West Texas Pine Harvest and Alternation of Generations

<v Speaker 1>Welcome to another episode of the Crime Page a Bond
<v Speaker 1>He Doesen Podcasts. Today, we're going to be talking about
<v Speaker 1>something called the alternation of generations, which is some really
<v Speaker 1>weird shit that plants do, animals don't do, humans don't
<v Speaker 1>do it. It's fucking weird. It's bizarre. There's nothing analogous
<v Speaker 1>to it, like I said, in animals, but basically alternation
<v Speaker 1>of generations. One of the benefits of it is it
<v Speaker 1>allows plants to produce exponentially more progeny than they otherwise would.
<v Speaker 1>That's one of the potential benefits. But also it's just
<v Speaker 1>you know, they evolve from algae. Green algae do it.
<v Speaker 1>It's weird, and flowering plants it's totally reduced. In mosses
<v Speaker 1>and all the other bryophytes, liver warts and horn warts
<v Speaker 1>have You probably even know what the shit a horn
<v Speaker 1>wart is. I didn't even have any photos of it
<v Speaker 1>on my i astrillists when I was putting together a
<v Speaker 1>presentation for this class later or earlier. But it's in
<v Speaker 1>the bride fights. It's just especially weird. In ferns it's
<v Speaker 1>weird too, you know. It's got to do with gametophytes.
<v Speaker 1>Sporo fights, haploid diploid mitosis, miosis, all this shit. If
<v Speaker 1>you're already familiar with most of this stuff, this might
<v Speaker 1>be boring to you. It might not be fun. I'll
<v Speaker 1>try to throw in some extra cursing and profanity and
<v Speaker 1>get lost in some anecdotal stories, some little cute stories.
<v Speaker 1>But if you're a lay person, this is really important
<v Speaker 1>to know because it's how plants reproduce and also it's
<v Speaker 1>just fascinating shit. It's what enables phenotypic change in plants.
<v Speaker 1>It's what enables well the haploid and the diploid cycle do.
<v Speaker 1>It's what enables natural selection to occur. In order for
<v Speaker 1>the environment to select for something, you've got to have
<v Speaker 1>phenotypic change, right, If everything was just a clone of itself,
<v Speaker 1>you wouldn't have any of that. But anyway, we'll get
<v Speaker 1>into that later. At first, I want to talk about
<v Speaker 1>the last couple of days, because I've been in some
<v Speaker 1>pretty lovely places, especially yesterday when I was collecting Pinus
<v Speaker 1>ramota seed, where Pinus ramota is a pinion pine. Sometimes
<v Speaker 1>it's classified as a subspecies or variety of Pinus sombroidies,
<v Speaker 1>which is another pinion pine that you get in northern
<v Speaker 1>Mexico and in a few places in the southwestern United States.
<v Speaker 1>They're edible obviously, you're eating mostly gometofitic tissue. By the way,
<v Speaker 1>when you're eating a pine a pine nut, you know
<v Speaker 1>where it's like if you're eating a seed of a
<v Speaker 1>flowering plant, you're mostly eating triploid endosperm. You know, angel
<v Speaker 1>sperms have a whole double fertilization thing, but don't worry
<v Speaker 1>about that anyway. But this the fucking landscape. God, these
<v Speaker 1>landscapes in West Texas are just so fucking intoxicating, man.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, just to be able to look for miles
<v Speaker 1>and not see anybody, and especially not see a fucking
<v Speaker 1>car dealership or a billboard for some sleeves bag pig
<v Speaker 1>attorney or you know, thousands of you or other primate relatives,
<v Speaker 1>you know, individuals of your same species, the Homo sapiens,
<v Speaker 1>you know, driving around in these career this is like
<v Speaker 1>especially United States thing where you know, everything is car
<v Speaker 1>culture predominates. You know, we've all been been stuck in
<v Speaker 1>this hyper cardependent lifestyle where you don't move. You come
<v Speaker 1>down with metabolic diseases early from living a sedentary lifestyle
<v Speaker 1>and you're also breathing in a whole bunch of nasty
<v Speaker 1>shit that comes off these things, these these automobiles. Anyway,
<v Speaker 1>it's nice to be able to just look out and
<v Speaker 1>see nothing. I was instead of seeing all the horrible
<v Speaker 1>shit that makes me want to puke in everyday human
<v Speaker 1>society here in the United States, probably the ugliest First
<v Speaker 1>world country that there is. All Right, we've really fucked
<v Speaker 1>up our landscape, just made it into a commercial cesspool.
<v Speaker 1>Instead of looking at those things I was looking at.
<v Speaker 1>I saw some prairie dogs. I saw a prong horn,
<v Speaker 1>I saw a whole bunch of really cool plants. I
<v Speaker 1>saw vast mountain ranges, cool cloud formations, the beautiful fucking sunset,
<v Speaker 1>et cetera. It's crazy to me how many people will
<v Speaker 1>never get to experience that, especially especially in the eastern
<v Speaker 1>half of the United States where there's no public land.
<v Speaker 1>There's no public land in Texas either, But you know,
<v Speaker 1>most of the bodany, most of the exploration you just
<v Speaker 1>do on the road sides, unless you're you know, well,
<v Speaker 1>in the trespass or you know, you know the property
<v Speaker 1>units and care or whatever. But once you get west
<v Speaker 1>to Texas, all the land, all the States have a
<v Speaker 1>large amount of public land, which is crazy to me that.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, so many people in Texas don't realize that.
<v Speaker 1>So many people don't realize that in most of the
<v Speaker 1>eastern United States, where eighty six percent of the land
<v Speaker 1>is private. Texas it's like ninety eight percent, but especially
<v Speaker 1>everyhere east the Mississippi River, most of the land is private.
<v Speaker 1>I think it is literally like eighty six percent. So
<v Speaker 1>there's all this land that you can't go on. And
<v Speaker 1>it's not because there's a house there, because there's et cetera,
<v Speaker 1>even a development there. It's just privately owned. In the
<v Speaker 1>case of Texas especially, everything's privately owned. There's no house,
<v Speaker 1>there's nothing you're not in. You're not encroaching at anybody's
<v Speaker 1>private shit. It's just you know, say five thousand acres
<v Speaker 1>that a family owns, or a trust or you know
<v Speaker 1>some rich freak who's the ex CEO of Cisco Corporation. Real,
<v Speaker 1>but who's probably not listening to this podcast, so I
<v Speaker 1>can I can say that. Otherwise, you know, some of
<v Speaker 1>those rich freaks they get real litigious, they get the chance.
<v Speaker 1>But anyway, yeah, it's it's fucking Nevada is all public land.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, you can literally just roll around anywhere, botanize anywhere,
<v Speaker 1>and you know, if it's a private property, they've got
<v Speaker 1>to hang a sign, the owner's got to hang a sign,
<v Speaker 1>they's got to fence it, et cetera. Otherwise, everything's fair
<v Speaker 1>game for you to walk on. And surprisingly not a
<v Speaker 1>lot of the land gets trashed, you know, until the
<v Speaker 1>federal government comes in and due to lobbying, tries to
<v Speaker 1>sell it off to like a solar farm or sit
<v Speaker 1>to fucking mining or drilling or whatever the fuck. But
<v Speaker 1>you know, there's always a lot of a lot of resistance,
<v Speaker 1>especially from the right wingers, about public land. They want
<v Speaker 1>it the you know, how's they They try to they
<v Speaker 1>try to mislabel it is a government thing. Oh, it's
<v Speaker 1>the federal government runs it, you know it's not. Actually
<v Speaker 1>it's yeah, it's the federal government might run it. But
<v Speaker 1>the public has open access to it. So fuck you
<v Speaker 1>if you want to take that away from people. You know,
<v Speaker 1>this this more this Reagan shit. You know that the
<v Speaker 1>the federal government can't do anything right. You know, they're
<v Speaker 1>just gonna fuck the land up. Really, I've seen more
<v Speaker 1>private landowners fuck parcels of land up you know, in
<v Speaker 1>their unthinking, mouth breathing choices they make. Then I've seen
<v Speaker 1>the federal government though, I mean it's possible either one.
<v Speaker 1>Can you know, fuck a landscape and an ecosystem into
<v Speaker 1>a coma. But to think that private landowners somehow innately
<v Speaker 1>know more, or care more, or take better care of
<v Speaker 1>their land, it's complete insane. A lot of them don't
<v Speaker 1>give a shit. They'll sell it off to the highest bidder.
<v Speaker 1>They'll divide it up into smaller parcels and build hideous
<v Speaker 1>tracked homes on it there. They'll I get a wild
<v Speaker 1>hair if they're ass you know, some drunk guy with
<v Speaker 1>his skids theor he just wants to go out in
<v Speaker 1>clear land that makes him feel fucking manly or some shit.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know. I've seen that appen too. You know
<v Speaker 1>a lot of these, you know, these men, especially if
<v Speaker 1>you get him hammerd you give him a skids theer
<v Speaker 1>or power quip, they just go out there just fucking around,
<v Speaker 1>try to like real line a creek, fuck up an
<v Speaker 1>entire watershed in the process or something. I've seen all
<v Speaker 1>kinds of goofy shit, you know. Anyway, it was a beautiful,
<v Speaker 1>a beautiful night yesterday and a couple of days before,
<v Speaker 1>I was passing through San Marcos, Texas again, and I
<v Speaker 1>had I was gonna go when I was going to
<v Speaker 1>talk with Dan Hostage and I hadn't met him yet,
<v Speaker 1>and he didn't know my dogs. I didn't know his dogs.
<v Speaker 1>One or two of his dog well, one of his
<v Speaker 1>dogs is fucking nuts, beautiful dog, absolutely crazy though, won't
<v Speaker 1>let you get close to it. I didn't want to,
<v Speaker 1>you know, mess up my well behaved healers, especially the
<v Speaker 1>geriatric one, the blue healer. So so I got I
<v Speaker 1>did something I will never ever do again. I got
<v Speaker 1>an Airbnb in someone's house, which is the fucking weirdest
<v Speaker 1>shit I've ever done. I can't believe they It's just
<v Speaker 1>like bottom of the barrel. Desperation ended up being like
<v Speaker 1>eighty bucks. I could have just stayed in the Day's
<v Speaker 1>in it probably would have. I should have. I should
<v Speaker 1>have endured the spiritual debasement of like staying in a
<v Speaker 1>motel six, which can be really bad. You know, it hurts,
<v Speaker 1>you know, you're left with the scar It's like I
<v Speaker 1>have to eat a subway sandwich or something like, why
<v Speaker 1>the fuck did I do that? You know, I ate
<v Speaker 1>a fish fillet from McDonald's. I fucking never eat McDonald's never.
<v Speaker 1>It's disgusting. But I was on the road, I was hungry.
<v Speaker 1>I'd certainly never put any of that fucking meat in
<v Speaker 1>my mouth. But uh, but I figure a fish fill
<v Speaker 1>a Whatever I ate, it was disguis. I fucking hated
<v Speaker 1>myself afterwards. Right, I should have just gotten subway Subway.
<v Speaker 1>I'd still hate myself, but at least it's one healthier anyway.
<v Speaker 1>I saw I stayed in this Airbnb, and it was
<v Speaker 1>funny because the neighborhood it was in was one of
<v Speaker 1>these new cul de sacs suburbs that they build in Texas,
<v Speaker 1>basically anywhere along the I thirty five corridor between San
<v Speaker 1>Antonio and Austin, which is also ironically the most hideous
<v Speaker 1>part of Texas. I would say, well, Dallas has some
<v Speaker 1>close contenders, but you know, it's just car dealerships, twelve
<v Speaker 1>lane mega highway frontage roads that are basically an extension
<v Speaker 1>of the highway. I mean, it is some fucking defiled shit.
<v Speaker 1>It is its hideous, it's a hideous landscape. Oh the
<v Speaker 1>amount of billboards, the gist of oh god, that's what
<v Speaker 1>hell would be like for me, as good as you
<v Speaker 1>might feel being in some beautiful mountains or in a
<v Speaker 1>remote you know, Florida swamp, or in a fucking prairie
<v Speaker 1>you know in western Louisiana, or a prairie or a
<v Speaker 1>cedar glade in Tennessee, or a fucking temperate rainforest in
<v Speaker 1>the Pacific Northwest. As good as you feel, imagine the
<v Speaker 1>exact opposite, you know, minus the fire and brimstone and
<v Speaker 1>someone's sticking a hot poker in your ass. That minus
<v Speaker 1>all that. That's what driving the I thirty five quarter
<v Speaker 1>between Austin and San Antonio was like, it is fucking horrendous,
<v Speaker 1>horrific ough anyway, But they build these little cul de
<v Speaker 1>sac communities, you know, with the curvy streets, to imply
<v Speaker 1>that there's more space that there than there is that
<v Speaker 1>you're like living in the countryside. Every house had a lawn,
<v Speaker 1>it was. Every house is also like six feet away
<v Speaker 1>from the one next to it. And uh, Anyway, this
<v Speaker 1>lady like she was probably I think she had just
<v Speaker 1>gotten divorced from her husband, who knows, and uh, I
<v Speaker 1>get it. I sympathize with her. You know, she's probably
<v Speaker 1>didn't want to rent out a room. But she did anyway,
<v Speaker 1>and she had like made all the airbnbs are always
<v Speaker 1>all the same too, they're like plastic plants, really, you know,
<v Speaker 1>non confrontational colors, gray, lots of gray. We love gray
<v Speaker 1>and uh and the fucking art on the wall was
<v Speaker 1>horrific too. It was it was like, you know the
<v Speaker 1>ship you buy at Pier One Imports or Marshals or
<v Speaker 1>fucking Michaels whatever, whatever the fucking you know, the depressing
<v Speaker 1>chain stores that you steal from when you're a teenager.
<v Speaker 1>I don't think anyone steals some Peer one Imports. What
<v Speaker 1>would you steal some plastic shit that came over in
<v Speaker 1>a Chinese shipping container. I don't know anyway, But it
<v Speaker 1>was like that had that decour and it was like
<v Speaker 1>ninety degrees in the room because the air conditioning wasn't
<v Speaker 1>reaching it for some reason. And go in the bathroom
<v Speaker 1>and there's there's no like, there's no soap. It's just
<v Speaker 1>all this that body wash that smells like a stripper
<v Speaker 1>that no offense to strippers, that comes out of a
<v Speaker 1>pump bottle, you know, it just like the fake floral
<v Speaker 1>scent that you know, bath and bodyworks scent. Just the
<v Speaker 1>really experience, a really rough experience I could have done without,
<v Speaker 1>you know it just this again, I felt spiritually defiled,
<v Speaker 1>you know, like someone had opened up my soul and
<v Speaker 1>taken a shit in it. Uh and so, and it
<v Speaker 1>was like again it was like I should have just
<v Speaker 1>stayed in the fucking days and you know when I
<v Speaker 1>got the waffle machine and then I woke up the
<v Speaker 1>next day and I just felt bad. Me and Pria
<v Speaker 1>both we just felt bad about ourselves. You know, we
<v Speaker 1>just felt pretty bad. You just feel bad. And I
<v Speaker 1>was trying to make the lady's there at her house,
<v Speaker 1>so I was like was talking with it was like
<v Speaker 1>trying to be friendly and stuff, and she's, yeah, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>you know that like really basic Caucasian woman thing that
<v Speaker 1>they do, you know, yeah, like just fucking surface conversation,
<v Speaker 1>no offense to her, but obviously fake. You know, he
<v Speaker 1>doesn't give a shit what I'm doing. She just wants
<v Speaker 1>to make money off this fucking transaction and give me
<v Speaker 1>the fuck out of there. Hope I don't knock a
<v Speaker 1>hole in the wall. And uh yeah, it was just
<v Speaker 1>it was I hate that too. I was like trying
<v Speaker 1>to be nice and she's just made me feel like
<v Speaker 1>a phony. I was like, all right, you know I
<v Speaker 1>was genuine, but just being talked to like that, Yeah, okay, well,
<v Speaker 1>oh god, all right, what I even try? That made
<v Speaker 1>me feel the filed. You know, it made me feel
<v Speaker 1>like I like I was, you know anyway, So that
<v Speaker 1>was unpleasant. But uh but I made up for it
<v Speaker 1>two days later when I was in when I was
<v Speaker 1>collecting pine seeds. So I was collecting this species of
<v Speaker 1>pine Pinus ramota because apparently it's very heat and drought tolerant.
