
the theka is a theka releases pollen. So it's just
one stamen producing pollinia, but person of pollen nodules, because
you know, epidendrods produced two polyin nodules, but it'll be
one on either side. And that's on either side of
the stamen, the theka, which are the yellow anther lobes.
But so this this uh, this sip. The super pedioids
are cool. They're not as species rich as the epith androids.
But this what was interesting is that this I assumed
all the super pedioids had a bag, right, that they
had a uh, you know, a labellum that had been
morphed into a bag and for the fly to go
in and then to fly out the back whatever. But
this didn't have that. This just had these really long teeples,
probably four times as long as the flower had itself,
the mass of the flower itself, the parient itself. And uh,
I mean the peoples are of parents, but you know
what I'm saying, right, they're fucking long peoples, right, long
dong peoples and it just had a really bizarre morphology.
And then you look inside at the column and it
had these red hairs like it was mimicking rotting meat
or something, you know, like it was mimicking dead animal flesh.
And then it had this this other statement in the back.
It was so fucking weird. And I sent it to
some other orchid or nerves that I know, and yeah,
it was just God, it was bizarre. But there were
tons of orchids there, you know, terrestrial orchids, and this
thing was growing terrestrially just out of the ground. And
the ground at this site we were at like sixty
five hundred feet, it was remnant vegetation because everything around
here is agriculture, or its pines or its fucking blue
gum eucalyptus. There's more blue gum eucalyptus here than I've
seen in Australia. I'm looking at a hillside that's been
denudative native vegetation and is mostly pines now right. It's
crazy to see. It makes me really wonder what was
here before, because there's so little record of it. Like
normally on agriculture you'll find and it's incredibly steep slopes.
We saw greenhouses on the thirty degree slope yesterday. I mean,
it's just it's so steep because these mountains are still
being uplifted, right, it's the fucking andes, right, You've got
the Nasca plates causing all this uplift that's subducting Naska
plate is causing these mountains and these volcanoes. I'm looking
at a volcano right now, Tungaragua volcano, bathed in vapor
right like towering above you. It's really cool at night
when like lights come on, because you know, it's like
they got the Catholic dungeon everywhere. They got these shrines
and shit, and you see these they're all lit up
and it's like they look like they're in the sky.
They're so high up there, you think that they're you forget,
mountains can be that tall, right, taller than skyscrapers. So
in a relatively short amount of time, like the slope
is really steep, you know, like they're they're right there.
It's like comb peak and uh you know they're big
sur that's sir with the s U R, not big sir.
You know, like you call you deity. Uh but anyway, yeah,
so uh this but this area that we had like
this peat soil, it felt like subparramo vegetation. There was
a cool back wrist there I'd never seen before, cool
coyote bush, tons of orchids. There was like six or
seven different orchid species, probably more. There was that wine
Mannias species qunony A c. Which you can always tell
is keunony ac because it denoted by those two uh
uh half circle uh stipules that you get at the
appical marastem of every shoot, you know, before the new
growth emerges. Relatively uninspiring flowers. But whatever, But that was
a that wye manny I've seen before. It was a
pioneer species winged the winged stems too, or winged racus,
the winged rackus where the leaves leap, the pinnate leaves are,
the odd pinnate leaves are. God damn, I got fucking
chiger bites on my ass. I got really taken apart
by the chickers. What else did I see there? Yeah?
I mean just just wild, really cool ferns. Uh. That
epiphytic red liver wart that looks like a Spanish moss
was everywhere. I mean, it's just it's a spot you see,
and you just want to stop and check it out.
There there was a oh yeah, and ruepalla rupala monosperma proteace.
I saw this thing, this little this small tree, small
shrub and a large shrub, small tree, and with these
these giant, ovate, serrated leaves that felt like they were
made out of plastic, very coreaceous. They felt like stiff leather,
like a like a leather glove had been left to
dry out in the sun, you know. And that's always
for me, that's always a giveaway of prote ace, the
bizarre Southern hemisphere plant family with woody fruits. It always
has woody fruits. And you get the banksias in Australia,
you got the fucking proteas used in the floral arrangements.
And ship from South Africa got a South African accent.
Is so punishing, man, there's just no offense, you know
what I mean? That Dutch Afrikaans like, okay, never mind,
I'm gonna I'm already of finding people again, but I
just can't take the fucking accent. Oh It's like, I
don't know what it is. I don't know what you
know what. I'm sorry I'm just gonna stop before I
get myself out of trouble. But anyway, but the the
soil was it was pretty dry. It had and rained
in like in like two months. And uh, and the
soil was like this, this black carbon rich pea, probably
very acidic, which was enabling these things to grow here.
Lots of cabin dishes too. Speaking of acid soils, we
got eric acy cavin dishy is a prominent genus with
those wonderful tube flowers for hummingbird pollination. But just tons
and tons of interesting shit and uh and yeah, Rupaula
monosperma was a cool one. Rupaula. I've seen that genus
in Brazil. It's proteac again given away by those the
texture and feeling of those relatively large leaves. I couldn't
find influorescences on any and then I found an inflorescence
full of the woody fruits. I would love to see
it when it flowers. It's gotta be fucking wild. Uh.
