Estado de Hidalgo Rants

<v Speaker 1>Welcome to another episode of the crime pacer Bot and
<v Speaker 1>he doesn't podcasts. I'm doing us on the road again.
<v Speaker 1>I'm really juggling a lot here where. Anyway, it's a
<v Speaker 1>few days later since the last podcast night that we
<v Speaker 1>were in San Luis Poto C. Today I'm with my
<v Speaker 1>friend Seesar and we're in Hidalgo State. Beautiful Hidalgo State.
<v Speaker 1>We're driving past these fucking pecan orchards right now. We're
<v Speaker 1>in elevation at forty three hundred feet. It's been in
<v Speaker 1>a pretty incredible couple of days. I feel totally high
<v Speaker 1>from all the crazy shit I've seen, really amazing geology,
<v Speaker 1>calcareous shale and yeah, mostly the calcarious shales. Look up
<v Speaker 1>for to tope. We've hit a few topays along the road.
<v Speaker 1>You know, it's a good analogy for life. Every once
<v Speaker 1>in a while, you hit an unnecessary tope, completely pointless
<v Speaker 1>that they put it there and you don't see it
<v Speaker 1>till the last minute, and you end up flying up
<v Speaker 1>in the whole fucking car. You know, you break the axles,
<v Speaker 1>shits flying all over the place. You know, you hit
<v Speaker 1>your head on the ceiling. Whatever. But anyway, these calcarious
<v Speaker 1>shit topped by layers of flood basalts, some of it
<v Speaker 1>columnar jointing. Ooh uh and uh, I finally got to
<v Speaker 1>see Cephalo sirius sceinalists, which I don't know why I
<v Speaker 1>had such a strong draw to that cactus species, but
<v Speaker 1>I did. And I think because I've grown been growing
<v Speaker 1>one for the last two or three years. And uh,
<v Speaker 1>they're just so well adapted because those spines have been
<v Speaker 1>modified into hairs. You know. It's one of many plants
<v Speaker 1>colloquially referred to as the old Man cactus, the viahito
<v Speaker 1>and uh, it's this guy gonna let you go with,
<v Speaker 1>you know anyway, Hotel grant Adidas. It's where we stayed
<v Speaker 1>last night, where they charged it for the water, you know,
<v Speaker 1>and it didn't have bad bugs out. It's good, wonderful,
<v Speaker 1>wonderful decoor, though I will say so. Uh, but you know,
<v Speaker 1>Cephalo serious sinas. So the spines have been modified into tricombs.
<v Speaker 1>Some of it it looks like it's like gray pubes.
<v Speaker 1>I know that sounds really disturbing, just forgive me, but
<v Speaker 1>I don't know how else to say it. Maybe because
<v Speaker 1>they're wiry, you know, there're not like Hey, they're not
<v Speaker 1>like smooth hairs. They're wiry hairs. And I guess they
<v Speaker 1>can do that. My theory is that they can do
<v Speaker 1>that because they grow on such incredibly steep calcareous slopes
<v Speaker 1>that they almost don't really need spines because they're out
<v Speaker 1>of reach of anything that might eat them to begin with.
<v Speaker 1>So they can, you know, they say, fuck it, we're
<v Speaker 1>just gonna turn these into this coat of hairs. What's been,
<v Speaker 1>you know, mind blowing to me is just how mild
<v Speaker 1>the climate is. I mean, it is December, it's winter,
<v Speaker 1>but you know, I was wearing a hoodie yesterday, and
<v Speaker 1>then I'm sure in the summer it's just hot as balls.
<v Speaker 1>But yeah, I mean it's been. It's been really pleasant. Again.
<v Speaker 1>We're at you know, forty three hundred feet elevation, and
<v Speaker 1>we are in these canyons. They mostly grow in these
<v Speaker 1>steep canyons, very very steep canyons, unstable shale and tallis
<v Speaker 1>and yeah, man, it's been. It was great to see
<v Speaker 1>these things thirty feet tall, some of them, you know,
<v Speaker 1>growing with pinion pines. In one spot, these weeping pinion pines,
<v Speaker 1>the Mexican weeping pinion pine Pinus Pinsiana. Okay, that was nice.
<v Speaker 1>That was a really beautiful glaucus yucca. And we're you know,
<v Speaker 1>we're headed up to the cloud forest. We're going through
<v Speaker 1>all these mid elevation areas. Now we're forty eight hundred
<v Speaker 1>feet going off past Cephalo series. Menzilia is so dominant here.
<v Speaker 1>There's Menzilia everywhere, and this one is really I mean,
<v Speaker 1>it really sticks to you. We came out covered in
<v Speaker 1>the leaves. What is that leon? Notice that invasive lamy ace.
<v Speaker 1>There's Florenzia resinosa again, some massive bushes of that we
<v Speaker 1>saw yesterday, along with Fukaria fasiculada. Absolutely mind blowing plant.
<v Speaker 1>Probably one of the most bizarre plants I've seen. Here's
<v Speaker 1>Nicotiana glaca treat tobacco invasive his hell, which is invasion
<v Speaker 1>of his hell in California as well. But Fukaria fasiculada
<v Speaker 1>is one of the weirdest. I mean, it's up there
<v Speaker 1>with well witchy. You know when people ask me the
<v Speaker 1>thibor play it, and you know, it'said, fucking I love
<v Speaker 1>all of them, right, but Forcaria for siculata, I mean,
<v Speaker 1>there's just these doctor Sussian bottle trees. And you can,
<v Speaker 1>you know, when you see like a colony of ten
<v Speaker 1>of them. I don't know if it's all the same
<v Speaker 1>individual or different seedlings, but each one is like the
<v Speaker 1>size of a fucking yoga bowl, you know, and green
<v Speaker 1>and just has it. It looks like a bottle, like
<v Speaker 1>one of those weird fucking Kianti bottles? Is that what
<v Speaker 1>it is? I don't drink. What's this shit called kyanti?
<v Speaker 1>I think it's called kanti? What is it? What is it?
<v Speaker 1>I don't know. I fucking hate alcohol. I hate alcohol.
<v Speaker 1>I can't stand it makes people fucking insufferable. But uh, okay,
<v Speaker 1>we go. We gotta stand on the road here. Oh
<v Speaker 1>what's this leg him? But it's all this calcareous geology.
<v Speaker 1>And then to this morning we eat a wonderful little jaunt,
<v Speaker 1>a little wonderful sachet up a fucking really narrow wash
<v Speaker 1>that was all calcareous shale. But then there'd be the occasi,
<v Speaker 1>you know, boulder of basalt that came down from up
<v Speaker 1>top because there was a much younger layer of flood
<v Speaker 1>basalts that apparently was draped over all of the calcarious
<v Speaker 1>geology like a beautiful icing on top of a cake.
<v Speaker 1>But yeah, the Fulkaria fisiculata. I mean we left yesterday
<v Speaker 1>at dusk on these completely sketchy roads, windy sketchy roads
<v Speaker 1>with you know, little pecan orchards down below, going up this,
<v Speaker 1>you know this place where there shouldn't it seems like
<v Speaker 1>there shouldn't even be a road, you know, it felt
<v Speaker 1>like you know, I used to work I was working
<v Speaker 1>for the road. I used to do conductor jobs up
<v Speaker 1>the Feather River Canyon and it was just the same thing.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, they're just giant, just complete the whole the
<v Speaker 1>mountain just wants to come down, wants to come down
<v Speaker 1>and wants to get washed out to sea. It's worse,
<v Speaker 1>it's going through. It's bound for the ocean, you know,
<v Speaker 1>it wants to go be free. And so there's just
<v Speaker 1>these giant boulders coming down everywhere. Giant. I mean, it's
<v Speaker 1>the maintenance that was required both on the Feather River
<v Speaker 1>Canyon Railroad in northern California and Plumus County as well
<v Speaker 1>as here. It's just nuts. I mean, the canyon was
<v Speaker 1>just insane, but it's all that calcarious geology and then
<v Speaker 1>you'd see these massive hanging over the side of these
<v Speaker 1>rock cuts high above you, these massive Fukaria fisiculata, and
<v Speaker 1>then we find a little area where we get in there.
<v Speaker 1>In my first experience with that species came from a
<v Speaker 1>shipment of poach specimens that sewel Ross University received from
<v Speaker 1>Customs was probably going to some Japanese traders or some
<v Speaker 1>bullshit plant fetishes that have no collectors, that have no
<v Speaker 1>respect for habitat or interest in habitat, or interest in conservation.
<v Speaker 1>They're just, you know, they're like, they're like they might
<v Speaker 1>as well be breeding poodles or something, you know, for
<v Speaker 1>the dog shows and shit. I mean just they're kind
<v Speaker 1>of like irrelevant shit and beautiful plants they make. I'll
<v Speaker 1>give them that, but you know, the destruction of habitat
<v Speaker 1>that's entailed versus why not just get a couple of seats?
<v Speaker 1>Did do those people did? Like any of these these
<v Speaker 1>you know boutiques, these boutique growers in Asia, they or
<v Speaker 1>check or stuff, they have any interest in habitat? Do
<v Speaker 1>they care about habitat at all? I don't know. I
<v Speaker 1>doubt it. I doubt it. I just you know, they're
<v Speaker 1>just hoarding primace. Might as well be collecting star wars,
<v Speaker 1>figurines or fucking you know, seventies lunch boxes or something anyway,
<v Speaker 1>But for cary for sticular, I didn't know they got
<v Speaker 1>that bit because the only time I've ever seen them
<v Speaker 1>was poach specimens that were very small. These were fucking massive,
<v Speaker 1>I mean, twenty thirty feet tall. They were flowering. To
<v Speaker 1>the flowers imply moth pollination. They're white, they've got exerted anthers,
<v Speaker 1>so they're outside of the corolla, like, you know, jutting
<v Speaker 1>outside the corolla. So a moth, a moth could uh
<v Speaker 1>you know, feasibly be going for some nectar and then
<v Speaker 1>just get dusted, get its head dusted with some pollen.
<v Speaker 1>And what was interesting to me was that the leaves
<v Speaker 1>of you know, because that's all Okatello species do is
<v Speaker 1>they turn their petioles into spines, right, but all there's
<v Speaker 1>lois Cilia mexicana, is that what it is, the Mexican
<v Speaker 1>of the red one polmoniacy. But you know, they that's
<v Speaker 1>all Oktas are doing, is turning their petioles into spines.
<v Speaker 1>Like on fucurious splendns, the one you get in Arizona,
<v Speaker 1>California and West Texas. The leaf blade emerges photosynthesizers for
<v Speaker 1>a while, it's got a pettiole about an inch inch
<v Speaker 1>and a half long, two inches long sometimes, and then
<v Speaker 1>the leaf blade falls off. The petiole remains, and now
<v Speaker 1>you've got a spine. But on this, on Fysiculata, it
<v Speaker 1>seemed like the leaf blade emerges and then while the
<v Speaker 1>leaf is still photosynthetically active, the red pettiole kind of
<v Speaker 1>breaks off from the leaf blade like a like a sheath.
<v Speaker 1>And then and then you know, becomes protective while the
<v Speaker 1>leaf is still active. The leaf blade doesn't need to
<v Speaker 1>fall off, so I couldn't see you. And then they've
<v Speaker 1>got fo curious went ends has the second year's growth.