<v Speaker 1>No shit, it grows in a desert. It grows in
<v Speaker 1>the I guess what you could call the high desert
<v Speaker 1>of West Texas, high being like elevation forty three hundred
<v Speaker 1>feet with all those cool kylanthoid ferns like Astrolepis. And
<v Speaker 1>there was a Thymophila. What was the thymophyla species? I saw?
<v Speaker 1>There was yuca everywhere too, Yuka torrie and Yuca elatta,
<v Speaker 1>And yeah, what was that thymophila? Oh God, saw so
<v Speaker 1>much good stuff. Yeah, Thymophyla Cetifolia croton dio week is.
<v Speaker 1>There was a buckwheat there too. It's at this little
<v Speaker 1>it's at this little like picnic area, which is what
<v Speaker 1>Texas calls arresto. They don't worry. They maybe the don't
<v Speaker 1>want to call it a rest stop because if they apply,
<v Speaker 1>if they say restop, that implies you can sleep there,
<v Speaker 1>and they didn't look the sure certainly won't allow that.
<v Speaker 1>But they call it a picnic area. You know, there's
<v Speaker 1>no spot to take a shit unless you want to
<v Speaker 1>dig a hole. But they got a little picnic table.
<v Speaker 1>You can eat, you can hang out whatever. Uh some
<v Speaker 1>lady ended up no one came into the spot. We
<v Speaker 1>were there for like two or three hours. Some lady
<v Speaker 1>came in later who was on in route to Portland
<v Speaker 1>from Houston. As much as I hate Portland, that's gotta
<v Speaker 1>be a nice transition to go from fucking Houston. Talk
<v Speaker 1>about a miserable, fucking area. Jesus Christ, no offense to
<v Speaker 1>anybody in Houston. I feel for you, buddy. You know,
<v Speaker 1>the car slum, the commercial slum, the retail slum. That's
<v Speaker 1>what Houston is, man, It's anyway. But uh, yeah, she
<v Speaker 1>was going route to Portland, so she hung out and
<v Speaker 1>we talked to her for a little bit. I guess
<v Speaker 1>she was going to sleep in her car there. But
<v Speaker 1>but yeah, there was a buckwheat species there to Aria
<v Speaker 1>agonam harass a fullium, which is a fucking gorgeous and
<v Speaker 1>somewhat narrow endemic buckweed. It grows in New Mexico, Texas.
<v Speaker 1>This whole area kind of felt like parts of southeastern
<v Speaker 1>New Mexico, which again is another like insanely beautiful spot.
<v Speaker 1>And again once you cross over at Stay Lined, you're
<v Speaker 1>in public land. Like once you leave Texas, you know, well,
<v Speaker 1>first off, you can feel the cultural repression kind of
<v Speaker 1>ease up a little bit, and uh, then you also
<v Speaker 1>have public land everywhere. But it just I love these landscapes. Man.
<v Speaker 1>The whole landscape is it's and it's all limestone. It's limestone.
<v Speaker 1>And then all the plants are like mint green, like
<v Speaker 1>chalky mint green from all the hairs on them tiny
<v Speaker 1>in most cases, tiny little oppressed hairs, you know, like
<v Speaker 1>a little coat like hairs that are parallel to the
<v Speaker 1>leaf that gives them that chalky mint green color. All right.
<v Speaker 1>Croton Dioecus was like that. Bauerjavia linear folio was another
<v Speaker 1>one I saw. It's a nick tadge. I'd never seen
<v Speaker 1>that one before. Dalia Greggy, I have seen that in
<v Speaker 1>Waivo Leone, all these chalky mint green species, you know
<v Speaker 1>what would sucked though. I saw a long billed curl curlew,
<v Speaker 1>really beautiful bird that had just gotten smacked by a truck.
<v Speaker 1>I presume that was on one of the roads just
<v Speaker 1>before this, and I was such a It was a
<v Speaker 1>rough injury. The thing was still alive. It felt so
<v Speaker 1>bad for it. So I picked it up and it
<v Speaker 1>made this little whimpering sound. It was just laying there
<v Speaker 1>in the sun. I wanted to just get it out
<v Speaker 1>of the sun. I picked it up very gently and
<v Speaker 1>went and placed it in some some tall grass that
<v Speaker 1>was off to the side. Such a gorgeous bird. I
<v Speaker 1>felt so bad for it. I hung out with it
<v Speaker 1>for a minute to it. Placed my hand on it,
<v Speaker 1>you know, I said, hey, peace, peace be, would you
<v Speaker 1>as you go into the the afterlife? No, seriously, I was,
<v Speaker 1>you know, gave it a moment of peace and uh.
<v Speaker 1>And I don't think it was freaking out at this
<v Speaker 1>point that already moved it. Hopefully I didn't fucking terrify.
<v Speaker 1>I think I'm sure under a lot of stress, but
<v Speaker 1>I think hopefully it figured out I wasn't gonna eat
<v Speaker 1>it after thirty seconds for a minute, but you know,
<v Speaker 1>I had a little moment then and and and wished
<v Speaker 1>it well on its journey into the next dimension or
<v Speaker 1>wherever the fuck it's going. So that was really sad.
<v Speaker 1>That was at the prairie dog spot. There's a prairie
<v Speaker 1>dog town in West Texas, which is pretty cool, little
<v Speaker 1>prairie dog town north of Marathon with prong horn just
<v Speaker 1>hanging out, you know, just just hanging out on these
<v Speaker 1>these vast epic plains with the nice landscape of mountains
<v Speaker 1>in the background. Pronghorn antelope more closely related to giraffes
<v Speaker 1>than to deer. So anyway, these pines had just dropped seeds.
<v Speaker 1>They'd been dropped. There were still some seeds in the
<v Speaker 1>cones up on the trees, but they had they had
<v Speaker 1>mostly dropped. They had dropped most of their seeds, so
<v Speaker 1>most of the seeds that we were picking up were
<v Speaker 1>on the ground, and a bunch of Germany already. I
<v Speaker 1>guess they'd gotten a decent rain the whole area too.
<v Speaker 1>Of course, it had rained. The whole area was green,
<v Speaker 1>Like the whole fucking drive there was green. The desert
<v Speaker 1>looked so good. Parthenium and Canum, a member of Asteraci
<v Speaker 1>and some somewhat closely related to Ambrosia to the ragweeds.
<v Speaker 1>But this is an insect pollinated parthenium or insect pollinated.
<v Speaker 1>Parthenium is an insect pollinated, not a wind pollinated like
<v Speaker 1>the ragweeds. Parthenium is an insect pollinated genus. And it
<v Speaker 1>was it was, yeah, they were. There was a whole
<v Speaker 1>hillside lit up in parthenium or in canam giving it
<v Speaker 1>this like chalky mint green color. And then there were
<v Speaker 1>just it only reaches a height of like two feet.
<v Speaker 1>But then there was Yucca tore i and a lotta
<v Speaker 1>just poking up everywhere. Another thing at this spot that
<v Speaker 1>was cool was the plant Hoffmann Segia glocca, which is
<v Speaker 1>a little p it's a little pea in the sasee
<v Speaker 1>alpinioid subfamily, so it's got safe alpinioid flowers, five distinct petals.
<v Speaker 1>They don't have that banner wings and keel flower more fun,
<v Speaker 1>you know, banner petal, wing pedals, keel pedal that members
<v Speaker 1>of you know, like the true p subfamily Faboidi, have
<v Speaker 1>a lot of the saytyu pennyways are cool Senna say
<v Speaker 1>Selpinia erythrostemmen. I've seen some really cool fucking Hoffman segia
<v Speaker 1>and the deserts of Baja California as well as Chile.
<v Speaker 1>But Hoffman Segia at Glaca is our local West Texas one.
<v Speaker 1>It's a little it's a little uh herb. Well, they
<v Speaker 1>get kind of woody. I think they get a little
<v Speaker 1>bit of woody stem. But either way, they're cool. They
<v Speaker 1>they got a perennial root, beautiful flowers like glands on
<v Speaker 1>the flowers like red sepals and bright yellow petals. But
<v Speaker 1>it was busting up through the fucking asphalt on the
<v Speaker 1>road at this spot near the Prairie Dog County, which
<v Speaker 1>I thought was pretty cool. Oh yeah, and there was
<v Speaker 1>Zenia anomaly there too. Another weird West Texas plant West
<v Speaker 1>Texas Northwest Mexico Zinia is astaraci. You've probably heard some
<v Speaker 1>granny talk about the zinnias in her garden, right, she's
<v Speaker 1>growing the Mexican species. No doubt. Those are the ornamental,
<v Speaker 1>showy ones that you'd see, you know, like in a
<v Speaker 1>fucking garden setting, unless it was like a native plant garden,
<v Speaker 1>you know, unless it was someone who's on the level,
<v Speaker 1>not saying you know, somebody who's grandma who's grown as
<v Speaker 1>zinnia isn't not a level, but you know what generally
<v Speaker 1>is a different taste. But this is a West Texas
<v Speaker 1>small little native zenia that's got vestigial lgules. So it's
<v Speaker 1>got vestigial petals. The petals you see on a daisy
<v Speaker 1>are not true petals, they're actually ligules or ray flowers.
<v Speaker 1>This zinia only has one or two. It's got a
<v Speaker 1>discoid mostly discoid flower, but it'll spit out one or
<v Speaker 1>two uhligules. I've seen this in the genus Laya before
<v Speaker 1>in California, which is another astoracy. You know, it's got
<v Speaker 1>like vestigial the same thing with these vestigial lgoles. It's
<v Speaker 1>not producing a full whirl like a daisy has or
<v Speaker 1>an in celia has, or a sunflower has of legules,
<v Speaker 1>but it's it's producing them stuff. It's only got one
<v Speaker 1>or two bright orange floria spride orange color to the
<v Speaker 1>individual floor. It's into the ligules and just a cool
<v Speaker 1>fucking plant. And that again that chalky mint green foliage.
<v Speaker 1>And it's a rare one. I don't know who knows
<v Speaker 1>when this thing's speciated or where it's distributed. I know
<v Speaker 1>it's in Mexico too, but anyway, yeah, Texas is basically Mexico.
<v Speaker 1>But it's a cool fucking plant. My friend Patty Manning,
<v Speaker 1>uh just uh grew it. My friend Patty Manning, who
<v Speaker 1>just passed away yesterday, she had ovarian cancer. Fucking great lady,
<v Speaker 1>great fucking woman. Man. She was just a cool fucking uh,
<v Speaker 1>just a good botanist and all the any erbarium record
<v Speaker 1>I would look at for cool West Texas plants. You know,
<v Speaker 1>half of them had her name on it, her Billy Turner.
<v Speaker 1>Really cool woman. She lived in Alpine, Texas, and she
<v Speaker 1>was growing a shit ton of the only person growing
<v Speaker 1>a lot of these plants. So many times that happens
<v Speaker 1>to me. I'm in West Texas. I look at the
<v Speaker 1>flora here, I look at some of these plants, and
<v Speaker 1>I'm like, why the fuck is somebody not growing these?
<v Speaker 1>These are such cool plants. You know, once we've fully
<v Speaker 1>eradicated the sick cult of the lawn, every last bit
<v Speaker 1>alon I'm coming for it. Least in West Texas, well
<v Speaker 1>in most of Texas. I think it's just doesn't make
<v Speaker 1>any sense. It's pretty shit for brain. Plus, native plant
<v Speaker 1>gardens are so nice to have, huh, I see, you know,
<v Speaker 1>there's so many plants that I see. I'm like, why
<v Speaker 1>is this not in cultivation more? You know, Instead these
<v Speaker 1>people fight this uphill battle of maintaining a lawn with
<v Speaker 1>a fucking sprinkler system. Oh god, it's just so nineteen
<v Speaker 1>fifties and just fucking bleak. God, get with it, man.
<v Speaker 1>I was at the my friend Michael Easton. He did
<v Speaker 1>this huge install of a native plant garden in Alpine.
<v Speaker 1>I did a video on it a few months back,
<v Speaker 1>and I was. I just walked by it the other
<v Speaker 1>day and it was fucking lit up. The humming words
<v Speaker 1>were chasing each other, you know, like little crackheads going
<v Speaker 1>in between all the different salveas. He put it in
<v Speaker 1>Salvia darcia, tetra neurs scaposa, little aster, little composite species,
<v Speaker 1>likes the rocky areas he was using as a groundcover.
<v Speaker 1>Some of the cool native grasses, the Mullnbergias were just huge,
<v Speaker 1>these beautiful bunch gray It was just so nice. It's like,
<v Speaker 1>God damn, why of course, Like, why the fuck why
<v Speaker 1>I try to have a lawn? Man? You know what
<v Speaker 1>plant I'm coming for as the fucking they call it
<v Speaker 1>the China berry. Invasive as hell in the Austin area.
<v Speaker 1>It's in the mahogany family Meliace cool flowers. I'm sure
<v Speaker 1>it's really cool where it's native nine thousand miles away
<v Speaker 1>from here, but on this continent and at least in
<v Speaker 1>Central Texas, it's extremely invasive. It's not invasive in West
<v Speaker 1>Texas because we don't have the rainfall for it, but
<v Speaker 1>I'm sure if we did, if we got a good mond,
<v Speaker 1>soon you get individuals popping up. But it's just, oh god,
<v Speaker 1>it's just one of those plants where you're like, man,
<v Speaker 1>what the fuck. And it's one of those things where
<v Speaker 1>it's the flowers smell good when they bloom, but it
<v Speaker 1>ends up taking over. I mean, it's a really bad
<v Speaker 1>noxious weed taking over, especially you know, uh, washes and
<v Speaker 1>creeks places where there is enough water. In the Edwards Plateau,
<v Speaker 1>there was a spot there was an old abandoned factory
<v Speaker 1>in New bron Folds. I remember going to it was
<v Speaker 1>I think it was on the Guadalupe River, you know,
<v Speaker 1>Denhim factory, and uh we were in there exploring it
<v Speaker 1>and then looking around at the landscaping ship and there
<v Speaker 1>was just h god, it was it was China berry.
<v Speaker 1>What is it? Melia Azida rock. I forget the I
<v Speaker 1>forget the binomial for it. But if you google China
<v Speaker 1>berry produced these little yellow berries, I don't even think
<v Speaker 1>it's from China. I don't know where that common name is.