There was a cool Corsettia which is fabasi. This is
more in the dry site. So we were at this
this like Subparmo vegetation spot with all the orchids, and
we drove to the drier site where there's native Apuntias
species and Borza cactus with a little red you know,
hummingbird pollinated flower coming out. You gotta look up Borza
cactus and Cleisto cactus if you've never heard of them before.
Very interesting. The whole genus Kleisto Cactus is hummingbird pollinated.
Uc Berkeley Botanic Garden, probably the best botanic garden in
the country, had a huge Cleisto cactus collection, and so
all the different species. Right, This like adaptive radiation of
these hummingbird pollinated high andian cacti really cool to see, right,
but they all have that red flower. The hummingbird pollination
thing is so fucking prominent in the andes. Of course,
is this dog shit I'm walking on and it's just
like horseshit. Okay, I feel better. I saw this dog
as day. It looked like Rick James. It was like
a white loss of apso. I don't know it was
a muth, but it looked like Rick James because the
hair had it was all like stringing shit and it
was like hanging down the fucking doghead bangs it was.
It was made all the more funny because it was
talking ship to me. It was really upset that I
was where it was. It was fucked I was fucked up.
But the so then after that we went to the
dry site, and we saw the dryer site on this
like kind of like this rain shadow area of Bono's
once all the rain's been squeezed up as the air
ascends westward from the Amazon. And and that's where we
saw the Borzicctus growing on these rock out croppings. There's
a gave everywhere too, but I'm pretty sure it's not
it's just naturalized, it's not native. Lots of interesting stuff.
This whole area was so floristically diverse. Uh yeah, man,
I made a ton of collections pressings, uh and uh.
But that corsetti was fucking weird too. That corsetti was
really was was a Corsetti at Dubia I think, which
you know is a pink Papoleonaceous faboid subfamily flower. Yeah.
Camillo's got he's got permits from the the Anabio at
the Keto, the Rbariamaketo. So we're collecting stuff for there.
So I collected all I collected all that shit. The uh,
the other interesting thing that I saw there too was crotons.
There was so much croton diversity. There was this one
croton that looked like California flannel bush, the genus Fromontodendron
because it god damn man, which it was covered in
this like this orange rusty scale, like pubescent, and it
had kind of malvoid like malevasy looking leaves. Just a
really fascinating plant, really interesting. You know, crotons up four bac.
They have flowers, you know, spikes of male flowers subtended
by female flowers. The mature at the ovaries and the
female flower. The female ovary has three carpals, so three sections,
and each section has a two branched style and stigma
that comes off of it, so it's it almost looks
like a stam and if you know, if you're not
paying attention to the fact, there's this jar large ovary
down there, because there's all these appendages coming off, you know,
so numerous they look like stamens. But there was this
what was a croton mentadora, and then croton I forget
the other one you got. I gotta look in the
Ecuador a catalog of ascular plants, or at the INET
observations I made. But just the diversity was just fucking nuts.
There was so, you know, you see one thing. That's
how it always works. You go looking for one interesting thing,
and you see six other things that are interesting, or
ten other things that are interesting, you know, and then
now you've got an interest in this, right, So you
always just got to get your ass out there. You
just got to get your ass out and look for
this stuff. Right, get out of the fucking house, Get
off the phone. Definitely, get off the fucking video games
if that's what you're doing. No offense the fucking video games. Right,
get out the social media stuff, comparing yourself to others.
Realize what you're doing, your bad habits. It's sick, it's
bad for you, it's bullshit. Don't do it. You're being
fucking indoctrinated. Get out there, go look for some nice ship.
So I think today, I don't know, we're gonna go.
Maybe we'll go to Ambato. I gotta take the bus
back down the hill eastward towards the Amazon to go
rejoin my party. I don't know if you can hear this,
but this is an Andy and J fucking weird bird
stand out on a cliff looking at some tiny patch
of remnant forest in the Banios area. Most of it's
been cleared. You heard it. That's a violacious j The
Andy and j flew up, but we got a violacious Jane.
Now you gonna look those things up, like violacious, like
a lush, like a luscious, luscious violet, luscious violet. J
What are these fucking corvids? Man? All these fucking corvids. God,
they're amazing. Ah made of Corvid's inherit the earth. Once
we've fucked everything, I don't think there's any hope. I
shouldn't be saying that out loud. There's no hope. I'm
a catastrophist. Right. It's like any any alcoholic They any
alcoholic ratic, they don't stop until they're forced through. Right.