<v Speaker 1>It comes out of fascicles, you know, So the first
<v Speaker 1>year leaf has a pettiole. In the second year leaf
<v Speaker 1>just comes out of fascicles. But in these it seems
<v Speaker 1>I didn't see any second year leaves. I don't know,
<v Speaker 1>but there weren't a lot of leaves. They weren't fully
<v Speaker 1>leafed out, so who knows. Oh yeah, see, we're getting
<v Speaker 1>much more verdant than green. God, it's crazy how quick
<v Speaker 1>it changes. Holy fuck, I guess we did go up
<v Speaker 1>a thousand feet. But uh, now there's junipers and oaks,
<v Speaker 1>this beautiful hillside covered in junipers and oaks, junipers flaccida,
<v Speaker 1>and oh wow, what is it? I don't know what
<v Speaker 1>the hell end was? Was that the what is the
<v Speaker 1>which the suppothe genus begins with the seas? Forget we
<v Speaker 1>saw one of them, rutasies. The family pubescents is the species.
<v Speaker 1>Kind of a rare species there were There was only
<v Speaker 1>one other one or two other observations on a naturalist
<v Speaker 1>before Cassa moroa. That's it, cassiroa. God, there's still mortillocactus,
<v Speaker 1>but it's growing with oaks and juniperse It's so mind
<v Speaker 1>imbing here. It really challenges it challenges your assumptions at least.
<v Speaker 1>Did you come from northern latitudes about about what the
<v Speaker 1>habit that is? You know, if it's if it's uh,
<v Speaker 1>there's a clematis, if it's desert, if it's fucking oak woodland,
<v Speaker 1>what is it? You know? It's just it's it's because
<v Speaker 1>it's it's kind of neither. I mean, it can be both,
<v Speaker 1>I guess, but it's just seasonal dryness. It's really all
<v Speaker 1>it is. At low latitudes, it's seasonal dryness at low latitudes,
<v Speaker 1>things are so different. At the lower latitudes, you can
<v Speaker 1>have you know, plant communities composed of species you would
<v Speaker 1>never expect to sea together. It's quite bizarre. We just
<v Speaker 1>we've seen a sign. It's just say vnded Barregos. Do
<v Speaker 1>you want to buy a sheep? And I had half
<v Speaker 1>a mind to say yes after I saw those baby
<v Speaker 1>goats in that wash today. It was quite adorable. Our
<v Speaker 1>goats are terrible for the fucking East. They're like cats.
<v Speaker 1>But but you know, they are cute, and they are cute,
<v Speaker 1>you know, and you can you keep a goat indoors?
<v Speaker 1>Can you do that? Could you keep a goat? You
<v Speaker 1>could put it in a little touxedo and shit dress
<v Speaker 1>it up? Is that animal abuse? I don't think so
<v Speaker 1>put a little sailor head. Yeah. We were walking up
<v Speaker 1>this really narrow wash, but very easy to climb due
<v Speaker 1>to the tilted bedding planes of the shale, and I
<v Speaker 1>saw these two little baby goats. I was just standing
<v Speaker 1>there filming a thirty foot tall cephalo series growing out
<v Speaker 1>of the canyon wall, and there was a there was
<v Speaker 1>a couple of little baby goats and then one of
<v Speaker 1>them was one of them was chilled. The other was
<v Speaker 1>kind of freaked out. I think they had just been born.
<v Speaker 1>The placenta was still there. And AM heard the one
<v Speaker 1>freaking out and came down. I saw, I saw those horns.
<v Speaker 1>I said, fuck this and jetted. But then she seemed
<v Speaker 1>timid anyway, and I was able to just walk right
<v Speaker 1>by them, thankfully, like two feet away from them, because
<v Speaker 1>it was a narrow canyon, you know, they were, and
<v Speaker 1>she chose a good spot to you know, to do
<v Speaker 1>her to have her kids. But shit, So anyway, we
<v Speaker 1>just passed the little garden full of Brookmonzi's in this
<v Speaker 1>tiny little cobblestone village. And so there's brook manzi is
<v Speaker 1>growing here too, which you know, if you know, don't
<v Speaker 1>like a lot of heat. So that's the thing. And
<v Speaker 1>there was just mortillocactus five hundred feet below. So that's
<v Speaker 1>fucking with. That's what's going on here ecologically and floristically
<v Speaker 1>and climatically in terms of plant communities. Got that lois
<v Speaker 1>Cilia's beautiful. Okay, that's a common genus. We've been seeing.
<v Speaker 1>This one, the red one, the red flowered one, is
<v Speaker 1>quite common at higher elevations. It's a more music and
<v Speaker 1>cooler species. But then you've got these little purple ones
<v Speaker 1>that grow on the more lower elevation dry scrublands. But
<v Speaker 1>they've all got those purplish blue anthers, purplish blue pollen. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>so now we just went over this little ridge, I
<v Speaker 1>mean literally, it's been thirty seconds and now we opened
<v Speaker 1>opened up into this tree filled valley filled with cypresses
<v Speaker 1>and oaks, has sparaciprus. Oh, there's pines here. I guess
<v Speaker 1>it's just petula and planted cypresses and oaks. It's just
<v Speaker 1>it's totally verdant in green, and it looks like the
<v Speaker 1>countryside of Marine County or some shit. It's crazy Marine County, California,
<v Speaker 1>you know, very expensive, very expensive, lots of rich people.
<v Speaker 1>You're gonna get yelled at dogs not on a leash,
<v Speaker 1>and uh, you know, and then maybe someone might try
<v Speaker 1>to sell you an herbal colonic. You never know, could
<v Speaker 1>be both right. It's some new age healers, you know,
<v Speaker 1>they're having tantric sex orgies in a fucking yert somewhere.
<v Speaker 1>It's one Marine County. That's Sonoma too. Anyway, it's wild.
<v Speaker 1>So it's just it's crazy how quick it changes all
<v Speaker 1>the moisture evidently kept in this little bowl, and then
<v Speaker 1>when you go outside the bowl it gets drier. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>this is so verdant in it's crazy. Myrtillocact's just on
<v Speaker 1>the other side of that little ridge nuts. Oh it's shady,
<v Speaker 1>it's music, it's moist. It's very nice here. But anyway,
<v Speaker 1>back to the Bucharia physculada, So that's that spot again.
<v Speaker 1>It's in a very narrow canyon. They're up on the
<v Speaker 1>on the ridges too. On these slopes. The terrain again,
<v Speaker 1>really I think it really affects what I guess, how
<v Speaker 1>armed these plants can be or not armed in the
<v Speaker 1>case of Cephalos series, because it's so steep, it's such
<v Speaker 1>unstable terrain. You know, you figure a giant sloth would
<v Speaker 1>have a lot of trouble, you know, a ground sloth
<v Speaker 1>would have a lot of trouble fucking around on those
<v Speaker 1>slopes without falling and breaking its ass because they're they're
<v Speaker 1>unstable and there's I mean, a human can barely walk
<v Speaker 1>on any of on any of these It's it's really
<v Speaker 1>really sketchy, and especially because of how easily the substrate crumples.
<v Speaker 1>But but yeah, god, there was some beautiful Tilanzia species
<v Speaker 1>like three feet long, you know, leaf plates five inches long.
<v Speaker 1>You know, some of these designer tilanzi as you see
<v Speaker 1>in these expensive plant boutiques. They were just draped all
<v Speaker 1>over these these things at the base, I mean, really peculiar,
<v Speaker 1>you know, just drinking through their leaves, doing the whole
<v Speaker 1>Tlanzia thing. You know, no roots, barely any roots at all.
<v Speaker 1>I don't need them. They're just facultative anchors. Anyway. They
<v Speaker 1>drink through the peltate, that is, shield like tricombes on
<v Speaker 1>there on their leaves. Looks like a little umbrella. If
<v Speaker 1>you were to do a cross section, like a vertical
<v Speaker 1>cross section of the leaf, it would look like a
<v Speaker 1>you know, it's a pelte tricho. It looked like a
<v Speaker 1>little umbrella coming right off the leaf surface of the epidermis.
<v Speaker 1>Beautiful plants though, beautiful, I mean fuck. There were like
<v Speaker 1>four or five different species of Tilansia. And then we
<v Speaker 1>saw this this area we went by. I could see
<v Speaker 1>it from high up on this sketchy one lane ridge
<v Speaker 1>that you know, strangely enough, had giant mac trucks going
<v Speaker 1>by every thirty minutes on it, you know, like dump
<v Speaker 1>trucks often they go over because it, again, it's really steep.
<v Speaker 1>And it was on those sketchy ridges that I saw
<v Speaker 1>a Nahuatlia species, which is endemic to Hidalgo, you know,
<v Speaker 1>relative of guk Nadia. This thing looked like it might
<v Speaker 1>have been a proteace or something. It had sessile I
<v Speaker 1>think it was mostly sessile eaves, or if they were,
<v Speaker 1>there was only a tiny petiole. It had a white undersides.
<v Speaker 1>It was Nahualia Herlingiana h E R. I'm not gonna
<v Speaker 1>try to spell it. I'll suck it up. But if
<v Speaker 1>you look in the Floristic Checklist of Mexico, it's a
<v Speaker 1>list of the entire country of Mexico, a checklist. I'll
<v Speaker 1>actually put it. I'll put a link in the podcast
<v Speaker 1>description because it's a great it's a great resource to have.
<v Speaker 1>But but yeah, anyway, so you know, if you find it,
<v Speaker 1>you can find it if you just look up Nahuatlia
<v Speaker 1>formerly guk Nadia. I guess it would have been guck
<v Speaker 1>Nadia maybe when the list came out, I don't know,
<v Speaker 1>but I saw that there as well. But when that
<v Speaker 1>was really peculre, I mean, again, the terrain is just
<v Speaker 1>so incredibly steep. It's like the Andes. It reminds me
<v Speaker 1>of parts of the Andy's and so anyway, when shortly
<v Speaker 1>after that, I was looking over the side of the
<v Speaker 1>ridge down below at some beautiful columnar cacti that were
<v Speaker 1>probably twenty thirty feet tall, multiple stems, but they looked
<v Speaker 1>like they were all white at the top, so I
<v Speaker 1>assumed it was Cephlo Serious, but that would be You
<v Speaker 1>never see Cephalo Serious clumped so closely together like that,
<v Speaker 1>you know, twenty thirty stems on the same individual, So
<v Speaker 1>that seemed very odd to me. But they did have
<v Speaker 1>this white top, and I figured it was just the
<v Speaker 1>white hairs of Cephalo Serious sceniless. And then we got
<v Speaker 1>closer and I realized it was all vulture shit, and
<v Speaker 1>the vultures were hanging out on top of these cacti,
<v Speaker 1>shitting on them, shit, pruning the cacti. You know, a
<v Speaker 1>columnar cactus can only take so much shit on top
<v Speaker 1>of it before it starts to rot, you know, from
<v Speaker 1>excess nitrogen as well as just bacteria in the shit
<v Speaker 1>slowly starting to finally decompose the cactus. And so these
<v Speaker 1>cactus the tops would get shipped on by the vultures.