<v Speaker 1>But you know, it wouldn't be surprising if there was
<v Speaker 1>a stupid fucking common name that led to uh, you know,
<v Speaker 1>misconceptions about a plant's origin or what it does. That's
<v Speaker 1>why we that's why we don't use common names. But
<v Speaker 1>I'm coming for that because it's in landscaping all over
<v Speaker 1>the place here and it's just you know, my chainsaw
<v Speaker 1>is ready carry us saw carried a chainsaw. I got
<v Speaker 1>an electric chainsaw. I fucking love it so much, so
<v Speaker 1>much nicer than those gas ones. They're loud as fuck.
<v Speaker 1>You know, if you don't use it for a month,
<v Speaker 1>you got to worry about the gas sucking up the
<v Speaker 1>fuel filter in there. If you leave the gas in there,
<v Speaker 1>you don't want to use old fuel. It's just a
<v Speaker 1>pain in the ass, loud as fuck, obnoxious, you know,
<v Speaker 1>makes it really hard to saw down things like crape
<v Speaker 1>myrtles and the dead of night or China berries and
<v Speaker 1>the dead of night, et cetera. You know, I mean,
<v Speaker 1>an electric chainsaw is loud too, but you don't have
<v Speaker 1>an internal combustion engine. But uh, you know, leave it
<v Speaker 1>to Texas meathheads. They'll find a way to politicize, you know,
<v Speaker 1>whether something's you know, internal combustion engine or powered by
<v Speaker 1>a lithium ion battery. Anyway, So moving, moving right along.
<v Speaker 1>Before this, before collecting these pine seeds, I on the
<v Speaker 1>way up from South Texas, I had stopped and seen prospibles,
<v Speaker 1>probably the coolest Liatris I've seen, next to Lyatris bridges. Alyatris,
<v Speaker 1>of course, is the genus known as Blazing Stars or
<v Speaker 1>Gaifa or what are they call it? Shooting I don't
<v Speaker 1>know what the fuck the name? And blazing Star whatever
<v Speaker 1>again Lyatris, it's just a really it's fifty species in
<v Speaker 1>the genus, common mostly in the eastern half, the central plains,
<v Speaker 1>the Midwest, the prairies. Uh. And you get a bunch
<v Speaker 1>of cool ones down in Florida, you get quite a few.
<v Speaker 1>In Central Texas. You get Liatris. What is it? Punk
<v Speaker 1>tatav righty Mexicana out here in West Texas down by
<v Speaker 1>Turlingua area, But this was on the South Texas sandsheet
<v Speaker 1>south of San Antonio, probably one of the hottest growing
<v Speaker 1>Liatrius species. I mean, this thing was growing on sand
<v Speaker 1>with all the with the usual cast of sand affiliate
<v Speaker 1>plants from that area, plants that are sand endemics essentially,
<v Speaker 1>you know, like Monarda particulosa Areagona multiflorum. I think there
<v Speaker 1>was that the Yuka species there that used to be
<v Speaker 1>called Yucca buckley eye but is now. I think it's
<v Speaker 1>Yuka constrict really thin leaved with fibrous leaf margins. Yuka
<v Speaker 1>species some really really cool. You know, it's like these
<v Speaker 1>sand prairies basically, it's it's it's hard for a lot
<v Speaker 1>of things to get tall on sand. It's hard for
<v Speaker 1>for trees to grow on sand. There's nutrient poor or
<v Speaker 1>too fast draining. But of course because of those stresses,
<v Speaker 1>sand just like limestone or gypsum or serpentine soil in California,
<v Speaker 1>you know, the sand acts as kind of like a speciator.
<v Speaker 1>It causes new species to evolve that that can tolerate
<v Speaker 1>the sand, and that end up only occurring on sand.
<v Speaker 1>They don't grow anywhere else, you know, probably because they
<v Speaker 1>can't tolerate the competition. You know, they're they're specialized on
<v Speaker 1>growing and sand. They don't get too tall whatever. A
<v Speaker 1>lot of edaphic endemism, soil endemism. And I said, only
<v Speaker 1>grow on a certain substrate, certain geology in the case
<v Speaker 1>this case it's sand dunees. But this was Liatris Currizana.
<v Speaker 1>I put a post up on anth Graham. I think
<v Speaker 1>I put on the Facebook tool. Video will be out shortly.
<v Speaker 1>But just a beautiful fucking composite man. Some of them
<v Speaker 1>were just you know, they get about two or three
<v Speaker 1>feet tall. They're blue, I mean you could see them.
<v Speaker 1>They're like bluish purple. But the blue is not caused
<v Speaker 1>by the ligules. Again, the rays, this is astra acy
<v Speaker 1>sunflower family terminology. They were It was caused by the fileries,
<v Speaker 1>the bracts that surround the involacar like on a sunflower.
<v Speaker 1>These fileries are just green. They're green pointed bracts that
<v Speaker 1>completely surround that flower head of a sunflower, you know,
<v Speaker 1>or on a daisy whatever. Fieries are really important. I'm
<v Speaker 1>always telling people, especially with the North American sunflowers. A
<v Speaker 1>lot of the DYCs are North American members of the
<v Speaker 1>sunflower family. A lot of them just look yellow. They're
<v Speaker 1>damn yellow composits. It's just really hard to tell. Apart
<v Speaker 1>if you're looking at the flower head on, you got
<v Speaker 1>to look at the sides, look at the fileeries, the
<v Speaker 1>filery structure, whether there's one series of fileeries or two
<v Speaker 1>or three stacked on top of each other, that that'll
<v Speaker 1>be a good way to identify different species of damn
<v Speaker 1>yellow composite. Well, the fileeries on this Liatrius had been
<v Speaker 1>morphed evolutionarily speaking into really bright blue attractant bracts to
<v Speaker 1>attract the bumblebee pollinators that pollinate the little flowers on
<v Speaker 1>this thing. And Lyatris carries on A C A R
<v Speaker 1>R I, Z A n A used to be grouped
<v Speaker 1>as a variety of Liatrius elegans, which is another great
<v Speaker 1>fucking species, really cool. There's also Liatrius hesper elagans from
<v Speaker 1>this whole same this general region like San Antonio east
<v Speaker 1>to East Texas, UH, Southern Arkansas, Louisiana, et cetera. But
<v Speaker 1>but anyway, so this is to be Lyatrius elegance variety
<v Speaker 1>Carrizana un guy nis. His botanists don't even know where
<v Speaker 1>the fuck he's located. But he wrote a paper, put
<v Speaker 1>a paper together, split him up into different species based
<v Speaker 1>on a couple of different traits. Of course, you get
<v Speaker 1>into the same old argument. What's the difference between a
<v Speaker 1>variety and a species? It fucking depends. It's just human interpretation. Really,
<v Speaker 1>when it comes down to it, what's the between an
<v Speaker 1>ecotype and a new species? Again? Human interpretation. It's you know,
<v Speaker 1>can you build a good case for it in a
<v Speaker 1>published peer reviewed paper or not? It's really often all
<v Speaker 1>it is, you know. And when you look at the DNA,
<v Speaker 1>I don't even even know if the DNA will tell
<v Speaker 1>you it's different, But is it? You know what? What
<v Speaker 1>aspects of the genome do you look at? What low
<v Speaker 1>side do you look at? The determine whether it's different
<v Speaker 1>enough to be considered a different species, et cetera. I
<v Speaker 1>know what that new composite species that was discovered in
<v Speaker 1>West Texas that I did a video on a few
<v Speaker 1>months ago. Uh, it came out close to psilostrophe or
<v Speaker 1>silos strophe, however you want to pronounce that p s
<v Speaker 1>I l O S t r O p h e H.
<v Speaker 1>When Isaac Lickor did the molecular work on it, it
<v Speaker 1>came out close to silas strophe psilostrophe, but not quite
<v Speaker 1>in it. And so he was able by looking at
<v Speaker 1>the DNA to determine that it's in. This constitutes a
<v Speaker 1>new genus. So a fucking new genus of astor. I'm
<v Speaker 1>getting a little sidetracked here from talking about the liantris,
<v Speaker 1>but a new genus of composite has been discovered in
<v Speaker 1>West Texas. That was the one that that lady deb
<v Speaker 1>Manning found in Big Ben National Park. Just a little
<v Speaker 1>fucking it's a little tiny annual. The seeds are just
<v Speaker 1>laying dormant in the soil seed bank out there in
<v Speaker 1>the middle of the blazing hot desert, and then when
<v Speaker 1>you get a good rain, they germinate generally in the spring,
<v Speaker 1>good spring rain, and uh, it just looks like, uh,
<v Speaker 1>you know it, little little white fluffball. The leaves are
<v Speaker 1>so ensconced and tom and toast and pubescent hairs, that
<v Speaker 1>toast hairs are wooly that it just looks you can't
<v Speaker 1>even see the green in them. But again there's an
<v Speaker 1>adaptation to the hot, dry, windy desert. But what's remarkable
<v Speaker 1>about it is that it's got these lgules, these the
<v Speaker 1>rays again, those lgules that are fucking super long and
<v Speaker 1>like candy cane striped, you know, along the length of
<v Speaker 1>the legule, and fucking weird. So they're calling it, I
<v Speaker 1>hope I'm not pissing. Well, no one's going to be
<v Speaker 1>listening to this biligula. I think Biligula anomala. So that's
<v Speaker 1>the genus Bilgula. But that's fucking exciting. I mean, it's
<v Speaker 1>in a national park. You could still be discovering an
<v Speaker 1>entirely new genus, not new species, but new genus, whole
<v Speaker 1>new genus to science of a very well known plant family,
<v Speaker 1>the astoracy, some flower family anyway. So but back to
<v Speaker 1>this liatres. So this Liatreus is essentially turning since Liatrius
<v Speaker 1>is all mostly I think they're all discoid flowers. They
<v Speaker 1>don't have any petals, any what you would call petals,
<v Speaker 1>the legos, they don't have any legals, they don't have
<v Speaker 1>any rays. It's all just discoid flowers. All the blazing stars,
<v Speaker 1>just discoyed feathers, gay feathers, just discoyed flowers. Excuse me,
<v Speaker 1>my fucking my mind, there's working over drive there. I
<v Speaker 1>was thinking of how silly the term gay feathers sound.
<v Speaker 1>What what a fuck comes up with these common names?
<v Speaker 1>Gay feather? Why what does that mean? You know it's
<v Speaker 1>a it's a happy feather? Is it a gay feather? Huh? Happy? Horny? Gay?
<v Speaker 1>And sassy? Fuck fucking common names. God, they just it
<v Speaker 1>drives me nuts. You know what really drives me nuts, too,
<v Speaker 1>is in Texas, a lot of people will staunchly stick
<v Speaker 1>to common names. It's probably like this in other areas
<v Speaker 1>of the southeast, too, will staunchly stick the common names
<v Speaker 1>instead of just learning the genus name. I rant about
<v Speaker 1>this all the time. I apologize if you've heard it before,
<v Speaker 1>but fuck learn my actress. Is it that hard? Jesus Christ,
<v Speaker 1>It's like, it's like you don't want to sound like
<v Speaker 1>you know what you're talking about. I don't get it, man.
<v Speaker 1>You know, coming here with your elitist six littered word
<v Speaker 1>you don't need that shit. Huh. You take your Yankee
<v Speaker 1>ass back up north. That was some fucking That was
<v Speaker 1>some shit I kept hearing in the public land argument
<v Speaker 1>that I was getting in with people when I posted
<v Speaker 1>something about the lack of public land in Texas, and
<v Speaker 1>these fucking eighties were like, you don't think you should
<v Speaker 1>be able to own land? No, it's not about whether
<v Speaker 1>you should be able to own land or not. The
<v Speaker 1>system shouldn't be built where so much land is tied
<v Speaker 1>up in private hands. It should be publicly owned. It
<v Speaker 1>should be owned by the BLM or the fucking Forest
<v Speaker 1>Service or whatever. It should be a national I mean
<v Speaker 1>they call it national or federal or whatever, but it's
<v Speaker 1>basically the public owns that you can go on there
<v Speaker 1>and no paranoid fucking tell you to get off of it. Right,
<v Speaker 1>Just so crazy, But that's something you'd always hear, Like
<v Speaker 1>the triggered Texan man in the comments, go back to
<v Speaker 1>where you came from. Why don't you go back to
<v Speaker 1>where you fucking came from. Your family wasn't here one
<v Speaker 1>hundred and twenty years ago, huh until the Texas Rangers
<v Speaker 1>made it safe enough by eradicating these those worrying natives,
<v Speaker 1>you know, for you to feel for your lily white
<v Speaker 1>family to fucking uh no offense. Maybe they're pink, you
<v Speaker 1>know you don't have a lot of melanin because it's
<v Speaker 1>you don't even come from a latitude where you get
<v Speaker 1>a lot of solar radiation. No harm, I'm not knocking. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>you know I got a little bit of melanin, you know,
<v Speaker 1>the Italian side did at least, but uh, you know,
<v Speaker 1>did you go back to it? It's just such a
<v Speaker 1>meat heeaded fucking are you go back where you coming from? It?
<v Speaker 1>It plays in again all the stupid shit that talking
<v Speaker 1>points like, now come out here with your California ways.
<v Speaker 1>Don't come out here with your goofy fucking Southeastern Confederate ways.
<v Speaker 1>You guys weren't even out here one hundred and twenty
<v Speaker 1>hundred and forty fucking years ago. Goofy fuck God, just
<v Speaker 1>don't come out here with you. Yeah, shut up, get
<v Speaker 1>a fucking getting that, get a couple extra brain cells.
<v Speaker 1>Fucking empty headed and went anyway, So we're talking about
<v Speaker 1>this liactress. The only other genus of Asta race sunflower
<v Speaker 1>family is twenty eight thousand species. I guess should stop
<v Speaker 1>calling it the sunflower. For me, the composite family is
<v Speaker 1>more appropriate because sunflower, you know, applies to a subfamily
<v Speaker 1>of Astace. It doesn't look like well, a tribe, whereas composite,
<v Speaker 1>you've got a composite flower head one well, what looks
<v Speaker 1>like one single flower is actually composed of many composite
<v Speaker 1>flower head the composite family. The only other time I've
<v Speaker 1>seen this done is in the Paper Days. He tried
<v Speaker 1>in the Failia with a G G N A, P
<v Speaker 1>H I, L e AE, which you get not many members.
<v Speaker 1>You get a couple of genera in the northern hemisphere.
<v Speaker 1>Antenaria is one of them. One of h Antonary is
<v Speaker 1>one of them. But it's not not gonna, you know,
<v Speaker 1>knock your socks off. It's not gonna, you know, land
<v Speaker 1>you on your ass by how cool it looks. Some
<v Speaker 1>of them are cool. But then when you get to
<v Speaker 1>South Africa and Australia, the Paper Days he tried, goes
<v Speaker 1>fucking wild, and you've got, you know, nephaliate, members of
<v Speaker 1>tribed nephaliate that look like they have leaves like conifers,
<v Speaker 1>like spruces. They feel like plastic they're turning, But most
<v Speaker 1>importantly and relevant to this conversation, they're turning their fileries,
<v Speaker 1>those bracts that surround the invulakar. The vase that holds
<v Speaker 1>the flowers, the main you know, unit of the composite
<v Speaker 1>flower head. They turn those into attractant bracts like this
<v Speaker 1>Liatriss is doing so they you'll see them and look
<v Speaker 1>up like a paper daisy. Like God, there's some really
<v Speaker 1>weird ones. If you go to Iinaturalist, type in tribe
<v Speaker 1>Nephalia with the g let the suggestion come up, you know,
<v Speaker 1>in the tax on box, hit the explorer feature on
<v Speaker 1>the web page. Go to the tax on box box,
<v Speaker 1>hit tribe and Nephalia and then hit like location on mine,
<v Speaker 1>hit user Joey santor hit the location South Africa or
<v Speaker 1>location Australia. You'll see what I'm talking about. There's some
<v Speaker 1>really weird ones. And those fileries that they're using as
<v Speaker 1>attractant bracts basically to you know, make themselves visible and
<v Speaker 1>conspicuous to the things that pollinate them, which is mostly insects,
<v Speaker 1>maybe a couple birds and some of the red ones.