We're not gonna stop until we're forced to from our
own bad behavior. Were there. We're forced to make room
for the sacred within our society and have a place
for the living world. It's a cool bird though, Oh
this is you gotta listen to this stone. It's a
couple of days later, it's a day later. Listen to
this stone, isn't it nice? That's Jillian Welch. See suddenly
I pick on a persona of like a sixty five
year old lesbian that lives by yourself with like five
cats in New Mexico or something. But it's a fucking
beautiful song and there's nothing wrong with me. And it's
sixty five year old lesbian that lives alone with five
cats in the middle of a desert in Mexico. It's
actually that's a that's not a bad you know, if
you come out like that, that's not a bad way
to end up, you know, if you've made it through
sixty five fucking years of this life anyway. At Jillian
Welch is great. She's liked some of my stuff before
on Instagram, but she don't follow me, probably because I
fucking annoyed her. You know. See, I think it happens
with a lot of people. They they see a video
I did or something, and then they look closer and
they're like, yeah, that's you know what. This guy's kind
of crass and and and obnoxious, and maybe I just
won't And that's fine with me. That's pleasant. That's the
way I've lived my life anyway. So I'm fucking back,
I'm chilling at hobbies. He's gone, I'm putting together a
burium labels. It is remarkable how fucking long it takes
for some of this plant material to dry out. You know,
when you come from a climate like that of Bono
Sekwood or in Tungaragua Province. Uh, you know the shit
swear it's it never gets hotter than eighty degrees and
everything's just bathed in raper all the time. It's very
hard to dry out. The last couple of days, yeah,
I was hanging out with the crazy entomologist. He's an
eccentric and uh, and just going through some really notable habitat.
It is wild how much of the fucking habitat Again,
I know I just said it, but it's wild how
much of a habitat has been destroyed like we we
And I went out with this wife the next day, Alina,
who studies the genus Monina, which is in polygalaci And
there's like eighty different Monina species. They look like pea flowers.
They're always purple and with like maybe a hint of yellow,
and they can be shrubs. You see them in Parma
vegetation a lot, generally at higher elevations. Sometimes you'll see
him in lower elevation tropical forests. They kind of look alike.
They're cool, but they kind of look alike. And anyway,
so we were driving around, like the other side of
the mountain and Bonios, going past these fucking incredibly sketchy
cliffs where you know, like maybe I said this already.
The road used to be two lanes, but now it's
like one and a half because the other half of
the lane fell off the cliff. And so it's it's
terrifying territory. It's like, you know, the type of shit
where you're like, fuck it, I'll just get out and walk.
I feel safe for walking than being in a car.
And we were driving past all this, you know, and
it's it's a lot of blue gum you can lit
this and pine probably I guess it's radiota pine. And
there's just nothing in the original vegetation left. Supposedly indigenous
cultures that lived there before had cleared most of the
forest or set fire to it so they could graze
el pacas, I guess, and lamas. You know that the
fuckers had spit on you, you know, with the fucked
up teeth I had. I got spin on by a
lama two years ago. I never really shook it off.
There was some church I went. Is this church the
near where I lived? They kept lamas upsid. I don't know.
The fucking priest is that he loves he loves the animals,
and it's lama. I went to go pettit and it'd
spit on me, and then my daughter started laughing at me,
and it was, you know, it was the lama was
the thing was a to be honest, all right, I
know I can be a pain of the ass too,
but the fucking lama was an asshole. And that's just
the way it goes. Sometimes you meet a lot of
these fucking lamas that are are and camel lid, you know,
these South America, South American camel lid bastards that are
just assholes. Have you ever met a nice one? Have
you ever met one that was kind and soft? Right?
It's not like that. It's not like if you meet
a donkey. I've met plenty of nice donkeys and uh, horses,
and shit, I've never met a nice lama. They're kind
of assholes, you know. And if you're gonna be species,
just you know, it's just call it what it call
a spade a spade, right, what is it? What does
it fucking saying mean? Hopefully I didn't just say some
racist shit? What does it mean to say call a
spade a spade? I don't know what is a fucking spain?
Is that a fucking racist term? Did I just say
some racist shit? Fuck? Anyway, So we were looking for
remnant patches of forest and uh fuck the lamas. We
were looking for remnant patches of forest. We finally found some,
and there was a Heliocarpus americanus, which is malvesi, and
it's got these really like kind of cool tiny white flowers. Big.
I mean, the leaves look malvacious. They look like that
kind of single lobed quasi maple leaf, look large tree.
There was lots of members of Qunoniace. You know, they
got the resin. Keunoni Has always have the resin. They're
kind of a boring plant genus, but they can be
really cool. I just don't know enough about them. And
the leaves all look the same. They got opposite leaves,
segmented stemins. They're generally very glabrous. We saw some of those,
but again very steep vegetation. Puya's on everything. Piccarnia. What
was it Pickearnia pungens or I figured this red flowered Piccarnia.
It looks fucking wild. It doesn't. It almost doesn't look
like Jesus Christ. Yeah, I've tried to come outside to
get peace. There's fucking I gotta stock. I'm dropping too
many f bombs from cursing, you know a lot. But uh,
this Piccarni is really unique. It looks like kind of
like a geophytic member of asparagacy, and it's got the
monoca thing going on. It's got these bright red flowers
coming off of eighteen twenty inch tall scapes or race seams,
but the leaves don't look bromeliad like it all. And
it is a bromeliad, and it was dominating these rocky
outcroppings of basalt. It's got the fucking rocks. They were amazing.
Just you'll see you'll find like a fifty foot tall
layer of columnar jointed rock with a sketchy road, winding road,
you know, at the base of it. The whole thing
is covered in orchids and PuYas and uh puya glamariphra.