<v Speaker 1>We hang out on them, got some wonderful shots of
<v Speaker 1>all the vultures hanging out of them, and then the
<v Speaker 1>top would die and then it would re sprout from
<v Speaker 1>the bass from a dormant but at the base and
<v Speaker 1>grow a new stem, and so they were kind of
<v Speaker 1>like shit printing them. They had ended up having a
<v Speaker 1>very a very bizarre shape, a very bizarre habit, and
<v Speaker 1>it was fucking hilarious. But yeah, then the tops would
<v Speaker 1>die and they were just covered in bird shit and
<v Speaker 1>then they would you know, start rotting away, and then
<v Speaker 1>it would so that it was not severalo serious. It
<v Speaker 1>was isolato series du mortierray, which I realized when I
<v Speaker 1>got closer to it almost looked like which can look
<v Speaker 1>like Pakistris webre, you know, the giant what's the common
<v Speaker 1>name for Pakiste's webre? You know oregonos? Yeah, so, uh,
<v Speaker 1>but they don't come that, they don't come that far north,
<v Speaker 1>so uh yeah, man, I don't know. It was it
<v Speaker 1>was really bizarre to see, really cool. I also saw
<v Speaker 1>an endemic and very rare species of Scootelaria, a red Scootelaria,
<v Speaker 1>growing out of the cliffs with very short abbreviated leaves.
<v Speaker 1>Probably I don't know what a centimeter was it just
<v Speaker 1>a male of propism, I mean to say attenuated. I
<v Speaker 1>don't know, like abbreviated it works too very uh, you know,
<v Speaker 1>maybe a centimeter long opposite leaves. And then the big
<v Speaker 1>giveaway that it was a scuotelaria is when you look
<v Speaker 1>at the klyx, it looks like a little mouth, like
<v Speaker 1>a little like duck lips mouth, like a duck lip selfie,
<v Speaker 1>you know, looks like the Mara a Lago face. God,
<v Speaker 1>that's fucking you know what mar a Lago faces say? Sir,
<v Speaker 1>you do do it? Yeah, do it. Let's do an
<v Speaker 1>impression of it, like look, but when you gotta get
<v Speaker 1>a face lift and some shit injected. You know, when
<v Speaker 1>you hate yourself and you don't you don't know how
<v Speaker 1>to love yourself and the way you look, and so
<v Speaker 1>you you have to fuck your face up with injection.
<v Speaker 1>I think it's hilarious. It's also very tragic and sad.
<v Speaker 1>But when it's happening to rich people, it's okay. It's well,
<v Speaker 1>it's not okay, but it's funny. It's I have sympathy
<v Speaker 1>for everybody, love for all you know, uh, you know,
<v Speaker 1>even the fucking Charlotteans that profess to be Christians, but
<v Speaker 1>you know, if they met Jesus, they'd probably crucifying themselves.
<v Speaker 1>You know, he's a fucking pacifist Kami. We don't want
<v Speaker 1>that shit here, right, We're gonna believe our our bottom
<v Speaker 1>of the brainstem. What the fuck. Oh that's a massive landslide.
<v Speaker 1>Huh Holy shit, that's a massive landslide. God damn it
<v Speaker 1>that they're working on repair and I see three guys
<v Speaker 1>staring at a hole in the ground. Holy shit, God,
<v Speaker 1>the mountains just want to come down. You know, it's
<v Speaker 1>just constant maintenance. But you get that the rumbas, and
<v Speaker 1>maybe you get some you know, celasipies. I wonder if
<v Speaker 1>silasipes up at the Korum comes up this far north
<v Speaker 1>it does, right, Yeah, that probably because it's down in Mexico.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah yeah, Oh, get alane up here, and it's one
<v Speaker 1>of the most beautiful psychoactive mushroom species. Velasa bees up
<v Speaker 1>at the Coorum with this. Oh god, it was it
<v Speaker 1>was I remember almost I remember it was getting rained
<v Speaker 1>and we were in a very narrow gorge and uh,
<v Speaker 1>I think it was in Morels in twenty twenty two,
<v Speaker 1>and we were looking at these like nine inch talls
<v Speaker 1>velasa bees up at the corum and we got we
<v Speaker 1>got fucking started pouring on us and I had to
<v Speaker 1>climb up a hillside covered in poison ivy. I didn't
<v Speaker 1>get any though, amazingly, I think because it was raining
<v Speaker 1>so hard, completely soaked. I had a luckily, I had
<v Speaker 1>a waterproof you know, messenger bag. I threw my gear
<v Speaker 1>in there. This slope was just you know, excruciating to
<v Speaker 1>climb up because he kept falling, was so steep and unstable.
<v Speaker 1>And then we got to the top and we were
<v Speaker 1>all all fucking stoke because these things, these mushrooms were
<v Speaker 1>so beautiful, they were so it was such a cool spot,
<v Speaker 1>you know. But you know, it's so you had to
<v Speaker 1>go through the ovelget see if garbage to get to
<v Speaker 1>them first, because everybody get the litters, so they see it.
<v Speaker 1>It's like they see a hillside down here, and they
<v Speaker 1>want to just throw garbage over the side of it.
<v Speaker 1>You know, if you don't have any garbage, fuck it,
<v Speaker 1>we'll make them. You know, do we have any garbage
<v Speaker 1>we can we can get to throw over the hillside,
<v Speaker 1>say sor let's pick a. Let's pick a fucking right
<v Speaker 1>up here, pull over here, we'll throw some garbage over
<v Speaker 1>the side, fuck it, you know, just like plastic bottles, shit, paper,
<v Speaker 1>plastic bags. Ah, it's been it's been disconcerting seeing the
<v Speaker 1>amount of disrespect that Mexicans have for their native flora,
<v Speaker 1>just like Americans. You know, it's everywhere. This is like
<v Speaker 1>a I guess, you know, if I was like a
<v Speaker 1>twenty year old sociology student, I'd say it's, you know,
<v Speaker 1>the product of colonialism. But I think it's a little
<v Speaker 1>bit more nuanced and deeper than that. I think it's
<v Speaker 1>I think it's a fundamental disconnection from reality. And I
<v Speaker 1>do get tired the identity indigenous people. Indigenous people are
<v Speaker 1>the protectors. There was that stupid fucking meme going on, right,
<v Speaker 1>and I'm not knocking indigenous people, of course, but this
<v Speaker 1>is really simplistic thinking. It's buzzwords, it's token ism, it's
<v Speaker 1>borderline racist and fucking corny. Aside from just being fucking
<v Speaker 1>corny as hell, you know, a human is a human
<v Speaker 1>is a human right. Not every culture some did, some don't.
<v Speaker 1>Not every culture that was happened to be indigenous you know,
<v Speaker 1>has naturally has respect for their place and things right,
<v Speaker 1>some do, some don't. But uh yeah, it's been it's
<v Speaker 1>been wild to just see them. Mean, you know, the
<v Speaker 1>ship that the destruction that goes on the like, you know, plants,
<v Speaker 1>the native plants are always seen as messy. And then
<v Speaker 1>you go to like the downtown plaza and its plazas,
<v Speaker 1>and it's always the corniest. You know, I will lead
<v Speaker 1>a grandma shit, no offense that do love. You know,
<v Speaker 1>the granty's are shut out to them. You know, we
<v Speaker 1>much some wonderful uh you know, old old ladies here,
<v Speaker 1>but it's you know what I mean, the the bogain
<v Speaker 1>v is, the abulitist style garden design of like bogain
<v Speaker 1>v is, and just fucking cast arrhinas, the Australian pines
<v Speaker 1>as they call them, which are actually more closely related
<v Speaker 1>to oaks. You always, you always see this shit, you know, planted,
<v Speaker 1>and wherever Latin America or United States, you see complete
<v Speaker 1>disregard for the native plants, complete disinterest in them. They're
<v Speaker 1>seen as messy. You know. I think it's just again,
<v Speaker 1>technology allows humanity to get far away from nature, and
<v Speaker 1>once we realize we don't need it anymore, or we
<v Speaker 1>think we don't need anymore, then we stop caring about
<v Speaker 1>it and failed to see the bigger picture, you know,
<v Speaker 1>whereas societies that realize they do need it because they
<v Speaker 1>have to live within it, that's where it comes from,
<v Speaker 1>you know. But again, just because someone's inherently got a
<v Speaker 1>certain fucking there's no like genetic disposition for this, which
<v Speaker 1>you know, the identitarians seem to imply, there's no genetic
<v Speaker 1>position for an awareness or appreciation of these things or respect.
<v Speaker 1>You know, yes, I don't know, I think that. But again,
<v Speaker 1>the thing that's kept most of Mexico intact comparatively to
<v Speaker 1>the United States is the Ahito system, the fact that
<v Speaker 1>developers can't move in and swiftly fuck up and destroy,
<v Speaker 1>and just the fact that they don't have this you know,
<v Speaker 1>they want they might want it, but they don't have this.
<v Speaker 1>This economy based on urban sprawl, you know, intense consumerism
<v Speaker 1>to the extent that Americans do, and especially fucking driving.
<v Speaker 1>The driving requires so much space, the parking lots, all
<v Speaker 1>that shit. But you know that said, I was in
<v Speaker 1>Mexico City and of course it smells like a parking garage.
<v Speaker 1>Cancer rates through the roof due to all the pollution.
<v Speaker 1>There's extreme health effects, and people insist on driving despite
<v Speaker 1>the fact that the fucking bus and the subway system
<v Speaker 1>are excellent and they only cost six pace. We rode
<v Speaker 1>a lot of buses just a few days ago, a
<v Speaker 1>lot of buses. Wonderful system they got, these street buses.
<v Speaker 1>The buses basically are treated like street cars. They've got
<v Speaker 1>their own lane no one can drive in. They're separated
<v Speaker 1>from the other traffic lanes by concrete bumpers. You board
<v Speaker 1>them at four feet high. You know, they're so there's
<v Speaker 1>like a platform where you wait in the center. You know,
<v Speaker 1>it feels like the Brown Line in Chicago when it's
<v Speaker 1>running at street level. You know you're the or like
<v Speaker 1>the Blue line on when it's running down the I
<v Speaker 1>two ninety, like where the platforms in the center and
<v Speaker 1>and the bus lanes on either side. It's really nice,
<v Speaker 1>and people still insist on driving despite the faith. We
<v Speaker 1>will fucking take you an hour to go what it
<v Speaker 1>would take you forty minutes to walk. That's how fucking
<v Speaker 1>bad the traffic is. People still insist on doing It
<v Speaker 1>makes everything fucking stink. The high hell smells like a
<v Speaker 1>park of great. Metro city is great. Downtown area is
<v Speaker 1>fucking amazing. Right, you can walk, you can find anything.
<v Speaker 1>There's tons of cool museums, and people still insist on driving.
<v Speaker 1>Get the fuck out of your car. It's crazy. This
<v Speaker 1>is what people do anywhere, you know, it's wild to me.
<v Speaker 1>I don't understand why the people drive in Chicago when
<v Speaker 1>you got a wonderful public transit system there. It's fucking pathetic, man,
<v Speaker 1>Get out of Get out of your car, fatty, get
<v Speaker 1>out and take a fucking walk. What are you doing?
<v Speaker 1>You bring these thank ye, I think you have it, Mike,
<v Speaker 1>and then I can have my trunk and threaking Dean,
<v Speaker 1>and then you gotta spend twenty minutes looking for fucking parking.
<v Speaker 1>Fuck you walk? Huh? Are we going right? I think
<v Speaker 1>we're going right away. Look it's so pleasant. Look at
<v Speaker 1>these pines. Patula is there? Heart weggy and not yet
<v Speaker 1>not her weggy as higher up right right? Yeah? Man,
<v Speaker 1>oh god, beautiful mushroom diversity here. Look there's an older
<v Speaker 1>older Where could you see older growing twenty minutes after
<v Speaker 1>you just seen him? Martillo cactus? Anyway, so we just
<v Speaker 1>took a quick break. We left you for a minute.