<v Speaker 1>Those fileries get turned into like this papery. They've got
<v Speaker 1>this papery text tip. That's why they call them paper daisies.
<v Speaker 1>So weird, but so only the other time I've seen
<v Speaker 1>members of the sunflower family. Do that you don't have
<v Speaker 1>legules because you got mostly discoid flowers. Fuck it, use
<v Speaker 1>your fieries. Turn your fileeries into these showy things. Lyatrius
<v Speaker 1>bridgesy I after some apparently after some dead guy named Bridges,
<v Speaker 1>which grows in East Texas, is probably the showiest fucking
<v Speaker 1>member of the genus Liatris. It does. It's so cool.
<v Speaker 1>I mean these in the structure of these fileries looks
<v Speaker 1>like the shit you'd see on top of you know,
<v Speaker 1>Corinthium columns, Greco Roman architecture, to ornamentation and stuff nice
<v Speaker 1>like you see on top of the buildings in downtown Chicago.
<v Speaker 1>You know. Great place to loiter and lurk, you know anyway,
<v Speaker 1>which I did much. I did a lot of as
<v Speaker 1>a youth. You know. You go lurk there and you
<v Speaker 1>go to Ronnie's Steakhouse, hang on the basement with your
<v Speaker 1>graffiti fens, drawing the books and shit, and listen to
<v Speaker 1>some music, you know, hide out in the little basement
<v Speaker 1>dining room of Ronnie's. I think Ronnie's is gone. Ronnie's Steakhouts,
<v Speaker 1>Oh those rid of the days. Yeah, that man, that
<v Speaker 1>fuck I you know, I spend like an hour and
<v Speaker 1>a half there. I was. It was so cool. I
<v Speaker 1>just you got to take everything in survey, check all
<v Speaker 1>what species are growing growing there, et cetera. Really cool stuff.
<v Speaker 1>So anyway, all right, so let's move on to alternation
<v Speaker 1>of generations. We're hitting the forty minute mark. This is good, okay,
<v Speaker 1>So let's talk about alternation of generations, all right, and
<v Speaker 1>why it's so fucking weird, but also why it's so
<v Speaker 1>cool in what the whole evolutionary purpose of it is. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>alternation of generations is completely different in the seed plants,
<v Speaker 1>the woody seed plants conifers aka jymnosperms and angiosperms. Then
<v Speaker 1>it is from ferns and bryo fights in quote spike
<v Speaker 1>mosses aka the lyco fights, all right, which are not
<v Speaker 1>technically ferns. I'll probably hear me ranting about Selaginella all
<v Speaker 1>the time, which is so fucking cool. I love I
<v Speaker 1>love celaginel. Of course, I'm ran thinking about it. I'm
<v Speaker 1>gonna have a guy on the podcast next week to
<v Speaker 1>talk about them. They're those you know, resurrection quote ferns.
<v Speaker 1>They're not a true fern, shitty common name that can
<v Speaker 1>completely dry out in the desert of West Texas, for instance,
<v Speaker 1>selaginal epidophla and then can come back to life within
<v Speaker 1>like thirty minutes of receiving some moisture. You also have
<v Speaker 1>the tropical ones that can't try up whatever anyway. So
<v Speaker 1>you got Celaganella's, the lycophytes, lycopods too, right. Laganella is
<v Speaker 1>a lycophyte, the lycopods, lycophytes, the bryophytes, and then the ferns. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>and the lycophytes in the ferns are vascular. They've got
<v Speaker 1>a they've got plumbing. They got xylum and flow them
<v Speaker 1>xyleum taking water up, flow them taking sugars back to
<v Speaker 1>the rest of us cells that you know, sugar's manufactured
<v Speaker 1>sugars and carbohydrates manufactured in photosynthesis. And the bryophytes, the mosses,
<v Speaker 1>the liverwarts, the horn wars are non vascular. Okay, they
<v Speaker 1>don't have any plumbing, all right, They just they're just
<v Speaker 1>taking it in directly through the cell. But the angiosperms
<v Speaker 1>and the conifers, okay, everybody does. Everybody does, alternation of generations.
<v Speaker 1>I'm all over the fucking place. I don't know where
<v Speaker 1>to start, because this is some really heavy shit, So
<v Speaker 1>sit down, all right, But it's this is really important
<v Speaker 1>shit to know. It's really cool. There's nothing analogous to
<v Speaker 1>it in humans. Okay, Alternation of generations means exactly that
<v Speaker 1>there are two separate generations, Okay, the gametophyte and the
<v Speaker 1>sporo fight. When you look at a maple tree, for instance,
<v Speaker 1>you're looking at the sporal fight. The sporal fight is
<v Speaker 1>the dominant plant. Pine tree, same thing, fern, same thing,
<v Speaker 1>like a fight, selaginella the resurrection plant. Same thing. When
<v Speaker 1>you look at a bryophight okay, a moss, a liver
<v Speaker 1>war to hornworth, the gametophyte is what you're looking at.
<v Speaker 1>The sporo fight is not photosynthetic in the bryo fights
<v Speaker 1>except for the hornworts, but still the dominant plant you're
<v Speaker 1>looking at in the mosses and the liver warts and
<v Speaker 1>all that shits. There's some really fucking cool desert liver warts.
<v Speaker 1>I just found that the one that grows with peyote,
<v Speaker 1>that risty species last year or two beautiful aquamarine color
<v Speaker 1>of that thing. Okay, you gotta pay attention to the
<v Speaker 1>liver warts. Nobody does liver warts and mosses. Maybe maybe
<v Speaker 1>not the mosses so much. Well, nice try. I've seen
<v Speaker 1>some cool bearded mosses, mosses in the Peyote gardens of
<v Speaker 1>West Texas and the limes Limestone. They've got like a
<v Speaker 1>these hairs on them, like, uh, looks like a fucking
<v Speaker 1>like it looks like a beard. Looks like there's a
<v Speaker 1>green moss and then it's got these white hairs. Sheriff
<v Speaker 1>Woody told me exactly what those hairs are, but like
<v Speaker 1>what tissue they're produced from, but I forget anyway, but
<v Speaker 1>they've got that beard. Obviously, hairs protect things from drying
<v Speaker 1>drying out. Of course, you live in a desert where
<v Speaker 1>the air is so dry it sucks up moisture like
<v Speaker 1>a dry sponge, and you get wind too, you're gonna
<v Speaker 1>need those hairs are gonna benefit you active benefit. So
<v Speaker 1>even the mosses are undergoing natural selection in a desert anyway,
<v Speaker 1>So you got the gametophyte. In the sporophyte generation the bryophytes,
<v Speaker 1>the gametafyte is dominant. That's what you're looking at, and
<v Speaker 1>in everything else, the sporo fight is dominant. The lycophytes,
<v Speaker 1>the ferns, the conifers, gyminal sperms, Ginko's psychads, all that shit,
<v Speaker 1>and then the angiosperms, okay, and the conifers, and in
<v Speaker 1>the gymnal sperms and the angiosperms. The gametophyte is not
<v Speaker 1>free living, it's not photosynthetic. It's entirely dependent on the
<v Speaker 1>sporophyte to live, and it's very reduced. Okay. What does
<v Speaker 1>gametafight in sporophy mean? Gametofyte means haploid. All gametafytes are haploid.
<v Speaker 1>When you think of gametafyt you should just it should
<v Speaker 1>be synonymous with the quality of being haploid. Okay, you
<v Speaker 1>think of sporophyte, it should be synonymous with the quality
<v Speaker 1>of being diploid. Okay, what the fuck is haploid and diploid? Right?
<v Speaker 1>Not everybody was graced with a decent biology course in
<v Speaker 1>high school. Many people dropped out of high school. Some
<v Speaker 1>people already know this, obviously this isn't for you, but
<v Speaker 1>you know, other people just had trouble paying attention in
<v Speaker 1>fucking biology and couldn't see the purpose of why any
<v Speaker 1>of this was interesting. That's kind of what school does.
<v Speaker 1>It's tragic, you know, when you're at least high school.
<v Speaker 1>Memorize this. Don't understand it, Just memorize it. We're not
<v Speaker 1>going to tell you what's cool about it and why
<v Speaker 1>it's worth paying attention to. Just memorize it. You're going
<v Speaker 1>to be tested. We got to get those fucking test
<v Speaker 1>scores up so you can get a degree and you know,
<v Speaker 1>go to college and then have a shitty job when
<v Speaker 1>you're older. Okay. Anyway, HAPLOYD means one set of chromosomes,
<v Speaker 1>one one copy of the genome, okay, like any humans.
<v Speaker 1>Like a human, humans have forty six chromosomes. A haploid
<v Speaker 1>human cell, which is either a sperm or an egxcell,
<v Speaker 1>has only twenty three chromosomes, okay, and whereas diploid has
<v Speaker 1>two copies, two sets of chromosomes, two copies of the
<v Speaker 1>entire genome. Okay, forty six. Right, You're all humans are diploid,
<v Speaker 1>all right, except for your balls or your ovaries, Okay,
<v Speaker 1>your gonads. That's where myosis occurs. It's another word you
<v Speaker 1>gotta remember. Myosis me e io s I s Miosis
<v Speaker 1>turns diploid cells into haploid cells. It produces haploid daughter cells.
<v Speaker 1>Miosis is what happens for reproduction, you know. And so
<v Speaker 1>you have every cell in your body, okay, in the
<v Speaker 1>nucleus of every cell in your body, you've got forty
<v Speaker 1>six chromosomes. You got your diploid. Every cell is diploid
<v Speaker 1>except for your sperm and X okay, ands same with
<v Speaker 1>the sporophytes in plants. They got two copies of the genome. Okay.
<v Speaker 1>Why would you need two copies of the genome? Okay,
<v Speaker 1>what's beneficial about that? Well, you need a backup copy, right.
<v Speaker 1>The benefit of being diploid means that if one of
<v Speaker 1>your genes located on this chromosome has an allele on it,
<v Speaker 1>a copy of that gene that's fucked up or deleterious
<v Speaker 1>or mutated or whatever. It didn't come out right, you
<v Speaker 1>got a backup copy that can write the correct code instead, okay,
<v Speaker 1>whereas the mutation is gonna you know, write the bad
<v Speaker 1>code all right, and so, oh god, this is even
<v Speaker 1>more confusing. Anyway, it's very beneficial. I don't want to
<v Speaker 1>fuck you up. I was going to talk about, you know,
<v Speaker 1>sickle cell anemia. Why having one copy of the sickle
<v Speaker 1>cell gene can be beneficial. It evolved in response to malaria,
<v Speaker 1>so there was malaria. The presence of malaria was selecting
<v Speaker 1>for this trait. Okay, having one copy of that sickle
<v Speaker 1>cell gene can be beneficial. But if you have two copies,
<v Speaker 1>it is you got sickle cell anemia. Okay, sickle cell
<v Speaker 1>anemia is not the same to have sickle cell anemia.
<v Speaker 1>You gotta have two copies of the gene, Okay, on
<v Speaker 1>both both sets of chromosomes have to have the same
<v Speaker 1>recessive aweel for the sickle cell whereas if you only
<v Speaker 1>have it on one of your sets of chromosomes, that's beneficial.
<v Speaker 1>That means you're going to be able to get over
<v Speaker 1>malaria quicker. So that was what was selecting for it. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>So it's beneficial to be heterozygous for the presence of
<v Speaker 1>the having only one copy of that sickle cell gene,
<v Speaker 1>versus being homozygous for the copy of that sickle cell gene,
<v Speaker 1>which means you're gonna get it right. You got two,
<v Speaker 1>you got both copies, it's gonna get it, gonna get
<v Speaker 1>fully expressed. If you got one copy, it's only going
<v Speaker 1>to be half expressed. Uh, you know, you need to
<v Speaker 1>remember all that now, Just remember the point. The point
<v Speaker 1>of being diploid is that you got a backup copy. Okay.
<v Speaker 1>It allows organisms to quote mask the effects of harmful
<v Speaker 1>recessive mutations. Okay, you got a safety net against genetic defects.
<v Speaker 1>All right. Some plants can have more than two copies
<v Speaker 1>of the genome though, you know, ophioglossom can have like
<v Speaker 1>a thousand copies, more than a thousand whatever. But don't
<v Speaker 1>worry about that. That's being that's called being polyploid. Don't
<v Speaker 1>worry about that now. Just focus on this, right, haploid
<v Speaker 1>and diploid, all right, Haploids associated with sex and reproduction. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>because when you're when you have two haploid cells coming together,
<v Speaker 1>one from one plant, one from another, or one from
<v Speaker 1>one human one from another, right, coming together, the form
<v Speaker 1>a diploid hole. Two haploid has come together to form
<v Speaker 1>a diploid hole. Sperm and egg cells only have one
<v Speaker 1>copy of the genome, and the sporophyte or the zygote
<v Speaker 1>that's created, and then the human that grows out of
<v Speaker 1>that is diploid have two copies of the gym. They
<v Speaker 1>got that backup copy. So remember the benefit of being
<v Speaker 1>diploid is if one copy of a gene located on
<v Speaker 1>a genome on a set of chromosomes is bad, the
<v Speaker 1>other the other set of chromosomes has that same gene,
<v Speaker 1>that same slot for the gene, that same slot for
<v Speaker 1>the code, whether it's a thousand base pairs or fifteen
<v Speaker 1>hundred base pairs whatever, but could potentially and hopefully have
<v Speaker 1>a different allele a different code. Okay. Eleeles are just
<v Speaker 1>copies of a gene, copies of the same gene, different
<v Speaker 1>copies of the same gene. That's all alleles are. You
<v Speaker 1>can have allele for blonde hair, allele for black hair,
<v Speaker 1>allele for the sickle cell gene for the sickle cell trait,
<v Speaker 1>et cetera. All right, it'd be a convoluted fucking mess.
<v Speaker 1>You're not gonna learn everything from everything about this from
<v Speaker 1>this podcast. Obviously, you get it. You should have questions
<v Speaker 1>if you're paying attention, that means you're actively thinking about it,
<v Speaker 1>and then you can look it up on the Google later,
<v Speaker 1>ask the fucking AI whatever, all right, which you should
<v Speaker 1>definitely do. The thing that's important to remember now is
<v Speaker 1>that it's beneficial to be diploid because you got two
<v Speaker 1>sets of the genome. Okay, you got a backup copy.
<v Speaker 1>Being diploid is what allows for the the trait of
<v Speaker 1>allele being dominant or recessive. Okay, without you know, just
<v Speaker 1>a haploid organist and only got one copy. You only
<v Speaker 1>got one copy of the genome. One set of chromosomes, Okay,
<v Speaker 1>one long line. Imagine it like a vertical line down
<v Speaker 1>like in the case of humans, just twenty three chromosomes,
<v Speaker 1>not the full forty six. Okay, so you got no
<v Speaker 1>backup copy. There's no dominant or recessive. You can only
<v Speaker 1>have a dominant or recessive trait. You know, if you
<v Speaker 1>have two to hold up next to each other, you know,
<v Speaker 1>one to override the other. That's what being That's what
<v Speaker 1>being dominant or recessive is. Okay, recessive alleles will be expressed.