Everything's bathed in water vapor. It's just like gray all
the time, and then you'll just see these these cliffs
of basaltic magma that cool these lava flows that probably
happen I don't know, ten million years ago, maybe maybe
more recently. But you know, the whole the whole mountain
chain is consistently being uplifted, and so that's why it's
so steep. It's because the mountains are still growing, and
so they're kind of growing. They're growing faster than they're
being weathered and eroded. But we found some patches of
remnant vegetation what the forest looked like. Because everything around
a town of Bonios, which I guess they're claimed the
fame with sugar. There's all these like you know, gross
like little sugar tiendas everywhere, candy tiendas and shit for sugarcane.
But uh, but we found some patches of native vegetation
and you know, got like a minute to get into it,
but it's again very steep. There was wine Mania spruciana,
another member of Keunoniac. There was Cunonia. There was heliocarpus.
There was Trema micranto, which is cannaba. See it basically
looks like a hackberry. It's like a pioneer species, edible
little berries in it. Kids up in all this stuff.
Romelia is up in all this stuff. Everything's covered in mosses.
It's basically a cloud for us. But uh, and thank
god there was these little bits left because there's so
little again, like I said, the hills on everywhere it's dominated,
it's all cleared. There's grasses, the odds, shrub here and there,
maybe a monina, and then pines and eucalyptus everywhere. The
fucking eucalypus. I've seen more eucalyptus there than I've seen
the Tasmania. And we work. We went the Keto yesterday
to Cruises. I guess my buddy Cruise got an apartment.
Cruise is kind of an eccentric. He's always walking around
his sandals with one of those little you know bags.
He looks like he's just perpetually on some vision vision quests,
like if you're gonna meet someone who's gonna give you
acid in public, you know, just because like so you
bump into him at a fucking, you know, burrito spot
or something. If there's gonna if there's someone who's gonna
do that, they would be Cruise. And he got this
little so he got an apartment. He's got this goofy
mustache too, which I say and endearingly. He's a friend
of mine, but it looks hilarious. It's like a fucking
Hulk Hogan mustache. But then he's like this neo shaman
fucking I don't know. He's an eccentric. He's an eccentric.
So we went and crashed it at his apartment get
our shit together. After sitting on his bus smelling like ass,
you know, maybe not ass, smelling like you know, we'd
been we'd been out in the field, you know, and
half the crew got fucking diarrhea. I don't know what
they ate, right, And so and Camillo's been staying at
Cruise's spots, so we went there to go collect ourselves.
And he lives next to this park, in this kind
of Fraser area, like a more fancy area of Keto.
I went to the park. The park's all eucalyptus. It
reminds me of Oakland Hills. It's all eucalyptus. And then
in the Understey there's these little patches of native remnant vegetation.
There was a cool dahlia like a beautiful shrub dahlia.
The flowers and all the native vegetation are super bright
and vivid, probably because of hummingbirds. This is at nine
thousand foot eleve. There's not a lot of bees. The
only bees you'll see are the occasional bumblebee and that.
But moths, of course can get by at those elevations
and the chili temperatures. I guess they got some insolation
and they can vibrate their wings too to drum up
some heat. And then uh, and then lots of hummingbirds
like this, what was it? Discover? What is it? The
fucking scarlet violators? I forget something violetator. There's so many
hummingbird species. But again it's just like it's again, it's
it's just like it's like the bay. It's all eucalyptus
and then horticultural atrocities. There was a catoniaster. What do
you You don't want to see a Katonia aster in
the cloud force of Central America. That's that's like disgusting
and insulting, you know, to it's it hurt me, It
hurt my spirit inside. Right, It's like I would rather
turn a corner and see, you know, a fat homeless
lady taking a ship, and no offense to fat homeless women,
but I'd rather see that then a katoni aster, whether
it's in someone's landscaping or just naturalized on a landscape. Right,
there's something almost charming you see, like like a fat
homeless lady taking a ship. Maybe she flips you off
and get you know, tells you to go fuck yourself
or something that's kind of funny. That's like a charming thing.
I'd say, Aha, you know, that's that's a nice urban
experience seeing a katoni aster, right, This fucking horrible horticultural atrocity.
It's not something you want to It's not it's not
a nice it's not a nice experience. There's no way
to romanticize that, you know what I mean. This reminds
you of suburbs. It's like spiritual death. And so anyway,
oh yeah, there was a spartium junsium Spanish broom that
was naturalized too. But then again, coming up amidst this
was just whatever remnant native vegetation had been able to
survive the first donslaught of bulldozers and the planting of
horticultural atrocities. There was a Bomara, that cool dahlia. There
was a native clematis that the cloud forests are so
cool because you're at these at these elevations where the
climate never quite freezes, it gets damned close to it
never quite freezes, and so you're getting all these lineages
that are generally from North America, but unlike North American lineages,
they've all got these vivid ass colored flowers. Like the
dahlia had these vivid purple flowers. The bo Maria had
vivid red flowers. The clematis it was a fucking clamatus.