<v Speaker 1>We were in a cloud forest fucking around looking at
<v Speaker 1>Magnolia's Guysandra I foind a really interesting centric pogon, which
<v Speaker 1>is a lowbilioid. You know, it's got that bilatterally symmetrical
<v Speaker 1>flower with the tubine. It looks like a lobilia. But
<v Speaker 1>uh but uh yeah. Now we're going to look for Meliosma,
<v Speaker 1>which is in proty alies. It's a relative of protea,
<v Speaker 1>so this should be fucking weird. Oh wow, there's obsidian
<v Speaker 1>in the mountain. That's kind of cool. We should go
<v Speaker 1>back and stop and look at that. There's obsidian buried
<v Speaker 1>in this road cut. Can we back up with a yeah?
<v Speaker 1>Let me they put the tires here for the mud
<v Speaker 1>and shit, God damn the giant chunks of obsidian. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>let's keep going up. Uh, you're good. I think there's yeah,
<v Speaker 1>giant chunks of obsidian in the mountain. Yeah. Me and
<v Speaker 1>Seesar both were both we were just we were dreaming
<v Speaker 1>about the Fukyria fisiculada last night. Yeah, we're just gonna
<v Speaker 1>park here in the side of road. It's fight. We'll
<v Speaker 1>put the blinkers on. We're gonna look at this obsidian. Oh,
<v Speaker 1>that was nice. Just the massive obsidian flow, well wasn't
<v Speaker 1>a massive It was like, you know, the sixty meters maybe, no,
<v Speaker 1>there's more. Okay, it is pretty massive on this road
<v Speaker 1>cut just coming up. Probably pretty old. It's not like
<v Speaker 1>Glass Mountain in northern California where you can actually get up.
<v Speaker 1>It's not like Glass Mountain in Northern California where you
<v Speaker 1>can actually get up and walk on the flow. This
<v Speaker 1>is uh, this is just coming on the roadside and
<v Speaker 1>it's all you know. It's in a matrix of volcanic mud.
<v Speaker 1>Like it looks like like sticky, it looks like volcanic ash,
<v Speaker 1>and you touch it, it's like volcanic clay. But but yeah,
<v Speaker 1>very interesting. So now we're going to see Meleosma, which
<v Speaker 1>is in proty Ales. Oh it was a ssyathea. It
<v Speaker 1>was a tree fern. But we're in this you know,
<v Speaker 1>really green music forest. I was excited to see Skysandra
<v Speaker 1>where we just wore as well, which you know, the
<v Speaker 1>first time I saw that planet was in Atlanta, Georgia,
<v Speaker 1>growing in a like the outskirts of a residential area.
<v Speaker 1>I think it was technically church property, but it was
<v Speaker 1>basically forest. It was still in the city limits. But
<v Speaker 1>it was for whoa fuck, and that's a broad turn.
<v Speaker 1>We should be careful anyway. Uh, but it was in
<v Speaker 1>you know, it was it was It was remnant forests
<v Speaker 1>in the Atlanta city limits that had never been destroyed
<v Speaker 1>and had been overtaken with English ivy, and you know,
<v Speaker 1>poison ivy. Poison ivy was really thriving. There is a
<v Speaker 1>is a ruteral plant and then in Sky'sandra everywhere. So god,
<v Speaker 1>I've never seen English ivy behave so invasively as I
<v Speaker 1>have in that little patch. It's very invasive. In the southeast.
<v Speaker 1>Always saw this cool solinum too, with orange fruits and
<v Speaker 1>papery papery klyxes, you know, still like the fruit ensconced
<v Speaker 1>in the klyx. But wow, look at these fucking ferns. Man.
<v Speaker 1>And we just saw a really bizarre fungus. I don't
<v Speaker 1>know what the fuck it was. I couldn't tell what
<v Speaker 1>it was, a bright orange fungus and if you touch
<v Speaker 1>it it squirted out white sportes. But it looked like
<v Speaker 1>it was had these like jelly like seeds in it too.
<v Speaker 1>It was really bizarre, right, would you say? They looked
<v Speaker 1>like seeds? Yeah, they looked like frog eggs. It was
<v Speaker 1>fucking wild. But oh yeah, thanks to Sezar for driving
<v Speaker 1>right now. My friend who's a biologist, My friend Saysar
<v Speaker 1>who's biologists from Mexico City. It did a video at
<v Speaker 1>his house last year where he was breeding all these
<v Speaker 1>rattlesnakes for release back into the wild like crotals. Zopkhn
<v Speaker 1>You still got that one, yeah, yeah, yeah, And he's
<v Speaker 1>got a male du so you know, he's making rattlesnake
<v Speaker 1>baby's in his apartment in Mexico City, which is great.
<v Speaker 1>And uh and then he's there. They're from the UK.
<v Speaker 1>He said, that's from the Yucatan likes yeah, pat h huh.
<v Speaker 1>It's a beautiful rattles like jasus. So anyway, we're gonna
<v Speaker 1>check on this smelliosma and which I was not familiar
<v Speaker 1>with until my friend Mark Olsen, who teaches at you know,
<v Speaker 1>told me about it. So got tons of landslides here
<v Speaker 1>though tons of the room bays. Yeah, and just like that,
<v Speaker 1>we're out of the cloud forest. We come down on
<v Speaker 1>the west side. Now we're in the rain shadow and
<v Speaker 1>there's slopes full of Isolato sirius and Martillo cactus. And
<v Speaker 1>large yuccas. There's still oak trees worth sixty five hundred
<v Speaker 1>feet elevation. So it's really just it's that rain shadow,
<v Speaker 1>all that all that warm moist there coming off the
<v Speaker 1>Gulf of Mexico, hits the Sierra Madre and then dries
<v Speaker 1>out on the west side. But it is very pleasant
<v Speaker 1>temperatures now it is Chili got It's fucking beautiful lista,
<v Speaker 1>the sun going down lighting up these hillsides covered in
<v Speaker 1>blue columnar cact the Isolato sirious rocks. There's fucking oak
<v Speaker 1>trees here. It's very lush, very very lush. That there's
<v Speaker 1>this montanoa that I've been seeing everywhere as well, which
<v Speaker 1>was the genius that the laid Vicky Funk was studying.
<v Speaker 1>Really nice woman. She sent me the composite e book,
<v Speaker 1>the Astrace Book, for free. It's like a thousand page
<v Speaker 1>she used to work of the Smithsonian. I wrote her
<v Speaker 1>and I was like, man, is this where can I
<v Speaker 1>get this? She's like, I'll just send you one and arrived.
<v Speaker 1>It was like fifteen pounds, one of my cherished books
<v Speaker 1>in my library. But we just saw, yeah, we just
<v Speaker 1>saw Meliosma from the family sabi Ace, which is order
<v Speaker 1>of prote alies. Really bizarre. The flowers weren't open yet,
<v Speaker 1>but you know, I just didn't know what it was.
<v Speaker 1>Just like I said, I have to get flower money
<v Speaker 1>shots somewhere else. We'll see where. I'm totally scared of tops.
<v Speaker 1>Now we've had a couple bad run ins with the
<v Speaker 1>pes in the whole fucking car, you know, because you
<v Speaker 1>don't see him until it's too late. Next thing, you know,
<v Speaker 1>you're just shit's flying everywhere, and yeah, it's it's brutal. God,
<v Speaker 1>it's so lush man for for the dry season, it's
<v Speaker 1>very lush. Okay, So now we're you know, we're back
<v Speaker 1>on a quarta. We came down out of the mountains.
<v Speaker 1>We came down out of fucking where'd we stayed mineral
<v Speaker 1>what was it called Mineral del Chico? Minorrel del Chico? No, No,
<v Speaker 1>what was this town? And we stayed in like a
<v Speaker 1>dory a tourist town. Yeah, Mineraelo del Monte up at
<v Speaker 1>eight thousand feet. We like rented a room in this
<v Speaker 1>little this family's little house because it was the only
<v Speaker 1>thing available that wasn't a ripoff. And then we went
<v Speaker 1>to go see Doug fur Man the forest up there
<v Speaker 1>are brutal. They look like shit. It's said there's an
<v Speaker 1>invasive beetles. Do you remember the genus name of the beetles.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know. So it's from it's from another continent.
<v Speaker 1>It's from a very disjunct ecosystem, and it's wrecking the forest.
<v Speaker 1>I'm surprised that. I wonder if it's hit because I
<v Speaker 1>haven't heard of it in the United States. I wonder
<v Speaker 1>if it's non tolerant, the freezing or something. Maybe that's
<v Speaker 1>why it hasn't hit the I don't know, but it
<v Speaker 1>just sounds like maybe they need to give it back
<v Speaker 1>to indigenous stewardship. Could that be? It? Is that what
<v Speaker 1>they need to do. This is a brave two spirit
<v Speaker 1>indigenous disabled in a wheelchair with long COVID, and they're
<v Speaker 1>gonna change it. They're doing a lot more work than
<v Speaker 1>you are with your Western with your Western science, you
<v Speaker 1>your westerns. Yeah, that's right, you better start apologizing to me,
<v Speaker 1>mister Mayor on you fucking piece of shit Western scientist.
<v Speaker 1>Did you know that taxonomy is just the history of
<v Speaker 1>white people stealing things? That's all it is, all botanical science.
<v Speaker 1>It's just actually had someone say it to me. They
<v Speaker 1>were Caucasian, of course, like they always are, but we
<v Speaker 1>don't need to. We were talking about that earlier. It
<v Speaker 1>is so hilarious. Anyway, the forests looked kind of rough,
<v Speaker 1>lots of dad Amy's religiosa, and we kept man, we
<v Speaker 1>drove around for like fucking what was it like four hours?
<v Speaker 1>Save Shark was very patient, seriously, because I was, I
<v Speaker 1>gotta fix. I had the fuckings I've seen Suda suga
<v Speaker 1>in the way we lay owned before. But the cones
<v Speaker 1>on the on the ecotype down here look wild. The
<v Speaker 1>the little mousetails that come out of the cone scales
<v Speaker 1>like recurve upwards. It's fucking bizarre. Man. It looks totally
<v Speaker 1>different than any of the the ecotypes I've seen in
<v Speaker 1>the United States. And uh so, anyway, I was we
<v Speaker 1>had to find it. Then my friend Jeff Bisbee, old friend,
<v Speaker 1>I mean, we're not like super tight, you know, we
<v Speaker 1>wouldn't go fucking play back gaming together and ship on
<v Speaker 1>the weekends, you know, But in acquaintance he got me
<v Speaker 1>into Conifers like fifteen years ago. God, that guy's driving
<v Speaker 1>like a cunt too. Fuck, but he uh, he had
<v Speaker 1>he had seen it here, and it's it's where I
<v Speaker 1>found it. It's you know, AB's is very shade tolerant,
<v Speaker 1>and they're getting hit hard with this invasive beetle. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>I don't know if it's the beetle or another insect,
<v Speaker 1>but they wrapped the ends of the voliage into these
<v Speaker 1>little cocoons. It sounds more like caterpillar activity, I suppose,
<v Speaker 1>I don't know. These trees look like shit. It's really sad.