<v Speaker 1>In order for them to be expressed. You got to
<v Speaker 1>have two, all right, the same gene on both sets
<v Speaker 1>of the genome, the one you got from your mom
<v Speaker 1>the one you got for your dad. Uh, the same
<v Speaker 1>gene has to have that trade for that recessive allele
<v Speaker 1>to be expressed. If it's recessive, if it's dominant, you
<v Speaker 1>only need one copy. Okay, So that's why dominant alleles
<v Speaker 1>will override recessive ones. That's why like you can have
<v Speaker 1>like and negative mutations I should mention too, are almost
<v Speaker 1>always recessive. Okay, They're always recessive because if they were dominant,
<v Speaker 1>they would be filtered out by evolution pretty quickly. If
<v Speaker 1>you had a deleterious allele that coded for a negative mutation,
<v Speaker 1>and it was dominant, not recessive, well then anything that
<v Speaker 1>got that one copy all you need, all you need
<v Speaker 1>is one copy for that to be expressed, that organism
<v Speaker 1>would be fucked. It wouldn't wouldn't last to be filtered
<v Speaker 1>out by natural selection. Whereas if it's if a negative allele,
<v Speaker 1>you know, like the sickle cell gene, well that's a
<v Speaker 1>bad that can be beneficial. But a negative mutation and
<v Speaker 1>a negative allele, if it's recessive, which again all of
<v Speaker 1>them are, it can hide because you'll need two to
<v Speaker 1>get you know, you'll need two for it to be expressed.
<v Speaker 1>So an organism can have that recessive allele, that negative allele,
<v Speaker 1>but if it doesn't have two, it's not going to
<v Speaker 1>get expressed. But meanwhile, that allele is still lurking in
<v Speaker 1>the genome, right so it's still there, it's just not
<v Speaker 1>being expressed because it's overridden by a dominant, non fucked
<v Speaker 1>up alile. So that's why you know inbreeding is bad.
<v Speaker 1>You get all these negative alleles, these recessive alleles stacking up.
<v Speaker 1>That's why you know, when the Spanish monarchy was fucking
<v Speaker 1>their cousins and all that shit, you got those recessive
<v Speaker 1>alleles stacking up because now you know both parents, you know,
<v Speaker 1>since they're related, might have that recessive allele. Now the
<v Speaker 1>zygot the embryo and the human goes like that. You know,
<v Speaker 1>zygote comes first. It's two haploid cells made up and
<v Speaker 1>sperm and egg form a zygot, which is diploid. That
<v Speaker 1>zygote starts undergoing mitosis, just normal cell division, producing a
<v Speaker 1>diploid cell, producing diploid cells and forms an embryo. And
<v Speaker 1>then a person whatever, and that person's got both recessive copies,
<v Speaker 1>you know, for the fucking h whatever whatever recessive allele.
<v Speaker 1>That's why you know, like for dog breeding, they want
<v Speaker 1>to you know, humans breed dogs. They want to make
<v Speaker 1>the dog you know with the fucking smash thin face
<v Speaker 1>or or look a certain way. You know they're they're
<v Speaker 1>having these dogs that are each other's cousins or brothers
<v Speaker 1>and sisters fuck each other. Yes, what's to do that?
<v Speaker 1>You know that's bad. So they're getting those recessive alleles
<v Speaker 1>that are already in that lineage stacking up. So you
<v Speaker 1>stand a greater frequency of the zygote that's formed from
<v Speaker 1>the two haploid halves, the mother and the father organism
<v Speaker 1>stacking up. You have that recessive allele, those recessive allele
<v Speaker 1>stacking up, and that zygot inherits both. It's got a
<v Speaker 1>greater probability that it's gonna inherit that both both both
<v Speaker 1>of its genomes in its cells when it's diploid, are
<v Speaker 1>gonna have that allele then negative allele versus you know,
<v Speaker 1>having a dominant allele from somewhere else because that recessive
<v Speaker 1>allele is already in the genome. You get what I'm saying.
<v Speaker 1>You're picking up what I'm putting down in my confusing
<v Speaker 1>ass way that i'm explaining it. It's okay again, you're
<v Speaker 1>gonna have to just look it up. I'm just trying
<v Speaker 1>to put these words in your head. So so far
<v Speaker 1>we have gometophyte, sporophyte, haploid diploid myosis, mitosis, dominant, recessive,
<v Speaker 1>what else I forget? I'm probably forgetting this shit done anyway.
<v Speaker 1>So the analogy the plants, well, no, it doesn't end
<v Speaker 1>there again, because not only does the benefit of being
<v Speaker 1>diploid allow recessive alleles, recessive copies of a gene to
<v Speaker 1>be overridden by dominant ones. And remember, most negative mutations
<v Speaker 1>are recessive because if they weren't, they would certainly be expressed.
<v Speaker 1>And that gives If they're expressed, they can't hide, all right.
<v Speaker 1>The organism actually displays those traits and then the environment
<v Speaker 1>can select on it, it can filter it out. You know,
<v Speaker 1>that organism doesn't get the reproduced it dies early. Whatever. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>sickle cell anemia is kind of a bad example, because
<v Speaker 1>sickle cell anemia is beneficial if you're heterozygous for it,
<v Speaker 1>if you've only got one copy and it's only negative.
<v Speaker 1>If you've got two copies of that. You know, so
<v Speaker 1>if both your the cells, the genome that you inherited
<v Speaker 1>from your mother and the genome that you inherited for
<v Speaker 1>your father both has that same trait, the sickle cell
<v Speaker 1>trait at that point on the genome, so you get
<v Speaker 1>both copies, whereas if only your dad has it and
<v Speaker 1>your mom doesn't. Now you got resistance to the malaria,
<v Speaker 1>but you don't have sickle cell anemia. So that's why
<v Speaker 1>that's probably why it sticks around, because malaria has been
<v Speaker 1>fucking human beings up for quite a long time a right,
<v Speaker 1>it goes back far in our evolutionary past. So in
<v Speaker 1>addition to allowing in addition to having a backup copy
<v Speaker 1>and allowing recessive alleles, you know, negative negative alleles, negative
<v Speaker 1>mutations to be overridden by dominant alleles that are not negative.
<v Speaker 1>In addition to that, being diploid also allows for genetic diversity. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>it's basically it's the material of evolutionary change, all right.
<v Speaker 1>You have two haploid halves coming together to form a
<v Speaker 1>diploid hole. That diploid hole, that zygote is going to
<v Speaker 1>be a different phenotype from either of its parents. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>same genome, same species, but different mix of code. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>all the same genes, but different mexic code that goes
<v Speaker 1>in there. Okay, same slots for the genes at the
<v Speaker 1>same location on the same genome, but it's going to
<v Speaker 1>have a different mixic code. Okay. So that's phenotypic change.
<v Speaker 1>Is the material of evolution a right, it's what natural
<v Speaker 1>selection works on. In order for natural selection to work
<v Speaker 1>its magic and select a right organisms, the offspring has
<v Speaker 1>to be different from the parent okay, versus you know,
<v Speaker 1>let's let's look at the case of an agave, all right.
<v Speaker 1>Agave's form offsets. Those offsets are an exact clone of
<v Speaker 1>the parent. Okay, agave's form offsets at the base, so
<v Speaker 1>that they can hedge their bets. You know, since they're monocarpic,
<v Speaker 1>they flower once and then they die. When they grow
<v Speaker 1>for twenty years, cook up carbohydrates, stash it in that
<v Speaker 1>big pineapple looking heart of theirs, and then use it
<v Speaker 1>all all at once to send up this giant inflorescence.
<v Speaker 1>Massive amount of sugar and energy require these. In the
<v Speaker 1>case of Agave americana, that inflorescence can reach thirty feet
<v Speaker 1>tall within a span of like two months. Right. That
<v Speaker 1>takes a lot of energy. That's why they're monocarpic, all right.
<v Speaker 1>But say that they do that and they don't get
<v Speaker 1>pollinated or a deer comes by and choose the inflorescence
<v Speaker 1>off all right. A lot of agaves have evolved the
<v Speaker 1>to send out sideshoots, to send out offsets, okay, and
<v Speaker 1>that is an adaptive trade. If you can just send
<v Speaker 1>out a clone. Boom, all right, deer, something comes by,
<v Speaker 1>fucking groundsloth thirty thousand years ago, whatever comes by, choose,
<v Speaker 1>choose the inflorescence of If you don't get a chance
<v Speaker 1>to flower, all right, it's the process is already been
<v Speaker 1>set in action. That that plant is gonna die, That
<v Speaker 1>one rosette of leaves is gonna die, but the clones,
<v Speaker 1>the offsets, will survive. It'll get a chance to flower again,
<v Speaker 1>all right. So a lot of agave's form offsets, those
<v Speaker 1>offsets are the same clone, the same phenotype is the parent.
<v Speaker 1>But if the gave sends up an inflorescence and the
<v Speaker 1>flowers get pollinated by a bat or bees or whatever
<v Speaker 1>the shit. Some agaves are pollinated by hummingbirds, then that
<v Speaker 1>pollen that that bird that bad is bringing haploid pollen.
<v Speaker 1>Pollen only has one copy of the U of the
<v Speaker 1>genome uh to the over in the flower, the female
<v Speaker 1>part of the the flower on that that parent plant.
<v Speaker 1>So then that that agave gets pollinated. The egg sac,
<v Speaker 1>which is haploid egg sac is a is a part
<v Speaker 1>of a ovule an unfertilized seed inside the ovary the
<v Speaker 1>fruit of an agave. Of course, the ovary is is
<v Speaker 1>before it's a fruit. It's in there in the flower. Two. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>So one, the haploid of eggsack meets up with the
<v Speaker 1>haploid pollen grain and uh and forms a diploid zygotes
<v Speaker 1>a k A. That little flaky black seed that will
<v Speaker 1>mature in a number of months if pollination is successful.
<v Speaker 1>If that that the ovule is fertilized, and that's a
<v Speaker 1>new Once that ovule is fertilized, then that becomes a
<v Speaker 1>diploid sporophyte. Okay, The seeds are diploid. This is why
<v Speaker 1>why sperm spores are not analog to seeds, because fern
<v Speaker 1>spores are haploid, all right, same thing with mosses. There's
<v Speaker 1>spores are haploid, whereas seeds are diploid. Fern spores are
<v Speaker 1>analogous to a pollen grain. Okay, because they're both haploid.
<v Speaker 1>But that doesn't even really work out. That's a little bit,
<v Speaker 1>it's not quite how it works. So anyway, once that
<v Speaker 1>seed in that agave is produced, that seed will germinate.
<v Speaker 1>That's a new diploid sporophyte. That's going that if that
<v Speaker 1>seed germinates and as successful, that'll be the same species
<v Speaker 1>as the parent plant, but it'll be a different phenotype. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>So that that bag of genes of genetic code has
<v Speaker 1>already been mixed up. The same codes are there are
<v Speaker 1>the same slots for the same codes rather, but there's
<v Speaker 1>a different code. Okay. Man, that's a different set of alleles,
<v Speaker 1>all right. Remember day, alleles are just different copies of
<v Speaker 1>the same gene. So it might have you know, less
<v Speaker 1>spines on the margins of the leaves, or it might
<v Speaker 1>produce a thicker cuticle, a thicker coat of wax, or
<v Speaker 1>a thicker a thicker farina. It might you know, god
<v Speaker 1>knows what. There's a phenotypic change again is the hard
<v Speaker 1>material of evolution. That's what natural selection has to work with,
<v Speaker 1>all right. So compare that, right, The offsets from an
<v Speaker 1>agave are going to be the same phenotype, the same
<v Speaker 1>clone as the parent, whereas a seedling that germinates from
<v Speaker 1>seed will be a different phenotype. Okay. And that's why
<v Speaker 1>the genetic diversity is what's beneficial. Okay. So that if
<v Speaker 1>if everything was the same clone, some disease comes in
<v Speaker 1>or whatever, or some environmental stress comes in, like prolonged
<v Speaker 1>to drought. Since everything's the same clone, there's no variation,
<v Speaker 1>everything's gonna die. So that's why obviously genetic diversity is good.
<v Speaker 1>Whereas if it's there's a bunch of seedlings around, they
<v Speaker 1>grow into full plants. Now that whole hillside that's covered
<v Speaker 1>in a bunch of different phenotypes of a gavey instead
<v Speaker 1>of just the same clone. Some might die in a
<v Speaker 1>prolonged drought, some will survive. Some might get hit by
<v Speaker 1>a rust fungus and succumb some might survive, et cetera.
<v Speaker 1>In such an event like that a catastrophe, you know,
<v Speaker 1>a prolonged drought or a rust fungus coming in. That's
<v Speaker 1>natural selection in action. That is, that is the environment
<v Speaker 1>selecting picking some individuals out of the population they don't
<v Speaker 1>make it, the environment selecting for whatever something survives. Say
<v Speaker 1>some of the individual agaves a gave individuals on that
<v Speaker 1>hillside survive. Those have been selected for their slightly more
<v Speaker 1>drought tolerant. Not always maybe they had you know, they
<v Speaker 1>were grown in the shade of a rock or something,
<v Speaker 1>or there could be environmental effects to why there are
<v Speaker 1>environmental reasons to why they survive. Maybe not genomic, but
<v Speaker 1>but regardless, that's a filtering event. It's like a natural
<v Speaker 1>selection filtering event, prolonged drought, et cetera, a human fuckery
<v Speaker 1>on the planet. Is this mass extinction we're causing is
<v Speaker 1>a filtering event. Doesn't mean it's good. It's causing a
<v Speaker 1>lot of shit to succumb, but it's you could think
<v Speaker 1>of that as a filtering event, all right. I mean
<v Speaker 1>that's what a mass extinction is as well. So it's
<v Speaker 1>a very you know, exponentially catastrophic filtering event. So this
<v Speaker 1>brings us back to alternation of generations. It will start
<v Speaker 1>with bryo fights first, because that's they're the weirdest. It's
<v Speaker 1>hard to uh, it's hard to grasp. Ferns are kind
<v Speaker 1>of like that too, but ferns are at least a
<v Speaker 1>little easier to grasp because the dominant the dominant individual
<v Speaker 1>is the sporo fight, not the cometophyte, whereas in bryo fights,
<v Speaker 1>the dominant individual is the cometo fight. There's again, there's
<v Speaker 1>nothing analogous to this in humans. To think of an
<v Speaker 1>analogy to alternation to generations and humans would be like
<v Speaker 1>if instead of you know, your balls or your ovaries
<v Speaker 1>producing sperm and egg, you produced what's a good way
<v Speaker 1>to think of this? Okay, I can't use the sperm
<v Speaker 1>and egg analogy for what would be produced, but instead
<v Speaker 1>of you'll still produce sperm and egg. Okay, but instead
<v Speaker 1>of that, instead of just going straight to producing sperm
<v Speaker 1>and egg in you in an individual, let's say you
<v Speaker 1>produce spores or something instead. All right, you produce thousands
<v Speaker 1>of spores, and each one of those spores lands somewhere
<v Speaker 1>and turns into a whole other human, and then that human,
<v Speaker 1>like a mini me, think, turns into a minime. This
<v Speaker 1>is really getting fucking weird. I apologize. I just like
<v Speaker 1>Sci fi dystopia. You produce a whole other generation, a
<v Speaker 1>mini me, and that mini me has gonads, two balls
<v Speaker 1>or ovaries, and then that mini me produces the sperm
<v Speaker 1>and egg and then they got a bang. You know too,
<v Speaker 1>mini me's gotta gotta mate, and then that forms the
<v Speaker 1>actual diploid new human being, new human baby. But you
<v Speaker 1>you wouldn't. You're not doing that. You're producing spores or
<v Speaker 1>something analogous to spores that would land, and you're producing
<v Speaker 1>a lot of them, and so you're making new a
<v Speaker 1>bunch of new minimes, little fucking midgets. They don't like
<v Speaker 1>it when you call them midgets. What do they want?