I don't wanna care for them too much, but had
big leaves right, because it's super humid. It's a cool temperature,
but it doesn't really freeze and it rarely ever gets
over eighty And then everything's been selected for by hummingbird pollination,
and hummingbirds like very vivid flowers. It's what they're attracted to.
Saw Kevin Dishy up there too, in the eucalyptus hell
and the eucalyptus dungeon. I shouldn't even say dungeon because
the dungeon could be nice, like if I was in
an orchid dungeon two days before in Bonios looking at
this this slope of columb A basalt that was covered
in terrestrial orchids. Right, But if if you're gonna see
if Eucalyptus, I mean Euculudse globulus, the forests where their
native are great, they're you know where they're they're not
a monoculture, and there's all kinds of cool shit there.
They've evolved therever millions of years. When you see a
planted eucalyptus, hell, it's it's too miserable to even be
called a dungeon. It's worse than that. It's like a
fucking I don't know, it's like an office park. So
that that's what it u. That's what that's what that
was the background setting forever there's like ninety percent eucalyptus.
And then they had a Cacia melonoxalon too, which is
invasive as hell throughout the bear as well. Very similar
climate to coastal California, like a lot of the same
horticultural garbage, horticultural atrocities. But there was a cavin this
year there was a Govinia orchid which has that little
like uh sickle shaped Labellum I guess or is there
a soupin eight flower in their two sickle shaped dorsal sepals.
I don't know either way, it's a once you see
a govigna. They all kind of have the same gestalt
and their flowers. So it was cool to see that
there was still some stuff coming back, but overall it
was you know, Oh, and there was a there was
two Mimosa species, one with this orange, rusty pubescence, which
I've seen in a lot of cloud forest stuff, which
is remarkable. I wonder what selects for that, Like, we
were seeing these cloud forest ingas you know, the genus
of ice cream bean Fabasi, the leggum family, and they
had this same thing, this orange pubescence. So what selects
for that orange pubescence. It can't be the heat because
it's not. It's never really hot there. Maybe it's a
little dry, but it's a it's a bizarre habit, but
it's it's really cool too. It gives the plants these
really cool looks to them, right, like orange orange tiny hairs. Anyway,
I'm getting carried away talking about Keto. That was just
let's go back to the fifty foot layer of columnar
jointed basalt, which is then topped by a three hundred
foot layer of black more like a blackish ryolt. I
guess it could be basalt. It looks it doesn't quite
have the texture of basalt. It looks like it might
be more intermediate like a true andesite, like a darker andesite.
And then above that you'll have one hundred foot so,
you know, one hundred foot of more volcanic rocks. So
the whole All in all, you've got these six hundred
and seven hundred foot tall cliffs of volcanic rock, all
completely covered in orchids. There was Spanish monster, there was
Telansia oostennioides there, which was wild. Must be a very
different eco type. Well maybe not. Maybe it's just I'd
love to do a study on that. Because Telansia oostenuoides
can occur in New Orleans, or in the pine and
oak forest of Nuevo Leone at six thousand feet or
here in these chilly, scrubby habitats. It's like scrub where
it's thinner soils and on rock and a dry site,
and then like forest where it's you know, like you know, shielded.
I don't. That's a good question too, because these habitats
were weird. It's I mean, there was the Borza cactus
area where the bores of cactus was growing. Borzic cactus
was on like the west side of Banos. But meanwhile,
the cloud forest is like five miles away, you know.
And it's just it's like this micro climate, tons of
micro climates, right, like lots of diversity of climatic setting
in a in a very close area and like a
small geographic area. And that's where the cool crotons were.
There were like three different species of these, these shrubby crotons. One,
like I said, looked like Framancia, looked like California flannel bush.
The other croton meant the doris. All these shrub crotons
were amazing. They were fucking beautiful. Man. It's the leaves,
not the flowers, because the flowers on No one talks
about the flowers on crotons right times. Can be large trees,
they can be shrubs, they can be herbs, annual herbs.
It's a it's a big ass genus in euphoury ace.
But these were just again the orange pubescents. There was
another there was a white one growing on this rock
outcropping next to this sketchy road. Fucking roads are terrifying.
No one slows down and you but you have to
go to the rock outcroppings because that's where all the
cool xerophytic shit is, you know, even though you're technically
in a cloud forest setting. Yeah, really really cool. There
was an a punthia there as well. Uh, there was
what appeared to be Tacoma stands, but it looked slightly different.
It looked like a tree. I'm not even convinced it
was Tacoma stands. I don't know what the fuck I saw.
It looked like Tacoma stands, big noniac catalpa family, the
odd pinnate leaves, the yellow tube flowers. But it doesn't
look like that Tacoma stands you're gonna see in Nuevo
Leone or that especially the Tacoma stands you're gonna see,
you know, in city of County, West Texas, where it's
dry as hell, which never forms a tree. It was
just it was such a bizarre Again, the more I
travel and the more I see, the more I just
start to give up on the idea of species. It's
just this fluid, constantly shifting orb there's no boundary around it.