<v Speaker 1>Entire swaths of forests dying here. And since the insect
<v Speaker 1>pathogen is in native like pine bark beetles are in
<v Speaker 1>North American, you know, the United States, it seems like
<v Speaker 1>it's going to take a lot to stop them because
<v Speaker 1>there's the trees have not probably dealt with them or
<v Speaker 1>any of their close ancestors in nine or ten million years,
<v Speaker 1>however long it's been since, you know, temperatures were warm
<v Speaker 1>enough and you could get kind of a continuous eco
<v Speaker 1>tone between North America and Asia. You know what I
<v Speaker 1>just won the last time. I just won a lot
<v Speaker 1>of these different lineages. It seems got separated, you know,
<v Speaker 1>like Chinese and American chestnuts, et cetera a million years ago.
<v Speaker 1>So we're talking Mia scene, you know again, and they
<v Speaker 1>again it was because the higher latitudes were warmer. I suppose,
<v Speaker 1>I think that's what it is, you know. And then
<v Speaker 1>western North America used to have all this a lot
<v Speaker 1>of these lineages too, but as it started to dry
<v Speaker 1>out anyway, you know, you've read Dave had axl riding anyway.
<v Speaker 1>But uh, but yeah, so these forests just looked rough.
<v Speaker 1>And so we finally found it going around this curve
<v Speaker 1>in this kind of more open area up against this
<v Speaker 1>rocky pinnacle, this this volcanic pinnacle, and there was a
<v Speaker 1>stand of like nine or ten Pseuda suga trees and
<v Speaker 1>and that was it. I had to shimmy up this
<v Speaker 1>roadside to go photograph them. And they looked kind of
<v Speaker 1>rough too, but they weren't getting as hit hit as
<v Speaker 1>bad as the abies. The furs are really getting taken out.
<v Speaker 1>It was. It was rough to see. It just makes
<v Speaker 1>you wonder, man, between that and climate change, invasive species
<v Speaker 1>and climate change, you know, what are this What are
<v Speaker 1>these areas gonna look like in fifty years? Really makes
<v Speaker 1>me wonder, you know, if they're doing this little parade,
<v Speaker 1>what's it for the Guadalupe what's it called? Yeah, just
<v Speaker 1>the day of the Virgin. You know, they're they're doing,
<v Speaker 1>you know, for the Guadalupe thing. The Spanish made it.
<v Speaker 1>What was it? The Spanish made it up. It was
<v Speaker 1>like throw the people a bone. But it was based
<v Speaker 1>on an on uh because they don't call them mass
<v Speaker 1>text down here. It was based on a what Michigan
<v Speaker 1>got us. Yeah. Yeah, So anyway, they having parades. You know,
<v Speaker 1>everyone's eight million people flood Mexico City mid December. Uh,
<v Speaker 1>and they're they're you know for the sal got like
<v Speaker 1>little Guadalupe shrines on their trucks and ship. It was
<v Speaker 1>people biking, lots of people biking on the on the kuotos.
<v Speaker 1>It was nice to see. But anyway, so now we're
<v Speaker 1>headed to Wahaka and uh, we're gonna look at some
<v Speaker 1>of the drive forests that I'm very excited to be
<v Speaker 1>in those lovely forests again, the lovely drive forests of Wahaka.
<v Speaker 1>But yeah, man, it's wild. It's during the place to scene.
<v Speaker 1>I bet I bet there was a you know, those
<v Speaker 1>those abs forests of course came down to somewhat lower elevations,
<v Speaker 1>but it's white. It's wild though, because you're in these
<v Speaker 1>forests and uh, and then you'll see like all these succulents,
<v Speaker 1>you know, because you think, you know, if you're thinking,
<v Speaker 1>if you grew up in the United States, you grew
<v Speaker 1>up more temperate latitudes. You know, high elevation montane forests
<v Speaker 1>get really cold. But I don't believe it really freezes
<v Speaker 1>up in these forests, even though you're at ten thousand feet.
<v Speaker 1>Maybe occasionally you'll get a frost, but I mean there's
<v Speaker 1>delanzias on everything. All these fir trees of giant Delanzia
<v Speaker 1>is on them. There's uh tons of like arborescent not arborescent,
<v Speaker 1>but they're you know, for a seedum, they're arborescent seedums
<v Speaker 1>and shit, you know, like shrubby seedums growing on the
<v Speaker 1>sides of these rock walls and echavarreas everywhere, and it's
<v Speaker 1>it's really cool to see. And then there, you know,
<v Speaker 1>it's just all these lineages that you don't think of
<v Speaker 1>as high montane, especially if you grow up to say
<v Speaker 1>in the rocky mountains, you know. But but yeah, there
<v Speaker 1>was massive opuntius. But a puntius can be pretty pretty
<v Speaker 1>cold tar. But I think this was a punti of
<v Speaker 1>robusta or something up there. I mean, the pads, the
<v Speaker 1>pads of this a Punthi award, a size of hubcaps,
<v Speaker 1>fucking massive, you know, it's it's it's mind blowing for
<v Speaker 1>people that you know, don't aren't aren't familiar with high elevation,
<v Speaker 1>low latitude, and the latitude here is like twenty degrees,
<v Speaker 1>but we're ten thousand feet. You've got increased increased solar
<v Speaker 1>radiation because you're closer to the equator, a different angle
<v Speaker 1>of the sun. But also it's a lot of the
<v Speaker 1>moisture in these cloud forests has a very moderating effect,
<v Speaker 1>you know, I think just specifically because it takes much
<v Speaker 1>longer to you know, well, it prevents the heat from
<v Speaker 1>radiating out at night because it acts like a blanket
<v Speaker 1>of fog and cloud cover. And then also just it
<v Speaker 1>takes longer for the air to cool down as well
<v Speaker 1>as heat up, so it stays a somewhat consistent temperature.
<v Speaker 1>Incredible for us though, you know, multiple different species of
<v Speaker 1>salvia everywhere to most reaching you know, four to five
<v Speaker 1>six feet tall fern diversity all over these rocks. It's
<v Speaker 1>highly diverse, really cool to see, really kind of mind
<v Speaker 1>blowing to see, and it also gives an idea of
<v Speaker 1>what you know, some what plant lineages may have been
<v Speaker 1>occurring at higher latitudes pre glaciation, you know, like three
<v Speaker 1>four million years ago to two to four million years ago.
<v Speaker 1>Some of these lineages were probably further north. All right,
<v Speaker 1>I'm back, I'm back in the States. Flew back, went
<v Speaker 1>through Dallas four were Worth yesterday and at the god
<v Speaker 1>flying during the holidays as fucking hell. Anyway, the continue
<v Speaker 1>we left off. We were in that cloud forest that
<v Speaker 1>roughly seven thousand feet with a number of oak species.
<v Speaker 1>Magnolia shidiana was there. Also saw Skysandra glebra. There was
<v Speaker 1>a Lippia miriocephala, which is it was a tree lypya.
<v Speaker 1>It was like eight feet wide with giant leaves. Looked
<v Speaker 1>looked kind of like bud laya cordatta, which is a
<v Speaker 1>super common but leaya in Mexico. But yeah, the libya
<v Speaker 1>was fucking wild, man. It was at the edge of
<v Speaker 1>this quarry on this incredibly steep hillside. We went down this,
<v Speaker 1>you know this when we found the magnolia. We went
<v Speaker 1>into the cut, like into the woods, very thick cloud forest.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, these forests feel like they've got way more
<v Speaker 1>in line with you know, apple or the southeastern United States,
<v Speaker 1>and I'm sure they do. I mean, there's so many
<v Speaker 1>floristic affinities, you know, similar if not the same species,
<v Speaker 1>than the same genus, et cetera. You know, the same
<v Speaker 1>lineage in these areas. I mean, you could totally tell
<v Speaker 1>prior to glaciation, like say two million years ago, one million,
<v Speaker 1>two million years ago, when the Southeastern US was a
<v Speaker 1>little bit warmer, many of these these plants occurred there,
<v Speaker 1>or you know, their last common ancestor did. But this
<v Speaker 1>magnolia was growing right up against you know, a liquid ambar,
<v Speaker 1>a sweet gum, which you still get in you know,
<v Speaker 1>fucking Louisiana, for instance. But here it's growing at like
<v Speaker 1>sixty five hundred and seven thousand feet and then a
<v Speaker 1>thousand feet below that there's giant you know, candelabras of
<v Speaker 1>Martillocctus that are fifteen feet across, and I mean just
<v Speaker 1>just wild again. This challenges is all notions about what
<v Speaker 1>plants grow together, and what ecoregions and biomes are likely
<v Speaker 1>to exist together, what plant communities are likely to exist
<v Speaker 1>together if you're from the temperate latitude United States. So
<v Speaker 1>I mean, for me, it's just thinking like a long
<v Speaker 1>term of you know, a more long term idea about
<v Speaker 1>how plants have been distributed across this continent and across
<v Speaker 1>the last you know, the timescale of the last twenty
<v Speaker 1>million years. It's really cool to think about it. And again,
<v Speaker 1>I mean, if anything, philosophically, it just shrinks all the
<v Speaker 1>dumb bullshit that humans are doing. It just shrinks it
<v Speaker 1>so much you realize, like, we really don't have a
<v Speaker 1>fucking clue. You know, we're so we are so limited
<v Speaker 1>in our understanding, our day to day lives, are so
<v Speaker 1>limited in our understanding of how these plants have existed.
<v Speaker 1>And you know, their distributions have shifted back and forth
<v Speaker 1>across the time you know, the geologic time scale and
<v Speaker 1>according to how you know their district there the climate
<v Speaker 1>is has changed, or mountain ranges you know, orogenes, how
<v Speaker 1>mountain ranges have come and gone. So it's, uh, god,
<v Speaker 1>it was just it's it's nuts to think about. But yeah,
<v Speaker 1>we saw this massive lipia which is verbin acy. You know,
<v Speaker 1>it's the frog fruit family. You know, most of Thelyppia's
<v Speaker 1>we get here in the United States, they're almost all
<v Speaker 1>you know, the relatives of lantana. They're mostly in the
<v Speaker 1>southern United States, but they're you know, they get like
<v Speaker 1>a meter tall. This thing was like twelve feet tall.
<v Speaker 1>And I was able to get a good glimpse of
<v Speaker 1>the flowers because it was on a very steep slope
<v Speaker 1>next to a quarry, and the thing was just covered
<v Speaker 1>in butterflies. So that yeah, they ended up being Lippya
<v Speaker 1>mario cephala. And then you know, ferns all around, and
<v Speaker 1>what was you know, the fungus that we saw that
<v Speaker 1>looked like frog eggs ended up being Ecto micae rhyzol
<v Speaker 1>with oaks. The name was Calistoma cinnabarinum c. A. L. O. S. T. O.
<v Speaker 1>M A. It's probably one of the weirdest organisms I've
<v Speaker 1>seen in a while. I mean, we saw fucking Fukiia
<v Speaker 1>purpussii the next day. You know, the trio catillo, A
<v Speaker 1>true doctor Sussian plant if there ever was one. But
<v Speaker 1>this fungus, this ectomycorrhizal fungus. It's in the family Sclerodermatasi.