<v Speaker 1>I don't know what the fuck? Little people? You're producing
<v Speaker 1>a bunch of little people, okay, that would be the
<v Speaker 1>gametophyte generation analogous and plants, and then those little people
<v Speaker 1>gotta meet up and bang, and then they form a
<v Speaker 1>diploid organism, all right, And the little people are haploid too.
<v Speaker 1>They only got one copy of the of the genome,
<v Speaker 1>you know, whereas you got two, so they got no
<v Speaker 1>backup copy. So you basically you like that analogy. You're
<v Speaker 1>producing a bunch of midgets, all right, not just one,
<v Speaker 1>but a bunch of midgets. You produce these spores that
<v Speaker 1>turn into midgets. The spores are haploid, the midgets are haploid.
<v Speaker 1>And then the midgets have to meet up. Two haploid
<v Speaker 1>midgets got to meet up and bang one haploid midget
<v Speaker 1>from someone else, and then they form a human baby,
<v Speaker 1>all right, And they have sperm and egg. You see,
<v Speaker 1>that's because that's plants have sperm and egg too. But uh,
<v Speaker 1>it's fun, I'm telling you, it's fucking weird. But the
<v Speaker 1>benefit of this is that since you're not just creating,
<v Speaker 1>you know, like humans, two humans get together, make a
<v Speaker 1>zygot sperm meets egg haploid sperm meets haploid egg forms,
<v Speaker 1>the new zygot embryo, human baby, et cetera. It's diploid,
<v Speaker 1>you only make one. But if humans were instead, you know,
<v Speaker 1>say you're shooting spores out of your balls or something.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know, you know, let's get nasty. Why not
<v Speaker 1>fuck it, let's roll with it. You're shooting spores out
<v Speaker 1>of your balls or spores out of your ovaries. You're
<v Speaker 1>not just gonna make one, you know. And and each
<v Speaker 1>one of those sports they you shoot a thousand spores
<v Speaker 1>out of your balls, and those a thousand spores turn
<v Speaker 1>into a thousand haploid midgets, okay, and then those So
<v Speaker 1>now you're you're exponentially increasing your progeny. You're not just
<v Speaker 1>making one human baby, You're you're this whole other generation
<v Speaker 1>is involved of these little haploid midgets, little people. Fuck sorry,
<v Speaker 1>I'm gonna get canceled little people. And those those haploid
<v Speaker 1>little people, each one of them, maybe half of them,
<v Speaker 1>don't make it. You know, they keel over it, they
<v Speaker 1>got whatever the fuck the environment takes them out. They
<v Speaker 1>don't land in the right spot, the spores can't germinate
<v Speaker 1>and turn into the haploid midget whatever. But say five
<v Speaker 1>hundred of those one thousand midgets do, and then they bang,
<v Speaker 1>They meet up with another haploid midget from another human,
<v Speaker 1>and then they bang and spur meets egg, their haploid
<v Speaker 1>spur meets the haploid egg from another individual. Then you
<v Speaker 1>get a diploid baby forming a diploid human baby. You're
<v Speaker 1>not just making one in that case. You haven't just
<v Speaker 1>made one human diploid human baby. You've made five hundred
<v Speaker 1>human diploid babies because five hundred of those haploid midgets
<v Speaker 1>fuck little people sorry, have met you know, have successfully reproduced.
<v Speaker 1>So that's the benefit, obviously one of the benefits. I
<v Speaker 1>don't know why the fuck plants do this, honestly, but
<v Speaker 1>they all do. So you're exponentially increasing how many offspring
<v Speaker 1>you've made, so hopefully it clears things up a little bit.
<v Speaker 1>So let's start with mosses, right, with mosses and liver wars. Okay, mosses, liverwarts, hornwarts,
<v Speaker 1>the three clades, the three evolutionary monophyletic groups of bryophytes
<v Speaker 1>of non vascular plants. All right, mosses, uh, you know,
<v Speaker 1>relatively simple. When you look at a moss, you're looking
<v Speaker 1>at the gametophyte. When you look at a liver wart,
<v Speaker 1>what you're seeing is the gametophyte. The sporophytes in liverworts
<v Speaker 1>is even fucking weirder than it is in mosses. The
<v Speaker 1>sporophyte in mosses is pretty cut and dry. Right. It
<v Speaker 1>looks like a little stalk, a little semaphore with the
<v Speaker 1>capsule at the top. It's not photosynthetic. It's brown, maybe
<v Speaker 1>it's orange, but it doesn't have any chlorophyll in it,
<v Speaker 1>and it's not making its own food. It's completely dependent
<v Speaker 1>on the gametophyte in a moss. Okay, what is making
<v Speaker 1>the food is what is photosynthesizing, is the gametophyte, which is,
<v Speaker 1>you know, the actual ma that you see. All right,
<v Speaker 1>So the gametafyte is haploid. A spore. A haploid spore
<v Speaker 1>germinates from a moss, It turns into a happ It
<v Speaker 1>germinates and turns into a haploid gametophyte and on that
<v Speaker 1>haploid gometophyte a. Then this is gonna fuck you up
<v Speaker 1>even more. Whole new term. We're learning Anthidium or archagonium,
<v Speaker 1>Anthidia or archagonia plural. Anthidia is produced, Anthidia produce sperm,
<v Speaker 1>Arcagonia produce uh eggs? Right, all this shit has been
<v Speaker 1>wiped out in the in the seed plants. Okay, there's no,
<v Speaker 1>there's no Actually, I think it's just angiosperms. Let me check. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>Anthidia and arcagonia, right, which produces sperm and egg respectively?
<v Speaker 1>Don't angiosperms don't have them. They're still in conifers, but
<v Speaker 1>they've been lost evolutionarily lost in angiosp and some neales
<v Speaker 1>italies with the g ephedra and fucking wilwitchia and the
<v Speaker 1>genus need them. Okay, But in conifers and all the
<v Speaker 1>other shit ferns, lycophytes, mosses, they all produce anthidia and arcogonia.
<v Speaker 1>But we're talking about brio fytes. Okay, So the moss
<v Speaker 1>cometophyte produces anthidia or acogonia, some produce some avoid selfing
<v Speaker 1>by producing anthidia first and then arcagonia after, or maybe
<v Speaker 1>a devicerous. I don't know either way. They just avoid
<v Speaker 1>it by producing him at different times, avoid selfing because remember,
<v Speaker 1>you don't want a self you want genetic diversity. You
<v Speaker 1>don't want those recessive alleles stacking up. Okay, So on
<v Speaker 1>a moss, the Anthidia and arcagonia, this is all too
<v Speaker 1>tiny to see, of course, it's on a fucking moss
<v Speaker 1>for Christ's sakes. Anthridia produces sperm, Arcagonia produces egg. The
<v Speaker 1>sperm actually swims, this is why they need it wet.
<v Speaker 1>They need water to swim through. Swims to the egg,
<v Speaker 1>fertilizes it and produces a diploid sporophyte, which then starts
<v Speaker 1>growing out of that out of that cometophyte. And so
<v Speaker 1>the sporophyte again is like that little inch long, looks
<v Speaker 1>like an orange hair with a capsule at the top. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>the spora fight is nothing fancy. You see a green moss,
<v Speaker 1>some of them will have those little orange hairs that
<v Speaker 1>looks like an orange hair. That's the sporophyte. Okay. So
<v Speaker 1>it looks like a little semaphore with the capsule at
<v Speaker 1>the top, and that capsule that sporophyte is diploid. It's
<v Speaker 1>got both copies of the genome, two sets of chromosomes.
<v Speaker 1>And then it in that little capsule that's where miosis occurs.
<v Speaker 1>And then it produces haploid spores. And then those spores
<v Speaker 1>you know, get out of it, They blow out of
<v Speaker 1>the capsule, they start the whole fucking presses again, germinate
<v Speaker 1>form a haploid. Those spores germinate form a haploid go metaphyte.
<v Speaker 1>So again, the sporophyte is not photosynthetic in mosses. It's
<v Speaker 1>not free living. It's dependent on that cometaphyt for nutrition. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>let's move on the liver warts. New whole other evolutionary clade,
<v Speaker 1>monophyletic evolutionary clad Okay, meaning all everything that's in that
<v Speaker 1>clade is more closely related to everything else in that
<v Speaker 1>clad than it is to anything outside of that clay.
<v Speaker 1>All right, So everything in the liver warts that forms
<v Speaker 1>a monophyletic clad, So all the liver warts are more
<v Speaker 1>closely related to each other than they are to anything
<v Speaker 1>that is technically a moss. Right, duh. So I think
<v Speaker 1>I've talked, I've rant that enough about this monophyletic polyphyletic
<v Speaker 1>paraphyletic shit. If it's if it escapes, you don't worry,
<v Speaker 1>all right, You could look it up later. You could
<v Speaker 1>download the fucking PDF of Plants Systematics or a Raven's
<v Speaker 1>Biology of Plants. Plant Systematics I really recommend because it's
<v Speaker 1>it does everything from you know, oldest lineages to the newest.
<v Speaker 1>It's really great fucking reference, lots of nice diagrams. You know,
<v Speaker 1>you should buy the book. If you can't buy the book,
<v Speaker 1>it's a lot of fucking expensive, you could download the pdf,
<v Speaker 1>read it on a tablet or something. It's on libgen
<v Speaker 1>dot is and if you want, you can email me
<v Speaker 1>and maybe I can email you a PDF either way.
<v Speaker 1>Moving on to liver warts, all right. Liver warts can
<v Speaker 1>completely dry out. You can see them, you know. I
<v Speaker 1>remember seeing some cool liver warts in uh, you know,
<v Speaker 1>growing at the base of a fucking Browningia candelars in
<v Speaker 1>the in the desert's the northern out of Comma, the
<v Speaker 1>northern out of Coama Desert, northern Chile, all right, and
<v Speaker 1>they can completely dry out. They got a cool pattern
<v Speaker 1>when they when they dry out, when they get wet,
<v Speaker 1>they come spring back to life and start photosynthesizing and
<v Speaker 1>start actively photosynthesizing and metabolizing anyway. It's right or cool
<v Speaker 1>because they can basically grow almost anywhere. They don't need
<v Speaker 1>constant moisture. Some mosses don't need constant oil. A lot
<v Speaker 1>of mosses don't need constant moisture either. Actually, a lot
<v Speaker 1>of moist A lot of mosses are poikilo hydrich too.
<v Speaker 1>They can resurrection plants. They can dry out come back
<v Speaker 1>to life anyway. The liver wart does the same thing.
<v Speaker 1>It's this little leafy thalloid thing. That's the gametophyte. That's
<v Speaker 1>the that's the the haploid. Only only one set of chromosome,
<v Speaker 1>only one set of of only one copy of the genome.
<v Speaker 1>They they're they germinate from a spore, a haploid, spore
<v Speaker 1>goes out, germinates forms this little thalloid green liver wart.
<v Speaker 1>They got those sometimes they got those gemma cups. Like
<v Speaker 1>if you go to Garfield Park Conservatory in Chicago to
<v Speaker 1>fern room, it's a fucking wonderful place to be learning
<v Speaker 1>about this stuff. Those little gemma cups that they have
<v Speaker 1>looks like a little cup on the thallas of a
<v Speaker 1>liver ward. It's just doing a sexual reproduction, okay, just
<v Speaker 1>hedging its bets a right, asexual. It's producing asexual uh individuals,
<v Speaker 1>asexual spores. So where is the the sporo fight in
<v Speaker 1>liver warts? All right? That they some liver warts send
<v Speaker 1>up this little thing that looks like an umbrella. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>And you might assume, because it's you know, thinking of mosses,
<v Speaker 1>that this stalk thing gets like an inch sometimes less
<v Speaker 1>above the thous of a liver war you might think
<v Speaker 1>that that is the diploid sporophyte, because that's what it
<v Speaker 1>is in mosses. They said that some apour thing, it's diploid,
<v Speaker 1>that's the sporophyte. But remember, in liver warts, the sporophyte
<v Speaker 1>is not free living. It's not photosynthetic either, it doesn't.
<v Speaker 1>It's not green, right, these are green. These things are green.
<v Speaker 1>They look like a green umbrella. So it's photosynthetic. It
<v Speaker 1>can't be. It can't be the the sporophyte. What the
<v Speaker 1>fuck is it? Then it's an it's an anther radio
<v Speaker 1>for or an archagonio for Okay. So it's this structure
<v Speaker 1>specific to liverwarts that produces sperm an egg. Right, But
<v Speaker 1>it's photosynthetic. It's part of the gametophyte, right, so it's
<v Speaker 1>it's it's anther radio for producing sperm. Arcagoniaph producing eggs
<v Speaker 1>looks like a little green umbrella. When the sperm swims
<v Speaker 1>to the egg and fertilizes it, which the ante the
<v Speaker 1>radio four looks slightly most liver wars. It looks slightly
<v Speaker 1>dimment from the Arcagonia four the you know, and it
<v Speaker 1>looks like a cup like the the umbrella will be
<v Speaker 1>you know, when this is the case, the umbrella will
<v Speaker 1>be down on the Archagonia four and it'll look like
<v Speaker 1>it's been blown up by the wind, like a you know,
<v Speaker 1>convex shape upwards on the ant radiophoor, or just flat
<v Speaker 1>up top, you know, maybe it's a little little slightly curved.
<v Speaker 1>And so the sperm are produced on that anthra radiophour.
<v Speaker 1>Rain drop hits it hopefully splashes it to the Archagonia
<v Speaker 1>four and then the arca. The sperm is able to
<v Speaker 1>swim to the egg and the Archagonia four and then
<v Speaker 1>form forms a diploid sporophyte. And that sporophyte is a
<v Speaker 1>little capsule, all right. It's a fucking non photosynthetic little capsule.
<v Speaker 1>Sometimes they're yellow. You just look up, you want to
<v Speaker 1>see what this looks like. Dip or sporophyte of liverwarts.
<v Speaker 1>Look up sporofhyed liver warts and hopefully it gets some
<v Speaker 1>nice money shots. All right, they're fucking weird, all right.
<v Speaker 1>That's the sporophyte. That's where meosis occurs. That's the little
<v Speaker 1>yellow capsule. Is diploid. It's got two sets of chromosomes, uh,
<v Speaker 1>two copies of the genome. And then that's where meosis
<v Speaker 1>occurs and haploid spores are produced. A right totally, you
<v Speaker 1>would you you wouldn't notice it. In some cases it's
<v Speaker 1>you're able to see it. Uh, you know, it's readily visible.
<v Speaker 1>It's a little yellow dot on the archogonia for it's
<v Speaker 1>other cases. Sometimes it's up inside the archagonia four under
<v Speaker 1>the umbrella. And so that again, that's the that's the
<v Speaker 1>fucking spori fyte. It's a diploid sporophyte that makes haploid spores.
<v Speaker 1>That's where meosis occurs and forms haploid spores, haploid doughter cells.
<v Speaker 1>I moveing on the hornwarts. What the fuck is a hornwort?