But again it was what was really cool about this
site was just, I mean, really interesting vegetation. Tons of
tons of cool orchids, you know, these these scrubby habitats,
and then you'd have these more forested settings on the
slopes in you know, where there was any forest left,
you know, consisting of clusia. There was a Serawias species
actinidyac And then they were cultivating citrus. They were fucking
cultivating citrus on these slopes, even though it never gets
warmer than eighty degrees fahrenheit, so that it makes you
wonder what the shit they're doing, and you know, Florida
or South Texas, because citrus doesn't really seem to like
it that hot, you know, one hundred degrees especially. They
were growing citrus cat to see be on Lake Whale's Ridge,
which is an extremely dry site in central Florida, and
see that they were demolishing so much of that that
built these shitty orange gropes, and that oranges somehow became
the state logo of Florida, that god forsaken state, rather
than any of the cool native vegetation they have there,
tons of which I've still got to make videos about
because I never got around to it. But but yeah,
you know, so what I would do is I would
get things down to g I could always get things
down to genus if not family, and then I would
have to go on different websites. If you go to
Symbiota dot org and go to portals, you'll get a
list of all these different herbaria orbarium collection websites like
Consortium of California or Baria or Sinat you know Southwest
sw Biodiversity dot org, or in a BA which is
the Ecuador site, or Red Day or Barrios Meicanos which
is the Mexican side I was using when I was
in Hidalgo. Super helpful. And then you would type in
you could go to the map. You can draw a
polygon around the area war you can type in a
family or a genus, see everything that comes up, and
then get that name and then go to uh, where
would I what? What was the other website? Then I
have to go to another website to look at orbarium
digitize their barium specimens, the Neotropical Flora portal Neotropical dot
Symbiota dot org. I'll put this stuff in a I'll
put all this shit in the in the website description.
If I don't, you could write me and remind me.
But this is the way that I do everything because
I don't use fucking I don't use flora's, I don't
use get the key stuff out. That's nerd shit. I'll
do that, you know, sometimes if I'm really unsure of
the discrepancies between two species. But again, there's so much fluidity.
Often the people who are writing these floras are people
that don't get out much. They couldn't describe the gestalt
of these different species or the different habitats. Right, They're
just fucking nerds, no fence. They're just fucking nerds who
aren't feel botanists like they're internbarium looking for whatever micro
characters they can to try and differentiate between two sets
of pressed plants. Right Whereas if you were to talk
to someone on difference between this species and this species,
someone might say, well, this is more of a zerophytic plant.
This is a plant this is whereas this plant's one
you're gonna see in more in cloud forest and this
one they can look a lot alike. But the you
know this the petiole often as this orangeesh pubescent senta
where the petiole on this one's glabrous. You gotta look closely.
They often, you know, one is prescribed to a different
habitat that you'll frequently see growing with a suite of
other plant species versus this is more of this kind
of habitat or habit like it'll you know, like soacritiax
horiza and Iriardia del tody the two species of walking
pums that don't walk. Iriardia, they both send out prop
roots right. Iriardia looks much more like a dong, it's
more phallic. Socritea has these little pins that come off
of the roots that are sharper. Socritilla sends out adventitious
root bud six feet up, whereas Iriardia rarely ever sends
roots out from more than a meter high up. It's
it's it's stem right. But both are palm quote trees,
not real trees. They don't produce secondary but but you
know what I mean, you know, so I don't use
I don't use the flora's that much because there they're
not helpful. They're not fucking helpful, and they're not it depends.
Some can be really helpful Powell's trans pecos h Flora,
you know, or flora. The trans Paco's helpful because he
actually goes into describing the habitat, and he took the
time to write, you know, descriptions as if you were
talking to him and he was described and he knows
the plants, he knows the habitat, he's seen them, he's
been out. You know. There's nothing I can't stand more
than fucking armshair boon. It's no fence. I have people
who talk a lot of shit and act all cocky,
but have never been out into the field. They have
never seen these things. They've never eaten shit, they've never
sweat and fallen off cliffs nearly and cut themselves or
gotten stung or bit or you know anyway. So that's
what I'm doing. I'm going through all these press plants
trying to figure out what the fuck species you know,
and put labels, and then I'll go in later and
describe the habitats best I can. There's nothing worse than
just the dry, bare bones are buried. Label. You really
got to you want to describe things. You want to
make sure if someone's reading that fifty years from now,
when you're dead that they're going to be able to
get a good, good you know, idea of what the
habitat was like if it's still there, and it probably
it probably won't be because you know, the whole human
tumor thing. Right, Oh guy, here we go back to
South Texas. Back on the way to South. They spent
the night in San Antonio last night, flew into the
hobbies in Austin. Spent the night in San Antonio. WHI,
there's a nice town. They got a lot of old warehouses,
old infrastructure, their train tracks. Uh and uh. And then
now I'm back to set back to South Texas, towards
the Rio Grande Valley heat island of billboards and car
dealerships and asphalt where people hate the street trees because
the concrete is so clean. It's so clean. It's all
it's not messy, it's clean. Oh god. Anyway, it was
funny talking or when I got on a plane out
of Keto, there was an astonishing amount of culturally of
the whites, the cultural whites, people who are culture really white.
You could be Mexican and you can be culturally white.