<v Speaker 1>Maybe perhaps you know the genus Scleroderma. It's a basidio
<v Speaker 1>mice fungus uh in uh It's in the class A
<v Speaker 1>gerico mices. Oh no, ship it's in order bullet I
<v Speaker 1>didn't know. I didn't know sclerodermatasi was in the bullied
<v Speaker 1>order bullet ailes. But that makes sense because all the
<v Speaker 1>Sclerodermo's are or I think almost all of them are
<v Speaker 1>actough micro rhizol as well. But this thing just it
<v Speaker 1>looked like a fucking eyeball. It looked like an eyeball
<v Speaker 1>with you don't like that shit you squeeze out of,
<v Speaker 1>like if you squeeze out like a passion fruit, and
<v Speaker 1>the seeds come out and they're in that they're in
<v Speaker 1>like a jelly, you know, or like if you get
<v Speaker 1>you ever had like a chia drink, like you know,
<v Speaker 1>you get like an overpriced gia drink. It did the
<v Speaker 1>health food store. And you know chia seeds when you
<v Speaker 1>when you uh, I'm driving, I'm swerving all over the
<v Speaker 1>fucking road here. Sorry you uh, you know, when you
<v Speaker 1>the gia seeds get that jelly around them. That's kind
<v Speaker 1>of what this fungus seemed to be admitting. But it
<v Speaker 1>looked like a Halloween eyeball, you know, like a squishy
<v Speaker 1>gag eyeball size of an eyeball too. And then it
<v Speaker 1>had this little sphincter in the middle of it that
<v Speaker 1>if you squeeze, and if you squeeze the whole eyeball
<v Speaker 1>it shoots out white sports. It was so fucking weird,
<v Speaker 1>you know. I thought it was a parasitic plant at first,
<v Speaker 1>and then when I got close to it, I realized
<v Speaker 1>it's a fungus. But it was coming up on this
<v Speaker 1>road cut next to Pinguicula more ensis, which is common
<v Speaker 1>down there, I mean pingwicular more and its it's a
<v Speaker 1>very very common carnivorous plant. I still don't understand why
<v Speaker 1>it does so well on the substrate there, because the substrate,
<v Speaker 1>I mean, this is like rich forest. It doesn't seem
<v Speaker 1>to be hurting for nitrogen. There's got to be some
<v Speaker 1>sort of something else going on there ecologically, I don't know,
<v Speaker 1>but either way, that was cool to The Pinguiculas were
<v Speaker 1>going into their winter leaves, you know, the winter leaf rosette,
<v Speaker 1>the big broad floppy dog ear cocker spaniel ear leaves
<v Speaker 1>fade away and rot and then you're left with this
<v Speaker 1>kind of rosette leaf. Because the next few months in
<v Speaker 1>Mexico it's December, are going to be very dry overall,
<v Speaker 1>and then the rainy season picks back up in uh May.
<v Speaker 1>A lot of the cool cacti in the lowland or
<v Speaker 1>the lower elevation deserts. They're not lowlands, there's still like
<v Speaker 1>thirty five hundred feet, but a lot of those flower
<v Speaker 1>in March and April, I believe, and I think like
<v Speaker 1>the pack is series, all the columnar cacti fruit is
<v Speaker 1>generally ready in April May, like late April through June,
<v Speaker 1>in anticipation of like the heavier rains that come in
<v Speaker 1>the summer. Anyway, this fucking fungus, going back to the
<v Speaker 1>fungus Calistoma cinnabarinum c. A. L O. S. T O
<v Speaker 1>M A. You got to look this thing up. It's
<v Speaker 1>by far one of the weirdest things. And I've been
<v Speaker 1>in Mexico plenty of times before, especially with Alan kind
<v Speaker 1>of just tagging along on his little mycological expeditions, you know,
<v Speaker 1>when him and Alonzo or you know whoever whatever other
<v Speaker 1>Mexican my colleges he'd be traveled with were down here,
<v Speaker 1>and I had never seen this thing before. I should
<v Speaker 1>ask him about it. I mean, I'm sure he's really
<v Speaker 1>familiar with it. God damn, is it weird? Though? What
<v Speaker 1>the fuck, and what are those like frog egg like things.
<v Speaker 1>I don't understand the purpose for those or the adaptive
<v Speaker 1>benefit for the the frog egg slash chia seed things.
<v Speaker 1>It's I wonder if it's got to do with some
<v Speaker 1>sort of dispersal maybe for some bird that it attracts.
<v Speaker 1>It's it's got a vivid color to it as well.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, the fact that this thing is so vividly colored,
<v Speaker 1>it's a bright orange. That can't just be by chance either.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, maybe it could, who knows, but in any case,
<v Speaker 1>it's it's incredibly cool. So the next day we went
<v Speaker 1>to go check out for Kyria purpussii, which I got
<v Speaker 1>some really nice flower shots of, you know, and you
<v Speaker 1>could tell so much from a very clear, in focus
<v Speaker 1>with good depth of field macro photograph of a flower,
<v Speaker 1>especially in the case of this species. I mean, it's
<v Speaker 1>already I already had a feeling. I had a hunch,
<v Speaker 1>a hunch that it was moth pollinated like Fukiria physiculata.
<v Speaker 1>And the two species do look very different. They're completely
<v Speaker 1>different growth forms, but they're both succulent bottle bottle trees,
<v Speaker 1>except uh, you know, Fukiria physiculata looks like a kianti bottle,
<v Speaker 1>and Fukiria purpussii. These are both, of course okatillo relatives,
<v Speaker 1>same genus. Fukiria purpussii is more of a tree. It
<v Speaker 1>looks more like an actual boo jump tree. Fukiria columnaris
<v Speaker 1>the cereo from from ba, California. But the bark on
<v Speaker 1>these things, that photosynthetic bark is remarkable. They've both got,
<v Speaker 1>you know, the ability to store I think you know
<v Speaker 1>they've got parentkama tissue. That does it. I read some
<v Speaker 1>paper on the dad damn it, fucking cops. I just
<v Speaker 1>got going so slow. I'm doing this because I when
<v Speaker 1>I'm driving, because I'm so pressed for fucking time now
<v Speaker 1>and I'm not gonna have I'm just not gonna have
<v Speaker 1>time to record a podcast when I'm home, and I
<v Speaker 1>want to get all this stuff down, Uh, all these
<v Speaker 1>all these verbal notes down before I get back and
<v Speaker 1>have a shit ton of work to do. But anyway,
<v Speaker 1>I read a paper on the vasculature. You know it.
<v Speaker 1>There were a bunch of cross sections of Fukia propussii, fisiculata,
<v Speaker 1>and a few other species in the genus. We also
<v Speaker 1>saw Fukia formosa there, which has red flowers. It basically
<v Speaker 1>looks like a single stemmed Fukuria splendins with you know,
<v Speaker 1>with like a main single trunk instead of you know,
<v Speaker 1>like Fukia splend ins like typical octillo, has many many
<v Speaker 1>shoots coming out, you know, making it look like some
<v Speaker 1>sort of damn you know, underwater coral reef creature. Fukia
<v Speaker 1>formosa has a single trunk upwards of you know, eight
<v Speaker 1>inches across in some large specimens, and then bright red,
<v Speaker 1>very obviously hummingbird pollinated flowers. I mean, these flowers have
<v Speaker 1>a very large opening, probably perfect for fitting the shape
<v Speaker 1>of a hummingbird. But they're I'm sure they're generalists as well.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, fucking honey bees will go for anything. I
<v Speaker 1>heard there are some wonderful killer bee colonies down there too.
<v Speaker 1>Mark Olsen told me he had been chased a few
<v Speaker 1>times in some of the barancas in Hindalgo. Gotta hate
<v Speaker 1>honey bees. But anyway, but Fokiri purpussii, the flowers were white,
<v Speaker 1>their moth pollinated, and the anthers had these really bizarre
<v Speaker 1>you know, if you look at my photo on I'm naturalist,
<v Speaker 1>you could see these really bizarre appendages on the end
<v Speaker 1>that could possibly, I suppose, be osmophores, you know, scent
<v Speaker 1>producing structures, or they could be some sort of appendage
<v Speaker 1>that helps pollen get the you know, get the hissed
<v Speaker 1>from those anthers. But then you know the in the
<v Speaker 1>from looking at the photo, I could tell that the
<v Speaker 1>flowers are Protanderus too. You know, there were a couple,
<v Speaker 1>there's a bunch of flowers together in a cluster. They
<v Speaker 1>were main open during the day. They're white. The anthers
<v Speaker 1>have these weird white, you know, hairs that come off
<v Speaker 1>that are probably two millimeters long. They're not hairs, but
<v Speaker 1>their hair like appendages. And then you know, in a
<v Speaker 1>cluster of flowers, you'd see some that were had just
<v Speaker 1>opened and some that were, you know, on their second
<v Speaker 1>day or whatever. And the ones that out were on
<v Speaker 1>their second day the anthers had withered. They weren't. You
<v Speaker 1>can clearly see they're not really putting much pollen out.
<v Speaker 1>They don't look all turgid and turgid. They don't look
<v Speaker 1>all turgid and swollen, and they've kind of relaxed horizontally
<v Speaker 1>and in a style comes out of the middle. I
<v Speaker 1>counted eight stamens, which is another interesting point to make.
<v Speaker 1>I don't think I've ever actually counted the stamens on
<v Speaker 1>Fukyria flowers before, but yet, you know, and I saw
<v Speaker 1>honeybe hitting these two, and then Gabrielle sent me a
<v Speaker 1>photo of a American snout or maybe it was some
<v Speaker 1>sort of skipper or something butterfly hitting one during the day.
<v Speaker 1>It might have been a month. I have to look
<v Speaker 1>at the video again. But you know, I'm really interested
<v Speaker 1>in the pollination of both these species, faciculata and Purpussia.
<v Speaker 1>Either's so weird. The white flowers are really notable, something
<v Speaker 1>obviously selected for that. Looking at Fakura faciculata flowers, I
<v Speaker 1>wonder if they are protandrous as well. Protandrius is opposed
<v Speaker 1>to protogynas or protogenists. Protandris meaning you know, they're male first,
<v Speaker 1>then they become female a day later, you know, whereas
<v Speaker 1>protogenists is, the proto gynus is the opposite. And that's
<v Speaker 1>just of course, to avoid self pollination, to avoid them
<v Speaker 1>fucking themselves. You know, it promotes outcrossing, better genetic diversity.
<v Speaker 1>You're not stacking up recessive alleles and the gene pool
<v Speaker 1>you know, like the Spanish monarchy was during the same
<v Speaker 1>time they were colonizing and destroying, you know, the indigenous
<v Speaker 1>population and in North America. It's got to put that
<v Speaker 1>in there, just you know, keep it real. Maybe that's
<v Speaker 1>where it came from. You know, they were just they
<v Speaker 1>were these these these fucking you know, kings and queens
<v Speaker 1>had been fucking each other's you know, fucking their sisters
<v Speaker 1>and brothers for so long that maybe you got a
<v Speaker 1>couple of recessive alleles stacked up. That's when you get
<v Speaker 1>the lead poisoning too. They're all you know, who knows
<v Speaker 1>what they were smelting back then, you know, eating with
<v Speaker 1>pewter or some shit. I don't think Pewter has letten it.
<v Speaker 1>Do Pewter ha let in it. I'm just pulling out
<v Speaker 1>of my asks. Anyway, it made them hyper aggressive and psychotic,
<v Speaker 1>I don't know. But then the Anstecs had their whole
<v Speaker 1>death cult thing too. You know, humans are just fucking nuts, right,
<v Speaker 1>The Spanish are fucking nuts. The the or back then,
<v Speaker 1>you know, the colonial system. I sure it's very lovely now.