<v Speaker 1>I looked at my eye naturalist, uh observations. I didn't
<v Speaker 1>even I don't even have any observations of a horn war.
<v Speaker 1>They look like a liver wart, but they've got this
<v Speaker 1>green horn on them, which is the sporophyte. The thing
<v Speaker 1>about hornwartz, it's cool, and that's different from mosses and liverwarts,
<v Speaker 1>is that the sporo fyte is photosynthetic. It's not considered
<v Speaker 1>free living because it's still dependent on the gametophyte for nutrition,
<v Speaker 1>but it is photosynthetic. It is green, and that's what
<v Speaker 1>that's where they call hornwarts. It looks like a little
<v Speaker 1>green horn poking up like an inch above half inch
<v Speaker 1>above this thallus. This the thallus is just the leafy
<v Speaker 1>shit the mat of green. Okay. And so that sporophyte
<v Speaker 1>is photosynthetic. It's not free living because it's still dependent
<v Speaker 1>on nutrition, but that sporophyte and a hornwart is where
<v Speaker 1>again it's diploid. It's where miosis is occurring. It produces spores,
<v Speaker 1>haploid spores. Those spores you know, fly off, germinate somewhere
<v Speaker 1>and for germinate into a haploid gametophyte. That haploid gametophyte
<v Speaker 1>then produces anthridia and archagonia, producing sperm and egg respectively.
<v Speaker 1>The sperm swims to the egg fertilized and then produces
<v Speaker 1>that that photo synthetic diploid sporophyte on a hornwart. That's
<v Speaker 1>a hornwart. A right, trying to find a fucking hornwart.
<v Speaker 1>I'm on the lookout now. I never gave a shit before.
<v Speaker 1>I'm always seeing liverwarts because they grow in deserts. I
<v Speaker 1>don't think hornwartz. I don't think there's any xeric hornwarts,
<v Speaker 1>any any dry adaptedt hornwarts. Okay, so that's the bryophytes.
<v Speaker 1>Moving on to the lycophytes, Okay, modern relatives of lepidodendron. Okay, lepidodendron.
<v Speaker 1>You might might have seen a lepidodendron fossil in a museum.
<v Speaker 1>The scale trees, you know, they were big into Carboniferous
<v Speaker 1>three hundred and fifty million years ago. They were some
<v Speaker 1>of the first large trees to evolve. Some of them
<v Speaker 1>got upwards as ninety fucking feet tall. They have that
<v Speaker 1>that scale bark looks like snake scales, kind of old
<v Speaker 1>abscision scars for the leaves. That is, those lepidodendron are lycophytes. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>this is a whole clade again, another evolutionary monophletic clade plants,
<v Speaker 1>that's comprised of lycopods. It's composed of that's one group,
<v Speaker 1>monophyletic group. The it's composed of the Selaginella selaginell a c.
<v Speaker 1>Which is another monophyletic group. And then it's composed of
<v Speaker 1>isoet isoe tasty isohetes, right, another monophyletic group, all right,
<v Speaker 1>which are called what's the common name for iceo weees,
<v Speaker 1>quill quill warts or some ship. There's a there's a
<v Speaker 1>really rare and endemic Isohetes that grows in those ephemeral
<v Speaker 1>ponds up in on what enchanted Rock, Chanted Rock, Fragle
<v Speaker 1>Rock up there on Fragle Rock north of Fredericksburg, Texas
<v Speaker 1>a big granite dome that just pops up on the
<v Speaker 1>Edwards Plateau, which is mostly limestone. And now you get
<v Speaker 1>this granite dome, you get these little ephemeral ponds up there.
<v Speaker 1>There's an Isohetes species up there, Isohetes selaganella and the lycopods. Right, uh,
<v Speaker 1>this is this is where shit gets weird. Right, So
<v Speaker 1>you got these three groups that are considered lycophytes, the
<v Speaker 1>lycopods Celaginelle, celagenellis, leagendell ac, which can be the like
<v Speaker 1>the resurrection quote fern that you know, Celaganella lepidofla, which
<v Speaker 1>you get in the deserts of West Texas, or they
<v Speaker 1>can be those tropical, more tropical growing ones. I remember
<v Speaker 1>I had a clagendella I ganked from h It didn't
<v Speaker 1>gank it, it was It took a little cutting from Garfield
<v Speaker 1>Park Conservatory's fern room and I put it in this
<v Speaker 1>humid It needs a lot of humidity. This wasn't one
<v Speaker 1>of the drought adapted ones. It needs a lot of humidity.
<v Speaker 1>And I put it in this little tupperware container on
<v Speaker 1>theer lights. I fucking forgot about it. I ended up
<v Speaker 1>cleaning house like six a year later, six months a
<v Speaker 1>year later. The fuck is this? I just threw it outside,
<v Speaker 1>didn't even you know, empty it out or anything. The
<v Speaker 1>celaganelle had taken over the whole, you know, tupperware container.
<v Speaker 1>This is I'm talking of like a thirty gallon tupperware container,
<v Speaker 1>like a like a big one you know, for like
<v Speaker 1>holand books around. It's not tupperware. It was a storage bin,
<v Speaker 1>but it had a gasket on it, so you know,
<v Speaker 1>it'd sealed all the humidity inside, and I just forgot
<v Speaker 1>about it. A year later, I went and checked this
<v Speaker 1>thing had been outside. You know, it's like one hundred
<v Speaker 1>and five degrees where I live, and sometimes, you know,
<v Speaker 1>this thing it was in the shade, mostly shade, but
<v Speaker 1>sometimes it was getting struck by sunlight, no doubt. It
<v Speaker 1>was getting upwards of one hundred and twenty hundred and thirty,
<v Speaker 1>probably even one hundred and forty degrees inside this tupperware
<v Speaker 1>slash storage container. And the fucking celagionella was happy as
<v Speaker 1>a pig and shit like one hundred percent humidity, hot
<v Speaker 1>as fuck, and this thing was just thriving. They're really
<v Speaker 1>remarkable organisms, the spike moss is. They're so fucking cool.
<v Speaker 1>So Laganella is super cool. That's why I'm having this
<v Speaker 1>guy in a podcast next week to talk about them.
<v Speaker 1>But uh, anyway, Selaginella and Isohetes, two of the three
<v Speaker 1>lineages that are called lycophytes. Leaganella and Isoetes are heterospores. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>everything else every other you know, from ferns to mosses,
<v Speaker 1>are homospores. They produce spores that are all the same.
<v Speaker 1>They're just unisexual. Celaginella and isoetes are heterospores. They produce
<v Speaker 1>spores that are either male or female. This is really weird.
<v Speaker 1>This is what conifers aka gymnosperms and flowering plants do,
<v Speaker 1>all right, this is why. But this evolved independently in soilaginella.
<v Speaker 1>The benefits of it, I haven't thought about that enough.
<v Speaker 1>I'm sure we could come up with something if we
<v Speaker 1>thought about what would the adaptive benefits of that be?
<v Speaker 1>But all you gotta know is that they celaginelle and
<v Speaker 1>isoetes produce male or female sports, which is really fucking weird.
<v Speaker 1>It's analogous to what happens in gymnosperms and angiosperms, and
<v Speaker 1>it's unusual for the quote lesser plants, the ferns and
<v Speaker 1>the bryophytes. All right, all ferns produce are their homospores.
<v Speaker 1>They produce all the same or bisexual. I guess not unisexual,
<v Speaker 1>because it's the sport can germinate and form anthradia and
<v Speaker 1>arcogonia and the a meta fight either way. But uh,
<v Speaker 1>this is really really weird. All right, So all you know,
<v Speaker 1>ferns are homosporous, uh, and bryophytes are homospores, right, same
<v Speaker 1>sport type is produced it selaginal isoweeds. You get two
<v Speaker 1>different sport types that are produced micro spores the male spores,
<v Speaker 1>or megasportes the female sports. All right, yeah, so selaginella
<v Speaker 1>would be unisexual. Sorry, I mean if fuck you up there,
<v Speaker 1>all right, homospores means they're bisexual sports. The spores are
<v Speaker 1>all uniform, they're all the same. They can uh, you
<v Speaker 1>know they're bisexual, right, there's no difference between them. They
<v Speaker 1>can form anthradia and arcogonia, whereas they can, say, Selaginella
<v Speaker 1>microspores can only form, uh, can only form, can only
<v Speaker 1>end up producing uh, anthridia and sperm, and megasportes can
<v Speaker 1>only produce arcagonia and the egg, whereas Lycopodiace doesn't do that.
<v Speaker 1>Lycopodiace is homosporus, all right, which is it's a lycophyte,
<v Speaker 1>just like selaginella and isoetes, but it's homosporus, so it's
<v Speaker 1>just producing the one sport type. All right. So this
<v Speaker 1>is where these are different from briophytes, and that now
<v Speaker 1>we've got plumbing. Right, they're vascular lycophytes are vascular. They've
<v Speaker 1>got xylem, they got fluam, they got internal plumbing. The bryophytes, remember,
<v Speaker 1>don't have that. So this is we're already, We're already.
<v Speaker 1>This is a later evolving lineage, all right, a later
<v Speaker 1>evolving lineage that's got all the plumbing, comes from all
<v Speaker 1>the plumb and installed and h And the sporophyte is
<v Speaker 1>now the dominant plant. So lycophytes, you know, just like
<v Speaker 1>everything else is not a moss, are the sporophyte is
<v Speaker 1>the dominant plant that you're seeing, Okay, whereas the gametophyte is, uh,
<v Speaker 1>you know, this little shit most of most of the
<v Speaker 1>time would be in conspicuous, you know, paying attention. So remember,
<v Speaker 1>sporophytes of lycophytes are free living. They're free living, they're
<v Speaker 1>the dominant plant. They're making their own food autotrophic. They're autotrophic,
<v Speaker 1>making their own food via photosynthesis. Uh. And yeah, they
<v Speaker 1>you know, they're they can live independently. They're not dependent
<v Speaker 1>on the gametophyte for nutrition. The leaves of lycophytes are
<v Speaker 1>called lycophylls, and the gametophytes in lycopodiace a family Likeopodiace
<v Speaker 1>the club moss family, right, as opposed to Selaginelle the
<v Speaker 1>spike moss family or iso iso we taste the leaves
<v Speaker 1>are or the gamtopytes rather can be the they're they're
<v Speaker 1>all micorrhyizals. So they all need they all need they
<v Speaker 1>all associate with fungus, they need symbiotic fungus. They can
<v Speaker 1>be either epiterranean and photosynthetic, or they can be subterranean
<v Speaker 1>and saprophytic. Okay, So dependent on that mico riise a. Uh,
<v Speaker 1>you know, the commediaphytes can be so spur sport germinates.
<v Speaker 1>It's going to form a non photosynthetic comtophyte and it's
<v Speaker 1>it's gonna be underground and it's going to be completely
<v Speaker 1>dependent on micro rhizol fungus. Okay, So either of two
<v Speaker 1>can be the situation photosynthetic and above ground or subterranean
<v Speaker 1>and uh non photosynthetic and and saprophytic on a sapara
<v Speaker 1>trophic on Michael rising. So now moving on to Selaginella's
<v Speaker 1>and isoetes. All right, The two other clades selage selagendell
<v Speaker 1>aalies and selagend l A c. The only family within
<v Speaker 1>the order se legend selegend Nacy is the only family
<v Speaker 1>within the order selagendell leales. Motherfucker. Remember aleis means order
<v Speaker 1>ends in alis means order ends in a C. That's
<v Speaker 1>a family. Jesus Christ, I'm fucking tongue twister. There, uh
<v Speaker 1>selegien l a C. The gametophytes are endosphoric, all right,
<v Speaker 1>same with isoetes. I'm sorry, I'm fucking I just gave
<v Speaker 1>you bad dope. There is no selagian lllees. Silaganell selagin
<v Speaker 1>lace and isoee tace are two families in Isoetales. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>the order iso eateales a right. Everything else I told
<v Speaker 1>you is right. But there is no silaginell Lees. There is,
<v Speaker 1>It's only iso eales and it contains two families selagin
<v Speaker 1>l A c and uh iso e tac. But that
<v Speaker 1>doesn't fucking matter that much. Just know there are two
<v Speaker 1>monophyletic lineages, the isoetes, the quill warts that grow at
<v Speaker 1>the places like enchanted rock or Selaginella, which uh grows
<v Speaker 1>all over the place deserts, West Texas, hot humid tropics,
<v Speaker 1>right ground and rainforests. Whatever. I got some really fucking
<v Speaker 1>cool ones. God, there was one that was like an
<v Speaker 1>aquamarine color. One of the hot humid uh Silaganella's like
<v Speaker 1>a like a turquoise color. Fucking beautiful. Some of them
<v Speaker 1>are really cool. Slagenellas can have two different kinds of
<v Speaker 1>leaves too, dimorphic, two different kinds of lycophyls. Okay, this
<v Speaker 1>is where it gets fucking weird. Though. The gametophytes of
<v Speaker 1>these two groups are not They're not well free living
<v Speaker 1>in like a poteas either. But the gametophytes aren't separate
<v Speaker 1>from the plant. They don't it spore germinates, and they
<v Speaker 1>gamata fight germinates inside the spor They're they're endosphoric. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>The gameta fight germinates or the gamataft occurs within the sport. Again,
<v Speaker 1>this is fucking weird. This is what gymnosperms and angiosperms do.
<v Speaker 1>The gametophyte is endosporic. This is another thing, okay, aside
<v Speaker 1>from heterospory a right, different kinds of spores male or
<v Speaker 1>female spores. That Selaganella evolved independently, and that the only
<v Speaker 1>other plants that do this, the ferns don't do it.
<v Speaker 1>The fucking bryophytes don't do it, but gymnosperms and flowering
<v Speaker 1>plants do it. So the only other plants that do
<v Speaker 1>it are the woody seed plants. And you know, aside
<v Speaker 1>from Selaginella and Isoetes a right, which is fucking weird.
<v Speaker 1>It's so weird. I mean, it's the again a pollen
<v Speaker 1>or excuse me, angiosperms and gymnosperms are endosporic, so the gametophyte,
<v Speaker 1>the gametophyte develops entirely within the spore wall. Okay, whether
<v Speaker 1>it's the pollen grain in an angiosperm or the embryo
<v Speaker 1>sac in an ovule, the gametophytes develop inside those respective spores.
<v Speaker 1>Pollen's technically a haploid microgamtafyte. Remember, anytime you're confused about
<v Speaker 1>this shit, you gotta ask, is it haploid or diploid?
<v Speaker 1>Is what I'm looking at? Haploid or diploid is what
<v Speaker 1>I'm looking at at this point in the cycle. And
<v Speaker 1>you should definitely download like a diagram if you are
<v Speaker 1>curious and you generally want to learn this shit, and
<v Speaker 1>believe me, it'll benefit you because there are fucking real
<v Speaker 1>life applications, all right, whether it's you know, genetic stuff.
<v Speaker 1>We're just understanding plant breeding or whatever. Uh, if you
<v Speaker 1>download a diagram, just ask where in that diagram, that
<v Speaker 1>circular diagram, that cycle, whatever you're looking at, is it
<v Speaker 1>haploid or diploid? If you're confused about it? What is this?
<v Speaker 1>What is this spore? What does the seed? What is
<v Speaker 1>a fucking what is a maple tree? What is it?