You can be any any quote race. Remember, race doesn't
really exist it's just human phenotype as a result of
natural selection from a population being at a certain latitude
and the vitamin D and vitamin BAT deficiencies that afflict
human populations at both high and low latitudes, respectively. But
but you could be any color, and you can be
culturally white. And there were a lot of people that
were culturally white. They were also you know, phenotypically white
Caucasian on the plane, but they were culturally white, and
they were all they were in first class. And it
was like, I think maybe because the plane was going
to Atlanta. It was like a Keto to Atlanta flight,
and so you know, it's a bunch of rich cunts
like in a first class it's and it's funny that
they put them in first class so that all the
peons have to walk by and judge them, like I
like I did. I was very I was very obviously
judging them. You know, I don't know why you would
want to fly first class. You're gonna pay an ass
load of money for five hours of comfort. Really, you're
that much of a fucking pussy You can't take being uncomfortable,
and you know, being stuck up right in a seat
that doesn't recline sniffing someone's ass in front of you
for five hours, because that's what it is. I mean,
it's face to ask on these airlines today, right the
way they packed people in there. You can't you can't
tolerate that. You're so much of a fucking princess you
need to fly first class. But it was it was
it was like it was a very culturally white setting
and it felt I mean, it was so culturally white.
Maybe it's just because it was going into the South
or something. I don't know. Look, I'm being regionally racist
here that it felt like, you know, a plantation cosplay,
like in a Civil War reenactment. You know, that's what
it felt like, you know what I mean, like the
primpt and proper puckering, puckering crackers. Oh, I can't believe
they letting the Negroes vote now, Like it's that kind
of shit you'd expect to hear from this demographic, all
fucking buttered asses, you know, all primped and fucking pampered.
It was funny, man. I uh, I don't know what
it's gonna be like to grow up in the South.
Should ask some of my friend, you know, what was
it like? Growing up there. It's a fucking weird place.
I'm sure there's I'm sure there's charm about it. I'm
sure there's a lot of weird shit too. It's like anywhere,
it's just different flavor, right, what is the flavor like there?
But it was fucking where. There was some guy reading
that he had a break. He was clutching a brand
new copy of Bill O'Reilly's new book. You know. It
was It's like, it's just hard for me to be
you know, it's hard. It's hard. I judge not. I'll
be nice to anybody, but I'm just saying, you know,
the ship you could made, expect to hear some of
those anyway. Whatever, Okay, moving right along. It was odd
for me, guy, I guess because I hadn't I hadn't
been around culturally white people in quite some time, you know,
especially where I live. I mean, the only time you
see Anglos where I live in general, not even culturally
white anglos. Uh. You know, when the Mormons are coming
to Mormons and Jehovah's witnesses are coming to pray on
you know, poor Hispanics where I live, which is that's
what they do. They come and they prey on them.
You know, you take advantage of someone's low economic status
and the fact they might be more willing to believe
bullshit than you know, your average schmuck who might be
better educated and have you know, more of an economic
footing to stand on, and you pray on them. That's
how you get them to join your cult. So but anyway, okay, listen.
Uh So I went into fucking I went into Atlanta,
and I didn't even get a chance to declare my
barium specimens because they just take a photo of this dude,
this surly dude who looked like he was very unhappy.
He was working for Customs and Border Patrol, so that
might be the case. He told me to stand in
front of a camera, and a camera takes my photo,
you know, presumably using the face recognition software. You don't
even get asked if you can declare anything, because I
always declare my specimens. And then and then they fuck
can they just shuff with They spitch you out and
you go get your bag and that's it. So it was,
you know, it was surprising. It was the technology is
replacing the Uh, I guess it's just gonna be the
norm now. They take a picture all the face recognition. Shit,
what how if you get if you get like lip
injections and the facelift, how does that affect the face recognition?
Can face recognition take that into account, like for mar
A Lago face and shit, wouldn't it be funny? I
like to do one of those face tune apps where
I inject my own face with lip filler and it
looks like I'm just making duck lip selfies all the time,
Like what is it like? Bezos his wife? Have you
seen her? She's hilarious, you know, she got the whole
It looks like a fucking wax mannequin like it that
like partially melted. It's amazing though, It's really hilarious. So
I'd like to I do that occasionally. Sometimes you can
download the face tune app and do that to yourself
to see what you look like. Anyway, Okay, I think
we're almost here. I will say the Amazon was really nice.
I you know, you have to be in a mindset
to be in that kind of setting just because of
the high amount of swamp ass and schiggers that one
encounters there. And but and it's remarkable, but you know,
and also I mean, tropical plants, a lot of them
look very much alike if you don't have reproductive structure,
so it kind of forces you to focus more on
very subtle leaf characteristics like is it petiolet, how long
is the petiole? What's the margin? Like, of course opposite
are alternate leaves, but that's a given anyway, Venation I
was doing a lot of I was paying a lot
of attention to leave venation because you know that you
don't have much to go on. You don't have much
else to go on it because the s A lot
of shit's not flowering because it's on the understory, there's
not much light, or the reproductive structures are way high
up if it's you know, a leana, a robust mine,
or if it's a tree, so you know it's it's
a whole different mindset. And then yeah, there's chiggers on everything.