<v Speaker 1>Hear wonderful things about mcdred. I've never been there, but
<v Speaker 1>you know, here. It's wonderful air in the spring. I
<v Speaker 1>wanted to go to to see Drosophylum. Right, they do
<v Speaker 1>it a whole run through the streets thing. But humans
<v Speaker 1>just it's you know, we're a crazy fucking species, right,
<v Speaker 1>Chimps and bonobos. He definitely got more of the chimp.
<v Speaker 1>But I heard there was a study done where the
<v Speaker 1>bonobo's actually or there was research done on a bonobo population.
<v Speaker 1>A bunch of female bonobos ripped this male bonobo's balls
<v Speaker 1>off and kicked his ass. I guess he he had
<v Speaker 1>when it came out later though he had threatened an infant.
<v Speaker 1>So the bonobos are again. He just he got a
<v Speaker 1>lot of very impressive, very impressive species. Anyway, Where was
<v Speaker 1>I faciculata Fukia faciculata in this very narrow canyon that
<v Speaker 1>felt like a funhouse because the the bedding planes of
<v Speaker 1>the sedimentary rock had been flipped up at like sixty
<v Speaker 1>to sixty gree angles. Looking at the fukyria there, I
<v Speaker 1>noticed going back to my photographs because I take really
<v Speaker 1>nice I gotta get my money shots. It's so much again,
<v Speaker 1>so much info you can get from macro photos. It's
<v Speaker 1>not about beauty at all fuck that. I don't care
<v Speaker 1>about that. I take some landscape photos whatever if you
<v Speaker 1>need like some you know, good nature porn or something.
<v Speaker 1>It's in some feel good photos. The macro photos are
<v Speaker 1>so it's it's like it's like a compounding microscope or sorry,
<v Speaker 1>a stereo microscope. There's so much you can tell from them.
<v Speaker 1>And I'll reference them later, you know, as a record.
<v Speaker 1>It's got especially if you can get pollinators on flowers.
<v Speaker 1>Holy shit, you got to do that. Upload those to einatros,
<v Speaker 1>especially because those detailed ecological relationships. But going back to
<v Speaker 1>the Bukia Physiculta flowers, I noticed that most of the
<v Speaker 1>flowers were not open. On the cluster. I had a
<v Speaker 1>cluster of like an inflorescence of twenty twenty flowers. Probably
<v Speaker 1>if you were withered, they had been opened the night
<v Speaker 1>before one uh, none of them were open yet, but
<v Speaker 1>they had that look like onnather flowers have you know,
<v Speaker 1>the evening primrose when they're about And it was just
<v Speaker 1>before dusk when we were there, when they look like
<v Speaker 1>ripe and full and ready to open. So I'm wondering
<v Speaker 1>if they open at night. Fuck, we should have stuck
<v Speaker 1>around too. I don't know, why we didn't. But if
<v Speaker 1>we did, then we wouldn't have seen Salvia at augaenstis,
<v Speaker 1>which is a really rare yellow salvia at a gross
<v Speaker 1>in the southern Sierra Madre anyway, But the yeah, man,
<v Speaker 1>I don't, I don't know. We gotta go back. We're
<v Speaker 1>gonna go back next year in December when they flower
<v Speaker 1>and probably do a pollination study or something. Yeah, just
<v Speaker 1>hang out for two or three days and just photograph
<v Speaker 1>the shit out of flowers and the you know, visitors
<v Speaker 1>probably hit a few different populations of each species and
<v Speaker 1>and compare you know, the poll the I guess the
<v Speaker 1>pollinators between fisiculada and Purpussi. I might guess right now,
<v Speaker 1>and I might be totally wrong, But I'm wondering if
<v Speaker 1>Fukyria is more fasciculata is more of a moth specialist
<v Speaker 1>and the flowers close during the day like they're primarily nocturnal,
<v Speaker 1>and if Fukiia purpussii, on the other hand, is more
<v Speaker 1>of a generalist like it's evolved with moth pollination. Uh,
<v Speaker 1>they remain open at night for moths to come hit
<v Speaker 1>them too, but then they stood there open during the
<v Speaker 1>day as well. You know, we didn't stay there that
<v Speaker 1>late though, we were only there till like noon or one.
<v Speaker 1>The thing to do is go there at five pm
<v Speaker 1>and see if Fukyia purpussi flowers are still open at
<v Speaker 1>at five or six. I don't know, but it's really
<v Speaker 1>it's really fascinating because then that what kind of gives
<v Speaker 1>you a hint as to what over the over the
<v Speaker 1>last however many millions of years, has been selecting for
<v Speaker 1>pollination in these species. And I'm really curious how long
<v Speaker 1>they have each been species for. You know, the species
<v Speaker 1>is always changing, it doesn't really even exist. It's a
<v Speaker 1>human attempt to put hard boundaries around you know, constantly
<v Speaker 1>evolving life forms. But you know that said something's been
<v Speaker 1>selecting for something is these things have been interacting with
<v Speaker 1>every other living thing in their environment, and it makes
<v Speaker 1>me really curious to see how they've been doing it
<v Speaker 1>and what's been selecting for them. You know, I didn't know,
<v Speaker 1>I should have, but I didn't know if for Carriece
<v Speaker 1>is sister to the fhlox family, the pol amoniac. They're
<v Speaker 1>right next to each other on the cladogram right there.
<v Speaker 1>And a reminder, I'll put a link to the a
<v Speaker 1>drive file with the Mexico checklist on this podcast. I
<v Speaker 1>gotta get fluent in Spanish, you know, And if I can't,
<v Speaker 1>then I'll just type some shit out, have it translated
<v Speaker 1>to fluent Spanish, and then do a video basically encouraging
<v Speaker 1>people in Mexico to use a Naturalists and focus on
<v Speaker 1>flowers and reproductive structures and fruits, et cetera. For plant
<v Speaker 1>I d you know, and if you really gotta do
<v Speaker 1>is just explain to people you can learn to identify
<v Speaker 1>plants not by looking first at leaves. But it struck.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, of course you first look at leaves, but
<v Speaker 1>the most important thing is always reproductive structures for any plant,
<v Speaker 1>for flowering plants, for fucking ferns. You find that spor fill,
<v Speaker 1>flip it over, look at the sports on the other side,
<v Speaker 1>get a photo of cones if you're looking at a
<v Speaker 1>conifer or other gymnosperm. But I think that you know,
<v Speaker 1>not a lot of people use I Naturalists in Mexico,
<v Speaker 1>at least compared to the US. And if more people
<v Speaker 1>used it, I mean, just the sheer amount of data
<v Speaker 1>that can be collected by a handful of people who
<v Speaker 1>actively use their free time to go out and photograph
<v Speaker 1>nature and go into the hill and the matal and
<v Speaker 1>the fucking barancas and whatever. The sheer amount of info
<v Speaker 1>that can be collected for science is amazing. It's astounding.
<v Speaker 1>And so you know, that was a thing in Brazil
<v Speaker 1>that drove me fucking us too. Well. First off, there's
<v Speaker 1>no you know, appreciation, there's very little appreciation of the
<v Speaker 1>native plants in popular Brazilian culture most. I mean, there's
<v Speaker 1>some excellent fucking botanists there, but they're all in academia,
<v Speaker 1>like just you know, random schmucks like myself or whoever else.
<v Speaker 1>There's very like there's I went, I remember going into
<v Speaker 1>a book store. There were no guide books, Like you
<v Speaker 1>got the most some of the most diverse uh flora
<v Speaker 1>in the world, and there's no guide books for it.
<v Speaker 1>And like all the plant books were like cornyass gardening
<v Speaker 1>horticulture books. By the way, you know, I got these
<v Speaker 1>stickers made it said horticulture needs and I'm a please
<v Speaker 1>hit me up for some all right, I prefer you
<v Speaker 1>buy a pack, you know, a fucking nine different sticks
<v Speaker 1>for twenty bucks via the Venmo. Just leave your address,
<v Speaker 1>don't use purchase protection unless you're a sucker. But if
<v Speaker 1>you see me at a show or something and I
<v Speaker 1>got those horticulture needs in they just take one. You
<v Speaker 1>could just take one. I said, it's fine, right, but
<v Speaker 1>take a fucking handf of but take one. Get the
<v Speaker 1>message out there, because horticulture does need an anima. There's
<v Speaker 1>a lot of corny shit there. There's they're planting. Gabrielle
<v Speaker 1>told me that because he does landscaping ship for people
<v Speaker 1>in Guanajuato. But he was telling me to use Melanis rappins,
<v Speaker 1>not all grass is an invasive or as a horticultural
<v Speaker 1>plant down there. Again, it's it's just like the bare
<v Speaker 1>bottom dollar or bare bottom of the brain stem, fucking
<v Speaker 1>lowest kind of denominator mindset everywhere with plants. It's like,
<v Speaker 1>oh are they pretty? They're a thing for rich people
<v Speaker 1>for landscaping. Maybe you get some extra money, you're gonna
<v Speaker 1>put some fucking with you know, there's no other And
<v Speaker 1>I'm not I'm not I'm shitting on this mindset, but
<v Speaker 1>I'm not shitting on people. It just again, this is
<v Speaker 1>just what's putting on the plate of us. This is
<v Speaker 1>what we're given in a society where all the habitats
<v Speaker 1>been destroyed and is discarded and not cared about. And uh,
<v Speaker 1>you know, we put we just have this purely anthropocentric
<v Speaker 1>lens as a society, right, and so people are just
<v Speaker 1>products of the society that they live in by and
<v Speaker 1>large for the most part, unless they make a conscious
<v Speaker 1>choice to be different. But that, of course takes a
<v Speaker 1>lot of education and self awareness. Most people don't have
<v Speaker 1>that no matter where in the world you are, and
<v Speaker 1>so they just you know, they end up doing shit
<v Speaker 1>like planting the book and fees and all this corny
<v Speaker 1>shit and whatever, you know, because it's pretty. So I
<v Speaker 1>don't want what's pretty. I want the full picture. I
<v Speaker 1>want to restore this beautiful living machine that's been dismantled
<v Speaker 1>by this unenlightened species of primates. Anyway, Uh so we
<v Speaker 1>got to get if you speak Spanish, if you're you know,
<v Speaker 1>if you're in Mexico, whatever, please encourage people to use
<v Speaker 1>our natural was to use this shit out of it.
<v Speaker 1>You know, from that app, you can learn taxonomy, you
<v Speaker 1>can see what family something's in, you can see a
<v Speaker 1>map showing its distribution. There's so much information there, and
<v Speaker 1>you know, the more people use it, the more information
<v Speaker 1>is available. So please, It's got to get out there.
<v Speaker 1>You know, you teach people to give a shit about
<v Speaker 1>this stuff and have interest in it as a way
<v Speaker 1>to conserve it. I'm getting back home. I have to
<v Speaker 1>fight with this fucking idiot at city hall. He's not
<v Speaker 1>listening to this podcast. If he is, I'm sorry. Don't
<v Speaker 1>take it personally. You know, I call myself a fucking
<v Speaker 1>idiot some things too, But I gotta fight with this
<v Speaker 1>fucking idiot at city hall and do it in that
<v Speaker 1>Texas way where you smile at someone you know and
<v Speaker 1>you're all polite and shit, but you've got to beat anyway.