<v Speaker 1>Is it haploid or diploid? Is that have one set
<v Speaker 1>of chromosomes or two? One copy of the genome or
<v Speaker 1>two copies of the genome either way. The fact that
<v Speaker 1>Selaginella and Isoetes right, the two living genera, and in
<v Speaker 1>isoeet Tales, the order isoeet Tales, the two living genera
<v Speaker 1>are both heterosporous and endospores, which is fucking weird. That's
<v Speaker 1>whether it's so cool. So that's why again this my
<v Speaker 1>fascination with Selaginella grows. You got these adaptations that didn't
<v Speaker 1>appear again so far as we know, and the terrestrial
<v Speaker 1>plant lineage until gymnosperms and angiosperms evolved, till conifers and
<v Speaker 1>flowering plants evolved, they evolved in Slaginella and Isoetes, but
<v Speaker 1>they didn't appear again I mean they probably did. We
<v Speaker 1>just the lineage is extinct now. The whole lineage is
<v Speaker 1>extinct now. And you know, who knows what the fucking
<v Speaker 1>seed ferns were doing talk about an extinct lineage. There's
<v Speaker 1>so much shit that just there's so much shit that
<v Speaker 1>never got fossilized to begin with, and then there's things
<v Speaker 1>that they get fossilized. There's you know, there's so many
<v Speaker 1>fossil plants that have no living relatives today, so much
<v Speaker 1>weird shit. Remember, there's been a lot of mass extinctions,
<v Speaker 1>the Permian and the KT two hundred thirty million years
<v Speaker 1>ago in sixty six million years ago, respectively. Those both
<v Speaker 1>took out a lot of They cut a lot of
<v Speaker 1>branches off the evolutionary tree of life of plant life.
<v Speaker 1>But regardless, that's what makes the Laginella is so cool.
<v Speaker 1>They evolved these two traits, heterospore and endospory independently. Endospory
<v Speaker 1>cometophyte develops entirely within the spore wall, doesn't form this
<v Speaker 1>this free living gametophyte doesn't form a photosynthetic comtia, fight
<v Speaker 1>et cetera. Anyway, unless there's some se legend, I don't
<v Speaker 1>fucking think so. I don't think the spores are are
<v Speaker 1>right photosynthetic. No, lycophyte spores are not photosynthetic anyway, But
<v Speaker 1>that commediafyte still produces, at least in say the case
<v Speaker 1>of Selegendal, that comtaft still produces anthridia and archagonia, right,
<v Speaker 1>But it's inside the spore, so it anthridia and arcagonia
<v Speaker 1>can end up protruding through the spore wall, and then
<v Speaker 1>the sperm is still motile, it's still it still leaves.
<v Speaker 1>The spore has to swim, and I think with the
<v Speaker 1>arcagonia it protrudes out of the spore wall. So it's
<v Speaker 1>you know, so two spores still have to land next
<v Speaker 1>to each other when they blow out of those little
<v Speaker 1>spore aphil Lee, he was on something like a resurrection plant,
<v Speaker 1>the Selaginella lepid aphala. Has anyone seen I'd love to
<v Speaker 1>see a fucking some of those germinating who's ever germinated
<v Speaker 1>Celaganella lepidophala just chance encounter? You gotta get a male
<v Speaker 1>and a female sport of land next to each other.
<v Speaker 1>You know, it's weird. Oh yeah, I should I should
<v Speaker 1>mention to I I incorrectly called the reproductive part a
<v Speaker 1>Celaginella a sporophyl. It's not it's it's it's a strobolist, right,
<v Speaker 1>just like uh, like conifers, it's termed a strobolists. It's
<v Speaker 1>a conical structure composed of many sporangia's strobolists. And that's
<v Speaker 1>kind of what it looks like to celaganella. And the
<v Speaker 1>spores are ejected, which is weird. They're they're actively ejected
<v Speaker 1>from the sporangia, from the sporangia on that strobelust And
<v Speaker 1>I think most strobol eye on Selaginelle will produce both
<v Speaker 1>microspores and megasportes, male spores and female sports. So it's
<v Speaker 1>not like the plants themselves are unisexual, just the spores.
<v Speaker 1>And I don't think from what I've been able to find,
<v Speaker 1>I don't think that. I don't think. I don't think
<v Speaker 1>much is known about the actual stages of Selaginella reproduction,
<v Speaker 1>you know, like as in the you know, gometogenesis and
<v Speaker 1>how the how the sperm hits the egg, et cetera.
<v Speaker 1>So I don't fucking know. It doesn't matter, it doesn't
<v Speaker 1>matter for all intensive purposes. Just know they're fucking cool
<v Speaker 1>and they're weird. So Laganella is fucking cool and it's weird.
<v Speaker 1>And isohetes, the quill warts. The spores are produced at
<v Speaker 1>the base of those sheaths. Okay, the quill warts isohetes
<v Speaker 1>looks like a kind of like an onion, and it
<v Speaker 1>would be like at the base of the onion, that's
<v Speaker 1>where the spores are produced. And so that that you know,
<v Speaker 1>that onion leaf, you know, because you got a bunch
<v Speaker 1>of leaves, you know, wrapped around a little rosette pointing upwards.
<v Speaker 1>One of those leaves has to come undone for the
<v Speaker 1>for the fuck and sports to get out, for the
<v Speaker 1>spores to disperse. But quill warts again, remember mostly grow.
<v Speaker 1>I think they're all aquatic, all right. I know the
<v Speaker 1>one at the one at enchanted Rock is aquatic. So uh, anyway,
<v Speaker 1>you know, I'm gonna wrap it up there because the ferns,
<v Speaker 1>this is probably putting a lot of you to fucking sleep,
<v Speaker 1>if anyone's still listening. But again, it's immensely cool. We'll
<v Speaker 1>talk about, uh, maybe I'll do another one with ferns.
<v Speaker 1>Ship the ferns, you get basically the same thing going
<v Speaker 1>on the commetophyte, you know, the haploid spor germinates on
<v Speaker 1>a sporophyl of a fern. Many ferns have a vegetative leaf,
<v Speaker 1>a tropophyl, and they've got a sporophyl, a leaf that
<v Speaker 1>produces spores. It's why you look over look under every
<v Speaker 1>fern front on something like Astrolepis or osmundum or whatever.
<v Speaker 1>You know. Not every leaf, every not every fern front
<v Speaker 1>is gonna have spores on the underside of those leaves. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>the ferns, of course, all the quote unquote higher ferns, Well, no,
<v Speaker 1>because you've got maratioids too. But you got maradioids and equiscedum,
<v Speaker 1>the horse tails are grouped in there with the ferns now,
<v Speaker 1>and you got the ophioglossom which are weird ophioglossum horsetails,
<v Speaker 1>the whisk ferns, the ophioglossom those are in silotiles equisidum
<v Speaker 1>equisy tails, and the maradioid ferns like Angiopteris effecta, which
<v Speaker 1>can get like twenty foot long fucking fern fronds. Those
<v Speaker 1>are all U sporangiate, which means that the sperangi are
<v Speaker 1>developed from from a number of cells. Okay, angiosperms and
<v Speaker 1>gymnosperms are u sporangia too. You don't even need to
<v Speaker 1>understand what usparangia means, just knows that it's it's common,
<v Speaker 1>whereas leptos sperangiate, meaning it produces a leptosporangium is in
<v Speaker 1>the quote unquote classic ferns. All right, So we've moved
<v Speaker 1>on from Lycophytes okay, which has three different families in it,
<v Speaker 1>the lycopodiac Selagin lac and isoee tasty w is it
<v Speaker 1>two orders like Apodieles and isoetales, but anyway, three families
<v Speaker 1>that basically the lycopods, so Lajianella's and Isoetes. We moved
<v Speaker 1>on to that. Now we're in class Polypodiopsida, which are
<v Speaker 1>the quote true ferns, all right. And within Polypodiopsida, class
<v Speaker 1>polypodiops you have four subclasses. Subclass Equiscidity the horsetails, all right.
<v Speaker 1>Remember seeing Equisidum, Gigantium and chile growing in a fucking
<v Speaker 1>wash in these barren out of Comet desert. It was
<v Speaker 1>just growing at this little seep, this wet area. Then
<v Speaker 1>you have subclass Maradia D, which is Angiopterus e vectra.
<v Speaker 1>That one I was just telling you about with the
<v Speaker 1>twenty twenty foot long fern fronds saw giant one of
<v Speaker 1>those in fucking New Caledonia. Then subclass O fio gloss ophioglossidy,
<v Speaker 1>which is Silotum and ophioglossum and botrichium, the fucking grape ferns,
<v Speaker 1>the moonwarts, the whisk ferns, those are all you Sporangia
<v Speaker 1>sporangia developed from a number of cells. And then you
<v Speaker 1>have subclass Polypoda, which again are the true ferns that
<v Speaker 1>most people think of when they think of ferns. Those
<v Speaker 1>other three subclasses, the horsetails, the maradioid ferns, and the
<v Speaker 1>ophioglossity are outliers, okay, and people don't normally think of
<v Speaker 1>those when they think of ferns. Right. Those are kind
<v Speaker 1>of weirder there, and they're probably an older lineage than
<v Speaker 1>what most people think of when they think of like
<v Speaker 1>a fucking maidenhair or wood wardy or something. All Right,
<v Speaker 1>The classic ferns are all subclass Polypodia D, and those
<v Speaker 1>are the lepto sporangia ferns. Right, they have a lepto sporangium,
<v Speaker 1>which means the spores developed from a single the sporangia.
<v Speaker 1>Excuse me, the sporangia developed from a single cell. And
<v Speaker 1>there's this whole. This is a whole they got. The
<v Speaker 1>fucking lepto sporangia have an annualist they forcibly eject sportes.
<v Speaker 1>There's like a whole terminology that goes along with this,
<v Speaker 1>the lepto sporangium. The evolution of the lepto sporangium is
<v Speaker 1>what defines this group. Okay, there's no other group of
<v Speaker 1>terrestrial plants that produces a lepto sporangium. This is fucking
<v Speaker 1>weird when this is this is a novel snapomorphy of
<v Speaker 1>subclass polypodiady. All right, so just know that when you
<v Speaker 1>look at like a maidenhair fern or a fucking uh
<v Speaker 1>you know any name it name one I was mundum,
<v Speaker 1>fucking astrolepis. That's all. Those are all leptos sporangiat ferns.
<v Speaker 1>They have a lepto sporangium glycnia, which is the fourth ferns.
<v Speaker 1>Really kind of they form like these huge colonies like
<v Speaker 1>covering entire hillsides in a lot of tropical areas or
<v Speaker 1>at lower latitude areas, the Glyacnia again, leptos sporangia fern,
<v Speaker 1>the filmy ferns, hymenophi lec The filmy ferns they don't
<v Speaker 1>have fucking stomata because they're just there and they have
<v Speaker 1>some of their you know, the onesell thick leaves, right,
<v Speaker 1>that's why they called the filmy ferns. They grow on
<v Speaker 1>really humid places, quite a few cool ones and New
<v Speaker 1>Zealand when I was there, and you know, really wet
<v Speaker 1>forests of New Caledonia, et cetera. Again, let those sporangiate,
<v Speaker 1>let those sporangiut ferns, filmy ferns don't have any stomona,
<v Speaker 1>isn't it crazy? In the lepto sporangium itself can have
<v Speaker 1>you know, many different forms, right, there's like a whole
<v Speaker 1>chart of different leptos sporangium morphology. But just know that
<v Speaker 1>important there in the lepto sporangium, you have the annulus,
<v Speaker 1>which is a group of cells, a specialized group of cells,
<v Speaker 1>a single row of specialized cells that occurs in that
<v Speaker 1>lepto sporangium and that acts to actively eject the spores
<v Speaker 1>as it dries out. Okay, the capillary action of water
<v Speaker 1>as it dries out pulls it's it's thinner walled on
<v Speaker 1>one side than it is on the other. As it
<v Speaker 1>dries it pulls it back, and then is it when
<v Speaker 1>it fully dries out, it snaps it forward and it
<v Speaker 1>shoots spores out. So there you go. There's another adaptive benefit.
<v Speaker 1>Get your spores out onto the wind currents. That's why
<v Speaker 1>some of the ferns, some of these leptos sporangia ferns,
<v Speaker 1>are some of the first one to colonize, you know,
<v Speaker 1>say a lava flow, and it was a huge increase.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know if it was leptosporangia ferns. I would
<v Speaker 1>assume it was after the KT extinction. There's a shit
<v Speaker 1>ton of fern microfossils right there, fossilized fern spores in
<v Speaker 1>the layers of sedimentary rock, fossiliferous rock that occurred just
<v Speaker 1>above that layer of iridium that defines the KT extinction,
<v Speaker 1>the extinction that took out the dinosaurs. So a lot
<v Speaker 1>of the ferns were first to come back and then
<v Speaker 1>start diversifying after after this fucking comment had knocked out
<v Speaker 1>the really upended things on life on earth, you know,
<v Speaker 1>so Leptosporangium annulus, remember those, And I guess me, and
<v Speaker 1>we we'll do this some other time. Right, it's already
<v Speaker 1>been an hour four minutes. I got other shit I
<v Speaker 1>gotta do. But at least now you know about alternation
<v Speaker 1>of generations gametophyte, sporophyte, haploid, diploid, okay, one set of
<v Speaker 1>chromosomes or two, one copy of the genome or two.
<v Speaker 1>The benefits you can you know, you can mask harmful mutations.
<v Speaker 1>And it also provides the stuff of phenotypic change versus
<v Speaker 1>just being a clone, all right, which is you know
<v Speaker 1>what a lot of bacteria do. I think I'm not
<v Speaker 1>a fucking bacterologist, but bacteria can do horizontal gene transfer
<v Speaker 1>through so you know. And I got different DNA. They
<v Speaker 1>got circular DNA, not the not chromosomes like like you
<v Speaker 1>carry outs to do it anyway, I think I'll wrap
<v Speaker 1>it up there. God, there's so much cool shit we
<v Speaker 1>could get into. Oh, marsilliac, the fucking selviny alies they're
<v Speaker 1>oh you know what, selviny alies is a leptosporangia firm.
<v Speaker 1>But they're heterospores. So I lied to you it's not
<v Speaker 1>just sela janella and isoetes and uh and what he
<v Speaker 1>plants to do it the the the aquatic ferns are
<v Speaker 1>heterospores too, but yeah, fuck you know who really pays
<v Speaker 1>attention to them? All right? Except for marcilli ace is
<v Speaker 1>pretty fucking cool. Looks like clover leaves, but it's a fern.
<v Speaker 1>What the fuck else? Am I forgetting anything? Else? What
<v Speaker 1>else is in Ohola is selvini ac? Remember azola. We're
<v Speaker 1>the fucking mosquito fir and those are fucking cool, you know. Anyway, Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>selvini a Lei's I fucking forgot about that? God damn it.
<v Speaker 1>Oh well, all right, well if that uh that's sporadic
<v Speaker 1>and somewhat stuttery, well that's stuttery, just filled with a
<v Speaker 1>lot of ums. You know, fucked you up a little bit.
<v Speaker 1>What probably not the smoothest for learning, but at least
<v Speaker 1>you got some fucking keywords in there, and you remember
<v Speaker 1>some of this shit. It's fun stuff to think about,
<v Speaker 1>and if anything, it's a pleasant escape from the fucking
<v Speaker 1>droll reality of modern life in our the king dystopic,
<v Speaker 1>late stage capitalist, hyper unregulated capitalist the hellscape. So anyway,
<v Speaker 1>that's all. I gotta have a gracy day. Go fuck
<v Speaker 1>yourself by