You've gotta get chiggers. You go to the Amazon, you're
gonna get schigers. But I can see falling into that
mindset of like lowland tropical botany, because not all tropical
botanies alike. Obviously, there's a range of elevations that dictate
the different different environmental pressures in different settings. You know that.
I'm definitely like the higher elevation stuff more. It's more
more of a temperate setting, you know, climates that rarely
exceed eighty degrees fahrenheit, and the thin air causes more.
You know, that thin air too causes a wider it
means the you know, obviously, the the air can't hold
onto as much heat at night, so it cools off
wider fl sluctuations between temperature, which is when you've got
day and night temperatures, you know, varying so much. That's
a unique suite of environmental pressures that then select for
different traits right where you get the fuzzy leaves, you know,
increased UV because there's less atmosphere. I like all that stuff.
It's it's a it's something that people who have only
ever practiced botany or you know, paid attention to plants
in the temperate latitudes. It's a suite of traits that
they may not be used to and that they you know,
wouldn't foresee. It's a whole different fucking ball game. But
I like that the higher elevation stuff you'd have to
get in a whole different mindset to do to do
lowland tropical botany, and maybe one day I'll be in
air for it. You know, maybe one day I won't
care if my ass has twenty chigger bytes on it
all the time. You know, you'll like one heels and
stop stitching and you just get another one. That doesn't
mean you know, you just you always have chigger bytes
on your ass, or you're you're you know balls, or
could you get chigger pikes in your laby? I hope
not that you know. See, we asked the important questions
here at crime pace. Guy, what a fucking chiggers are horrible, man, horrible?
And I still haven't found a way to get rid
of them? If anybody knows of a way to prevent them.
That's not just permethrin. We all know about permethrin. What
do do you take vaciline? Can you make a concoction
of vaciline and sulfur and slather it on? What do
you do? Because they crawl up your pants and then
they'll go in your fucking waistband and your shirt and everything.
You can't even see the little fuckers. And then what
are they doing when there's no people around? They're mostly eating?
What are they what are they parasitizing little rodents and
reptiles and shit? I don't know. Keep thinking back to
that pristamanthus frog we've seen with the tadpoles on its
back because it's so cute, or excuse me, it was
an ecuador a poison frog. It was different genus, I believe,
but I had the little tadpoles on its back. She
was carrying her tadpoles on her back. Isn't it cute?
Or is it the males that do that? I don't
fucking know anyway, But you know, the the lowlands, that's
a whole other world. You gotta prep yourself. It's hard
to go back and forth between the different mindsets of
mid to high elevation tropical botany and then true low
lowland rainforest tropical botany. I'm here for it, though, man.
The amount of fucking Leanna's so many, so many leanis
down their roebust vines, right climbable vines. So anyway, I
gotta go to thorn Scrub. The bobcat was at thorn
Scrub last night. We've had a pig. We've been trying
to kill it as as well. That comes through, but
good luck because they are. The pigs are so good
at avoiding being detected. I think Javier said that when
him and his friend were down there, they had luck
doing a call like mimicking an injured animal, and that
actually helped bring the pigs in. Because the pigs are
looking for shit to eat. They think they can eat
an injured animal. They're gonna go for it, so that
that might work, But then you would need some sort
of normal scope or something too. I just can't wait
to shoot one of these motherfuckers. I hate the fucking
I hate feral pigs. They're just they're so damaging, so
fucking damaging, way more so than Havelinus could ever be,
and way bigger than Haveleena could ever be as well.
Hopefully that bobcat was eating some of the rabbits, though,
we get the little desert cottontails. You know, there's a
relative of wolverines that lives in the rainforest as well,
like a lowland tropical wolverine relative. What is that? I
don't know what that is. Anyway, we'll end it there.
Thanks for listening. Hopefully you know the background noise. I
wasn't sitting at home in my office with the nice
mic you know, I'm just recording the shit on my phone,
so hopefully the background noise was okay. Were you okay
with it? Are you gonna be okay? Huh? I still
hope you got something out of this. I'll be in
Saint Louis. I'm giving some presentation on the twenty eighth
of February or March first. I forget what date is.
I don't know. I gotta look at my calendar. I'm
doing a number I'm going. I'll be at the Carnivorous
Plant Society in May. I'll be at the Aeroid Society
presentation in September. I'll be where else am I going?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 1: I'm doing some book thing at the end of April.
I'm supposed to speak on April eleventh at the San
Antonio Book Fair, but I'm probably gonna go to the
Philippines instead because I got invited to go and out
of San Antonio book for it. They're not paying me
enough for my time up there, you know, let's say,
because I got to drive and everything, you know, and
I forget what else. I'm gonna be doing a bunch
of other things too, but I forget, who gives a
shit whatever? You'll catch me around sometime sooner or later.
I hope you're having a good day. I hope you're
having a real nice time, and I mean that genuinely,
even though it sounds like I'm being so casting. Have
a rest of your day, and again, I'll put some
resources in the description here for Ecuador Botany, as well
as the course materials folder. That's all I got. Go
buck yourself by