<v Speaker 1>This guy, he looks like a fucking jim Bro. You know,
<v Speaker 1>here's like the intellect of a door knop, and he's
<v Speaker 1>he won't let me plant. I'm trying to plant street
<v Speaker 1>trees around my neighborhood and this fucking guy, what kind
<v Speaker 1>of what kind of fucking city doesn't want street trees.
<v Speaker 1>It's it's insane to me. But that's the Rio Grande Valley.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, that's what you're gonna encounter down here. You know,
<v Speaker 1>they think they're messy. I don't. I don't get it
<v Speaker 1>like it's I remember, I fly a drone. I remember
<v Speaker 1>when I was flying a drone over my neighborhood in
<v Speaker 1>the summer, and it's just patches. You could see people
<v Speaker 1>are trying to have a lawn, but it doesn't work
<v Speaker 1>because you know, it's one hundred and five degrees uh,
<v Speaker 1>for eight months out of the year, the fucking Rio Grande.
<v Speaker 1>It doesn't produce water anymore, and if it does, it's
<v Speaker 1>totally brackish or at least very mineral rich, you know,
<v Speaker 1>six hundred ppms. I think we're at the water out
<v Speaker 1>of the tap six hundred parts promelion. But uh, anyway,
<v Speaker 1>you fly a drone over and you could just see
<v Speaker 1>people are trying to have lawns, and it's just instead
<v Speaker 1>of it being green, it's just these dead patches of
<v Speaker 1>like brown berm udigrass, and it's in calcareous soil, like
<v Speaker 1>the barren patches of that calcareous fine silt that's been
<v Speaker 1>brought here by the Rio grand over the last five
<v Speaker 1>million years. And then there's some dude you know, who's,
<v Speaker 1>of course, like three hundred pounds in a riding mower,
<v Speaker 1>just you know, doing donuts in a vacant lot, you know,
<v Speaker 1>landscapers whatever, doing donuts in a vacant lot and a
<v Speaker 1>riding mower is kicking up clouds of dust, probably fucking
<v Speaker 1>with you know, bizarre fungal spores. You don't think you
<v Speaker 1>get cockcitio my coasis down here, but you never know, right,
<v Speaker 1>It just makes no sense. Like the whole concept of
<v Speaker 1>a heat island to people down here is it doesn't
<v Speaker 1>hit home. It's it's crazy, like you've created a fucking
<v Speaker 1>giant heat mat made of asphalt and concrete. And then
<v Speaker 1>it's just more reason to just be stuck in your car,
<v Speaker 1>coming down with metabolic diseases, getting fatter because you don't
<v Speaker 1>ever move anywhere. And then you think that like going
<v Speaker 1>to the gy for an hour is gonna it's gonna, like,
<v Speaker 1>you know, make up for that, like going to the
<v Speaker 1>gym for an hour, breathing in off gassing plastic and
<v Speaker 1>hanging out with a bunch of meatheads grunting while they
<v Speaker 1>dropped their weights and and flex in front of each other. No, homo, bro,
<v Speaker 1>you think that that's gonna make up for spending the
<v Speaker 1>other twenty three hours of your day either sleeping or
<v Speaker 1>sitting in a car. It's just it's fucked. So I've
<v Speaker 1>been trying to plant street trees because there's plenty of
<v Speaker 1>room for them. And I you know, I told them
<v Speaker 1>I'll plant these things for free, I'll stake them, I'll
<v Speaker 1>maintain them, I'll prune them. And this this fucking idiot,
<v Speaker 1>just the dude looks like a contractor who basically got
<v Speaker 1>a job at city Hall. And you know he's just
<v Speaker 1>again super polite, but just fucking ignores you, totally dismissive.
<v Speaker 1>I hate that shit. It's just like that Southern stuff,
<v Speaker 1>like tell me to go fuck myself. At least I
<v Speaker 1>can work with that, you know, Chicago or New York
<v Speaker 1>style up front. And then you know, some of the
<v Speaker 1>closest friendships I've had, uh, you know, almost began his
<v Speaker 1>fistfights or you know, telling people to go fuck themselves,
<v Speaker 1>like my my attorney right now, you know, great guy.
<v Speaker 1>Well we first met, you know, I told him to
<v Speaker 1>go fuck himself and eat a dick. I forgot, I
<v Speaker 1>said to him. But and uh, and then we made
<v Speaker 1>up like a day later and kind of laughed it off,
<v Speaker 1>and now we're buddies. A great guy, really great guy.
<v Speaker 1>You know, only attorney I trust. Attorneys are real shit bags.
<v Speaker 1>No offense actually maybe there's one other guy. Maybe there's
<v Speaker 1>one or two other guys. But you know, I think
<v Speaker 1>to work in that job as an attorney, though, because
<v Speaker 1>it's so soul killing and makes you feel so fucking
<v Speaker 1>dead on the inside, and the subject matter that you
<v Speaker 1>have to learn is so god just fucking incorrigibly boring
<v Speaker 1>and soul deadening. Like there's no like, there can't be
<v Speaker 1>any passionate. I I'm sure there's people who would argue
<v Speaker 1>with me, like now I like to argue. I like
<v Speaker 1>it maybe, but the content you're studying is so fucking boring.
<v Speaker 1>It's all made up. It's made up bullshit. It's laws,
<v Speaker 1>it's completely subjective, it's made up by a bunch of
<v Speaker 1>fucking suits. It's it's these nonsensical dictates most of the time.
<v Speaker 1>And then all the bullshit you have to learn the
<v Speaker 1>formalities of learning that legal speak and how to write
<v Speaker 1>those documents has got to just fucking kill you. So
<v Speaker 1>the only thing left at the end of the day is, uh,
<v Speaker 1>you know, chasing shiny bullshit and hoarding money. There's no
<v Speaker 1>I mean, am I wrong? It seems like it's a
<v Speaker 1>pretty deadening fuck. I got into another fucking attorney out
<v Speaker 1>of Houston. Where's too much eyeliner? And I'm not even
<v Speaker 1>gonna get into it. She threatened me with a defamation lawsuit.
<v Speaker 1>I said, nothing I'm saying is untrue. You are you know,
<v Speaker 1>you are restricting access to researchers to your father's land.
<v Speaker 1>So that's you know, go ahead, go ahead, Missy. Got
<v Speaker 1>a lot of eyeline, really a lot of island. You
<v Speaker 1>like the Fox News anchors like that, remember you, so
<v Speaker 1>we see you see that shit with a Christy Gnome.
<v Speaker 1>She does the same thing too, all the all the
<v Speaker 1>fucking eyeliner. It's like, hey, why are you doing that?
<v Speaker 1>You don't need to do it. You're trying to look
<v Speaker 1>like a raccoon. Huh, like a raccoon with a facelift.
<v Speaker 1>What are we doing here? Anyway? I'm getting riled up,
<v Speaker 1>you know, almost back home. So uh but yeah, I
<v Speaker 1>gotta convince this fucking I don't know what to do.
<v Speaker 1>I'm gonna be polite, but I'm gonna go probably just
<v Speaker 1>show up at city hall and track his ass down
<v Speaker 1>and then just politely inform him like let me plant trees.
<v Speaker 1>I'm gonna do a video making fun of this entire
<v Speaker 1>town and how they hate They hate street trees, which
<v Speaker 1>is insane. You know, like, I'm trying to like do
<v Speaker 1>something that's gonna better the quality of my own life
<v Speaker 1>and the quality of people who live in my neighborhood,
<v Speaker 1>and you're saying no, for no, there's no reason for it.
<v Speaker 1>You just think trees are messy. This is the same guy.
<v Speaker 1>You know, there's an irrigation canal nearby. He used to
<v Speaker 1>have a grove of sable Mexicana on at the native
<v Speaker 1>sable palm down here. Them all cut down and then
<v Speaker 1>he ensures that a back hole goes into the irrigation canal,
<v Speaker 1>which is like a fifteen foot drop off on a
<v Speaker 1>very steep slope. It would really help to have some
<v Speaker 1>roots holding that slope, holding that wall, in that wall
<v Speaker 1>of mud. But you know, he cut the trees down,
<v Speaker 1>then he has abacco go in there and scraped the sides,
<v Speaker 1>thinking he's cleaning it out. I mean, this guy's just
<v Speaker 1>dumb as a fucking brick. I don't know how. I
<v Speaker 1>don't like, where does it come from? Where does it
<v Speaker 1>come from? You know, where does the how do you
<v Speaker 1>what the fuck? But you could see where the sides
<v Speaker 1>the slope has has sunk it in and then actively
<v Speaker 1>he thinks he's cleaning out the canal, but then it
<v Speaker 1>actually leads to more landslides and more debris falling into
<v Speaker 1>this canal. And I mean, you can see where it's
<v Speaker 1>happened already. I just I don't get it. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>what fucking community doesn't want street trees? You know it's wild.
<v Speaker 1>They just want They think bermuda grass that's cut the
<v Speaker 1>two inches is clean and trees are messy again. But
<v Speaker 1>this all this can change, you know, by just being
<v Speaker 1>a Surely I'm ranting about this kind of pocket, but
<v Speaker 1>I would be nice to him in person, you know nice.
<v Speaker 1>I love it when these cars are belching out clouds
<v Speaker 1>of black smoke that smells like sulfur and nitrogen dioxide
<v Speaker 1>Jesus background out of billboards and car dealer ships. All right,
<v Speaker 1>I've gotta just you go. You gotta just put your
<v Speaker 1>blinders on that. You know, the shit that makes you
<v Speaker 1>want to puke, a lot of stuff done. It makes
<v Speaker 1>you want to puke. But anyway, all right, we'll cut
<v Speaker 1>this short. That's been an hour fifteen minutes. I'll you
<v Speaker 1>got some out of that. I'm gonna be speaking in
<v Speaker 1>Austin next week Friday. What is it the nineteenth? Is
<v Speaker 1>it the nineteenth? And uh, I'm doing a Kill your
<v Speaker 1>Launch show up there, and then we'll be going on tour.
<v Speaker 1>I'll be doing book tour this spring as well as
<v Speaker 1>probably kill your Lawn tour in the Southwest and maybe
<v Speaker 1>even in Florida. Though Florida scares me, it does. They
<v Speaker 1>just see there's all kinds of weirdos over there. You know,
<v Speaker 1>it's a very bizarre sting. I saw, man. I saw
<v Speaker 1>a fucking video as some uh this guy that looked
<v Speaker 1>like a cross between Gallum and the Hunchback of Notre Dame.
<v Speaker 1>He was some old Caucasian guy yelling at someone for
<v Speaker 1>being in his neighborhood. And of course it was it
<v Speaker 1>was Florida. You know, it's unfair. There's some wonderful people
<v Speaker 1>in Florida too, but it does scare me. It's just
<v Speaker 1>a weird it's a weird culture we've made here in
<v Speaker 1>certain parts of the United States gets real weird, you know,
<v Speaker 1>real goofy, real weird shit going on. Anyway, that's I
<v Speaker 1>got heavy gus day, Go fuck yourself by and get
<v Speaker 1>some of those horticulture needs an animus stickers for me
<v Speaker 1>and convince other people to using it right. That's all right,
<v Speaker 1>Go go, go fund yourself. Have a gret to day
<v Speaker 1>by